Museum temporalities: time, history, and the future of the (ethnographic) museum

Uittreksel

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 temporariness that inform museum display, separated the modern from the traditional, and promoted preservation and development in ways that tacitly assume a North Atlantic cultural outlook as the end point of history and the standard that determines a hierarchy of science, art, technology, craft, and natural history. Questioning linear and epochal genealogies that assume Enlightenment surveys of the classifiable universe as the origin of the museum, Modest and Pels present evidence that global exhibitionary complexes will fail to sufficiently address questions of decolonization and restitution if they do not make room for the ethnographic museum as a principal site where suggestions for the future of all museums can be generated. They show that any attempt to address the problematic and painful relationship that museums have to colonial pasts requires them to reorient their relationship to time. The chapters in this volume assembles building blocks for a theory and practice of museums that no longer assumes the need for identities, objects, and collections to be permanent; for the museum to be the end point of knowledge; and for "art" or "science" to be the universal measure to which other forms of cultural production can only aspire. This pathbreaking collection centralizes and develops current concerns in critical museology and is valuable reading for scholars and students of museum studies, anthropology, heritage studies, and material culture.

Inhoud

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 1. 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 2. 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 3. 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 4. 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.