Museum Temporalities : Time, History and the Future of the Ethnographic Museum

This volume is the first of its kind in focusing on the temporalities of museum work. Wayne Modest, Peter Pels and contributors analyze concerns around the function of museums in relation to time, inquiring whether museums can ever be successful in arresting time or setting themselves outside of time. The chapters look at how museums require a stretching and setting aside of time to exist, as well as how museum practice changes and adapts through time and what this means for a theory of museum work. Moving on from ideas that originate in Enlightenment thought of how museums present a survey of the classifiable universe, Modest and Pels indicate that something in the global exhibitionary complex has changed. This volume therefore puts together a theory and practice of museums that addresses the question of why people need to make the counterfactural effort to render identities and meanings permanent.

Divided into five parts, the first part surveys and critiques implicit temporal assumptions and outlines emergent and future temporalities of museum practice. The second part looks in detail at the need for empirical studies of the historical and present-day approach to time, and modernist assumptions in relation to museums today. The third part looks at heterochronia and moves beyond modernist assumptions to consider the negotiation of ''other times'', expanding the Western Eurocentric understanding that has dominated studies to date. The fourth part looks at the empirical and conceptual study of the materiality of the museum and as well as the sensory intimacy of museums. Finally the fifth part looks to whether and how museum materials can convey futures, and whose futures are being portrayed.

This path-breaking collection centralizes and develops current concerns in critical museology and is a must-read for students of museum studies, anthropology, heritage studies, material culture and ethnography.