Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism / Edition 1

by Tony Bennett

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415247467
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/20/2004
Series:	Museum Meanings
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

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).

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

"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

'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, since that work is the outstanding study of how museums and the public cultural sphere have developed.' - Ivan Karp, Emory University

From the Publisher