Museum Theory

MUSEUM THEORY EDITED BY ANDREA WITCOMB AND KYLIE MESSAGE

Museum Theory offers critical perspectives drawn from a broad range of disciplinary and intellectual traditions. This volume describes and challenges previous ways of understanding museums and their relationship to society. Essays written by scholars from museology and other disciplines address theoretical reflexivity in the museum, exploring the contextual, theoretical, and pragmatic ways museums work, are understood, and are experienced.

Organized around three themes—Thinking about Museums, Disciplines and Politics, and Theory from Practice/Practicing Theory—the text includes discussion and analysis of different kinds of museums from various, primarily contemporary, national and local contexts. Essays consider subjects including the nature of museums as institutions and their role in the public sphere, cutting-edge museum practice and their connections with current global concerns, and the links between museum studies and disciplines such as cultural studies, anthropology, and history.

List of Illustrations ix

Editors xiii

General Editors xiv

Contributors xv

Acknowledgments xvii

Editors’ Preface to Museum Theory and the International Handbooks of Museum Studies xix

Introduction – Museum Theory: An Expanded Field xxvii
Andrea Witcomb and Kylie Message

Part I Thinking about Museums 1

1. Thinking (with) Museums: From Exhibitionary Complex to Governmental Assemblage 3
Tony Bennett

2. Foucault and the Museum 21
Kevin Hetherington

3. What, or Where, Is the (Museum) Object?: Colonial Encounters in Displayed Worlds of Things 41
Sandra H. Dudley

4. Anarchical Artifacts: Museums as Sites for Radical Otherness 63
Janice Baker

5. (Post‐) Cartographic Urges: The Intersection of Museums and Tourism 79
Russell Staiff

6. Museums, Human Rights, and Universalism Reconsidered 93
Jennifer Barrett

7. The Democratic Horizons of the Museum: Citizenship and Culture 117
Peter Dahlgren and Joke Hermes

8. Museums, Ecology, Citizenship 139
Toby Miller

Part II Disciplines and Politics 157

9. Reflexive Museology: Lost and Found 159
Shelley Ruth Butler

10. The Art of Anthropology: Questioning Contemporary Art in Ethnographic Display 183
Haidy Geismar

11. Change and Continuity: Art Museums and the Reproduction of Art‐Museumness 211
Ien Ang

12. Cool Art on Display: The Saatchi Phenomenon 233
Jim McGuigan

13. Contentious Politics and Museums as Contact Zones 253
Kylie Message

14. Emotions in the History Museum 283
Sheila Watson

15. The Presence of the Past: Imagination and Affect in the Museu do Oriente, Portugal 303
Elsa Peralta

16. Toward a Pedagogy of Feeling: Understanding How Museums Create a Space for Cross‐Cultural Encounters 321
Andrea Witcomb

17. The Liquid Museum: New Institutional Ontologies for a Complex, Uncertain World 345
Fiona Cameron

Part III Theory from Practice/Practicing Theory 363

18. The Displaced Local: Multiple Agency in the Building of Museums’ Ethnographic Collections 365
Howard Morphy

19. The World as Collected; or, Museum Collections as Situated Materialities 389
Fredrik Svanberg

20. Ambient Aesthetics: Altered Subjectivities in the New Museum 417
Natalia Radywyl, Amelia Barikin, Nikos Papastergiadis, and Scott McQuire

21. Museum Encounters and Narrative Engagements 437
Philipp Schorch

22. Theorizing Museum and Heritage Visiting 459
Laurajane Smith

23. The Museum in Hiding: Framing Conflict 485
Amelia Barikin, Lyndell Brown, and Charles Green

24. Preserving/Shaping/Creating: Museums and Public Memory in a Time of Loss 511
James B. Gardner

25. Sites of Trauma: Contemporary Collecting and Natural Disaster 531
Liza Dale‐Hallett, Rebecca Carland, and Peg Fraser

Index 553

ANDREA WITCOMB is Professor of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin University and Deputy Director of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Victoria, Australia. She brings an interdisciplinary approach to her research, locating her work at the intersection of history, museology, and cultural studies.

KYLIE MESSAGE is Professor of Public Humanities in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. Her research examines the relationships between cultural organizations, citizenship, government, and political reform movements.

MUSEUM THEORY EDITED BY ANDREA WITCOMB AND KYLIE MESSAGE

Museum Theory offers critical perspectives drawn from a broad range of disciplinary and intellectual traditions. This volume describes and challenges previous ways of understanding museums and their relationship to society. Essays written by scholars from museology and other disciplines address theoretical reflexivity in the museum, exploring the contextual, theoretical, and pragmatic ways museums work, are understood, and are experienced.

Organized around three themes—Thinking about Museums, Disciplines and Politics, and Theory from Practice/Practicing Theory—the text includes discussion and analysis of different kinds of museums from various, primarily contemporary, national and local contexts. Essays consider subjects including the nature of museums as institutions and their role in the public sphere, cutting-edge museum practice and their connections with current global concerns, and the links between museum studies and disciplines such as cultural studies, anthropology, and history.

THE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOKS OF MUSEUM STUDIES General Editors: Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy

The International Handbooks of Museum Studies is a multi-volume reference work that represents a state-of-the-art survey of the burgeoning field of museum studies. Featuring original essays by leading international museum experts and emerging scholars, readings cover all aspects of museum theory, practice, debates, and the impact of technologies. The four volumes in the series, divided thematically, offer in-depth treatment of all major issues relating to museum theory; historical and contemporary museum practice; mediations in art, design, and architecture; and the transformations and challenges confronting the museum. In addition to invaluable surveys of current scholarship, the entries include a rich and diverse panoply of examples and original case studies to illuminate the various perspectives. Unprecedented for its in-depth topic coverage and breadth of scholarship, the multi-volume International Handbooks of Museum Studies is an indispensable resource for the study of the development, roles, and significance of museums in contemporary society.

SHARON MACDONALD is Professor of Social Anthropology in the Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Üniversität zu Berlin, where she also directs the CARMAH, the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage.

HELEN REES LEAHY is Professor Emerita of the University of Manchester, where she was Director of the Centre for Museology from 2002–2017.

Online edition available at museumstudieshandbooks.com