1st Edition

Pasts Beyond Memory Evolution, Museums, Colonialism

By Tony Bennett Copyright 2004
    252 Pages
    by Routledge

    256 Pages
    by Routledge

    Contributing to current debates on relationships between culture and the social, and the the rapidly changing practices of modern museums as they seek to shed the legacies of both evolutionary conceptions and colonial science, this important new work explores how evolutionary museums developed in the USA, UK, and Australia in the late nineteenth century.

    Introduction  1. Dead Circuses: Expertise, Exhibition, Government  2. The Archaeological Gaze of the Historical Sciences  3. Reassembling the Museum  4. The Connective Tissue of Civilisation  5. Selective Memory: Racial Recall and Civic Renewal at the American Museum of Natural History  6. Evolutionary Ground Zero: Colonialism and the Fold of Memory  7. Words, Things and Vision: Evolution 'At a Glance' Postscript: Slow Modernism  Endnotes  References  Index

    Biography

    Tony Bennett is Professor of Sociology at the Open University, UK and a Director of the ESRC Research Centre on Socio-cultural Change. His current interests focus on the sociology of culture, the history and theory of museums, and cultural policy. His recent publications include The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge 1995) and Culture: A Reformer's Science (1998).

    "Sure to be a major intervention in museums and cultural studies...an important and provocative text....I expect this book to be as important as Birth of the Museum, which is saying something." - Ivan Karp, Emory University