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Museum Temporalities: Time, History and the Future of the (Ethnographic) Museum book cover

1st Edition

Museum Temporalities Time, History and the Future of the (Ethnographic) Museum

Edited By Wayne Modest, Peter Pels Copyright 2026
294 Pages 29 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

294 Pages 29 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Museum Temporalities analyzes how museums relate to time. It explores the hidden temporal assumptions and practices that define museums. How might these assumptions help us to better understand and address museums’ often problematic and painful relationship to the colonial past? Since the nineteenth century, the globalization of the museum has spread specific understandings of permanence and... Read more

Contents

List of figures

List of contributors

Foreword: Time, Temporality, and Objects

Johannes Fabian

Preface and Acknowledgments

Wayne Modest and Peter Pels

 

Introduction: Time of and for the Museum

Peter Pels and Wayne Modest

Part One: Anxious Times

1. Time is not What it Used to Be: Towards an Anthropology of Time for Museums

Peter Pels          

2. Material Culture and Transience

Pieter ter Keurs

3. Playing with Time in the 19th-century Art Museum

Cecilia Hurley

4. Anxiety and Possibility: Preliminary sketches on museums and carnival time

Jennifer Walklate

Part Two: Time Otherwise

5. “Another part of the circle”: Indigenous temporalities in and out of Canada’s art (hi)story

Ruth B. Phillips

6. Time and Indigeneity in Museum Practice: Curating Indigenous Contemporary Cultures and Arts in Mexico

Genner Llanes-Ortiz

7. Limbo Time: Museums, Caribbean Temporality, and the Wounds of History

Wayne Modest

Part Three: Conservation Time

8. Stockpiling the Past for an Unpredictable Future. Techniques of Preparedness
in Anthropology Museums

Frédéric Keck

9. Thinking through a Lens of Impermanence

Renata F. Peters

Part Four: Exhibition Time

10. Dreamtime and Disintegration: Contemporary Art and the Ethnographic Museum

Mary Bouquet

11. The Porcupine of Time: Mediating and Managing Multiple Temporalities in Exhibitions

Corinne A. Kratz

12. Materializing History: Time and Telos at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Epilogue: The Futures of the (Ethnographic) Museum

Wayne Modest and Peter Pels. 

Index

Biography

Wayne Modest is Director of Content of the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands and Head of its Research Center for Material Culture. He is also a Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Peter Pels is Professor of Anthropology and Sociology of Africa at Leiden University, the Netherlands.

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