This volume explores the origins of the Jewish Museum of New York and its evolution from collecting and displaying Jewish ritual objects, to Jewish art, to exhibiting avant-garde art devoid of Jewish content, created by non-Jews. Established within a rabbinic seminary, the museum’s formation and development reflect changes in Jewish society over the twentieth century as it grappled with choices between religion and secularism, particularism and universalism, and ethnic pride and assimilation.

Subjects: Museum Studies Jewish Studies Cultural Studies (General)

A range of meaningful objects—exhibits of human remains or live people, fetishes, objects in a Catholic Museum, exotic photographs, commodities, and computers—demonstrate a subordinate modern consciousness about powerful objects and their “life”. The Spirit of Matter discusses these objects that move people emotionally but whose existence is often denied by modern wishful thinking of “mind over matter”.

Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Archaeology Museum Studies

A characteristic trait of the maritime museums is that they are often located in a contemporary and/or historical environment from which the collections and narratives originate. This volume unravels the kinds of worlds and realities the Nordic maritime museums stage, which identities and national myths they depict, and how they make use of both the surrounding maritime environments and the architectural properties of the museum buildings.

Subjects: Museum Studies Archaeology Cultural Studies (General)

Museums flourished in post-apartheid South Africa. In older museums, there were renovations on the go, and at least fifty new museums opened. Most sought to depict violence and suffering under apartheid and the growth of resistance. These unlikely journeys are tracked as museums became a primary setting for contesting histories. The author demonstrates how an institution concerned with the conservation of the past is simultaneously a site for changing history.

Subjects: Museum Studies Cultural Studies (General)

Covering a range of case studies and a global geography, authors aim to historicize and bring depth to contemporary debates in relation to both the return of material culture and human remains. Defined as contested holdings, differing museum collections ranging from fine arts to physical anthropology provide connections between the treatment and conceptualization of collections that generally occupy separate realms in the museum world.

Subjects: Museum Studies Archaeology Cultural Studies (General)

Emerging technologies in museums have the potential to reveal unheard or silenced stories, challenge preconceptions, encourage emotional responses, introduce the unexpected, and overall provide alternative experiences. By examining varied theoretical approaches and case studies, authors demonstrate how “awkward”, contested, and rarely discussed subjects and stories are treated – or can be potentially treated - in a museum setting with the use of the latest technology.

Subjects: Museum Studies Heritage Studies Media Studies

Literary museums today must respond to new challenges; the traditional image of the author’s home museum as a sacred place of literary pilgrimage centered around a national hero has been questioned, and literary museums have begun to develop new strategies. The book addresses how literary museums have changed since the form was established, what challenges they face today and how we might imagine them in the future.

Subjects: Museum Studies Cultural Studies (General) Literary Studies

As an historical account of the exchange of “duplicate specimens” between anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and museums, collectors, and schools around the world in the late nineteenth century, this book reveals connections between both well-known museums and little-known local institutions, created through the exchange of museum objects. It explores how anthropologists categorized some objects in their collections as “duplicate specimens,” making them potential candidates for exchange.

Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

As the most ambitious study of the World Heritage arena so far, this volume dissects the inner workings of a prominent global body, demonstrating the power of ethnography in the highly formalised and diplomatic context of a multilateral organisation.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Museum Studies Cultural Studies (General)

Representing a cutting-edge study on the junction between theoretical anthropology, material culture studies, religious studies and museum anthropology, this study highlights the contradictions of museum practices and, at the same time, the potentialities that contemporary museums could offer for an engaging relationship between visitors and museum artefacts and for rethinking or, better, ‘softening’ specific approaches in material culture studies.

Subjects: Museum Studies Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

A padlock is a mundane object, designed to fulfil a specific – and secular – purpose. A contemporary custom has given padlocks new significance155. This custom is ‘love-locking’, where padlocks are engraved with names and attached to bridges in declaration of romantic commitment. This book explores the worldwide popularity of the love-lock as a ritual token of love and commitment by considering its history, symbolism, and heritage.

Subjects: Heritage Studies Archaeology Museum Studies Cultural Studies (General)

This volume is unique in that it is dedicated to approaching the analysis of heritage through the concepts of social movements. Adapting the latest developments in the field of social movements, the chapters examine the formation, use and contestation of heritage by various official, non-official and activist players and the spaces where such ongoing negotiations and contestation take place.

Subjects: Heritage Studies Museum Studies Anthropology (General)

Heritage is all around us, not just in monuments and museums, but in places that matter, the countryside and in collections and stories. It touches all of us. How do we decide what to preserve? And how do we make the case for heritage when there are so many other priorities? Playing with the Past is designed to make the case for heritage. It is the first ever action-learning book about heritage.

Subjects: Museum Studies Heritage Studies Archaeology

The Museum of Mankind was an innovative and popular showcase for minority cultures from around the non-Western world from 1970 to 1997, as the devolved Ethnography Department of the British Museum. This memoir of over forty years’ service with the Department is a critical appreciation of its achievements in the various roles of a national museum, of the personalities of its staff and of the issues raised in the representation of exotic cultures.

Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

Extinct Monsters to Deep Time is an ethnography that documents the growing friction between the research and outreach functions of the museum in the 21st century.

Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General)

The modern vision of historical violence has been immeasurably influenced by cultural representations of the Second World War. This volume takes a historical perspective on World War II museums and explores how these institutions came to define the broader European, and even global, political contexts and cultures of public memory.

Subjects: Museum Studies History: World War II Memory Studies

Politics of Scale offers a global, multi- and interdisciplinary point of view to the scaled nature of heritage, and provides a theoretical discussion on scale as a social construct and a method in Critical Heritage Studies.

Subjects: Heritage Studies Museum Studies

Tracing in reverse the journey of a collection of Romanian folk objects from a museum in London back to the villages where they were made, From Storeroom to Stage explores the role that material culture plays in the production of value and meaning.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Museum Studies Heritage Studies

Situated at the crossroads of performance practice, museology, and cultural studies, live arts curation has grown in recent years to become a vibrant interdisciplinary project. Curating Live Arts brings together innovative essays from international theorist-practitioners to pose vital questions, propose future visions, and survey the landscape of this rapidly evolving discipline.

Subjects: Performance Studies Museum Studies Cultural Studies (General)

Artifak investigates the meaning and value of (art) objects as commodities in Vanuatu, in differing states of transit and transition: in the local place, on the market, and in the museum. It provides an ethnographic account of commoditization in the context of revitalization of culture and the arts in Vanuatu.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Museum Studies

Detailed are the travels, self-education, and archaeological explorations of Eugène Boban, an expert in the field of pre-Columbian studies and explores the circumstances that allowed him to sell fakes to museums that would remain undetected for over a century.

Subjects: Museum Studies Archaeology

Contrary to popular perceptions, cultural heritage is not given, but constantly in the making, subject to dynamic processes of (re)inventing culture within particular social formations and via particular forms of mediation. Through the heuristic concepts of the "politics of authentication" and "aesthetics of persuasion," this volume explores the centrality of this tension to heritage formation worldwide.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Museum Studies

By accompanying a range of senior high school history students before, during and after their visits to the museum, Visitors to the House of Memory is an intimate exploration of how young Berliners from across the city experience the Jewish Museum Berlin.

Subjects: Museum Studies Jewish Studies Educational Studies Memory Studies

This book draws striking connections between the supposedly divergent spheres of home and museum, which both house objects and generate social narratives. Through fascinating explorations of the museums and domestic spaces of eight Israeli communities, it gives a powerful account of museums’ role in state formation, proposing a new approach for societies in conflict.

Subjects: Museum Studies Heritage Studies Refugee and Migration Studies

The UNESCO World Heritage Convention of 1972 is a key arena for contemporary cultural and natural conservation. In case studies from across the globe, anthropologists with situated expertise in specific World Heritage sites explore the consequences of the World Heritage framework and the global spread of this heritage regime.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Archaeology Museum Studies

Online activities present a unique challenge for museums as they harness the potential of digital technology for sustainable development, trust building, and representations of diversity. This volume provides insight into the issues behind designing and implementing web pages and social media to serve the broadest range of museum stakeholders.

Subjects: Museum Studies Media Studies

Since the Republic of Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004, heritage-making and Europeanization are becoming intertwined in Greek-Cypriot society. The author argues that heritage emerges as an increasingly standardized economic resource — a “European product” — and that heritage policy has become infused with transnational market regulations and neoliberal property regimes.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Museum Studies Heritage Studies

Eastern European museums represent the traumatic events of World War II, such as the Siege of Leningrad, the Warsaw Uprisings, and the bombardment of Dresden, in ways that cast the enemy in a specific light. This image results from the interweaving of historical representations, cultural stereotypes and beliefs, political discourses, and the dynamics of exhibition narratives. This book presents a useful methodology for examining museum images and provides a critical analysis of the role historical museums play in the contemporary world. As the catastrophes of World War II still exert an enormous influence over the national identities of Russians, Poles, and Germans, museum exhibits can play an important role in this process.

Subjects: Museum Studies History: World War II Memory Studies

Despite the wide interest in material culture, art, and aesthetics, few studies have considered them in light of the importance of the social imagination - the complex ways we conceptualize our social surroundings. This collection engages the “material turn” in the arts, humanities, and social sciences through a range of original contributions on creativity in diverse global and contemporary social settings.

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Museum Studies

What does it mean when runic stones or medieval churches are transformed from antiquities to monuments to heritage sites? This book argues that the transformations concern more than words alone: They reflect fundamental changes in the way we experience the past, and the way historical objects are assigned meaning and value in the present.

Subjects: Museum Studies Memory Studies Heritage Studies

Museums of history and contemporary culture face many challenges in the modern age, particularly in Europe where processes of Europeanization and globalization require more cross-border cooperation and different ways of telling stories for visitors. Based on research in nearly 100 museums across the Continent and interviews with cultural policy makers and museum curators, it studies the growing transnational activities of state institutions, societal organizations, and people in the museum field such as attempts to Europeanize collection policy and collections as well as different strategies for making narratives more transnational like telling stories of European integration as shared history and discussing both inward and outward migration as a common experience and challenge.

Subjects: Museum Studies Memory Studies

This book explores how such struggles unfold in practice at a highly symbolic battlefield site in the Danish/German borderland. Comprised of an ethnography of two profoundly different institutions – a conventional museum and an experience-based heritage center – it analyses the ways in which staff and visitors interfere with, relate to, and literally “make sense” of the war heritage and its national connotations. Borders of Belonging offers a comparative, in-depth analysis of the practices and negotiations through which history is made and manifested at two houses devoted to the interpretation of one event: the decisive battle of the 1864 war in which Otto von Bismarck, on his way to uniting the new German Empire, led the Prussian army to victory over the Danish.

Subjects: Heritage Studies Travel and Tourism Museum Studies Memory Studies

“This is an ambitious and ground-breaking volume which takes a thoroughly interdisciplinary perspective on what the editors have branded as ‘transcultural montage.’ ...The total effect is a mesmerising and in many ways insightful comparative endeavour that will do much to consolidate montage as a theme that goes to the heart of contemporary social theory.”  ·  Martin Holbraad, University College London

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Film and Television Studies Museum Studies

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Archaeology Museum Studies Heritage Studies

Subjects: Museum Studies History (General) Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Museum Studies Literary Studies

Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Museum Studies

Subjects: Museum Studies Archaeology

Subjects: Museum Studies History (General) Archaeology

Subjects: Museum Studies Memory Studies

Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies

Subjects: Museum Studies Refugee and Migration Studies

Subject: Museum Studies

Subjects: Museum Studies Refugee and Migration Studies

Subjects: Heritage Studies Museum Studies Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

Subjects: Museum Studies Theory and Methodology Colonial History Heritage Studies