The Politics of display : museums, science, culture / edited by Sharon Macdonald

Contributor(s):

Macdonald, Sharon [ed.]

Publication details: London [etc.] : Routledge, 1998Edition: 1st edDescription: xiii, 246 pISBN:

0415153263

Summary: The assumption that museum exhibitions, particularly those concerned with science and technology, are somehow neutral and impartial is today being challenged both in the public arena and in the academy. The Politics of Display brings together studies of contemporary and historical exhibitions and contends that exhibitions are never, and never have been, above politics. Rather, technologies of display and ideas about 'science' and 'objectivity' are mobilized to tell stories of progress, citizenship, racial and national difference. The display of the Enola Gay, the aircraft which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima is a well-known case in point. The Politics of Display charts the changing relationship between displays and their audience and analyzes the consequent shift in styles of representation towards interactive, multimedia and reflexive modes of display. The Politics of Display brings together an array of international scholars in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and history. Examples are taken from exhibitions of science, technology and industry, anthropology, geology, natural history and medicine, and locations include the United States of America, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Spain. This book is an excellent contribution to debates about the politics of public culture. It will be of interest to students of sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, museum studies and science studies. (Font: Editor)

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Holdings
Item type	Current library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Book	Centre d' Informació i Documentació del CERC Sala	General	S 01809	Available		1900152202

Reimpressions: 2001, 2007

List of figures -- Notes contributors -- Preface -- 1. Exhibitions of power and powers of exhibitions: an introduction to the politics of display / Sharon Macdonald -- 2. Speaking to the eyes: museums, legibility and the social order / Tony Bennett -- 3. The visibility of difference: nineteenth-century French anthropological collections / Nélia Dias -- 4. Reifying race: science and art in Races of Mankind at the Field Museum of Natural History / Tracy Lang Teslow -- 5. Making nature "real" again: natural history exhibits and public rhetorics of science at the Smithsonian Institution in the early 1960s / Steven W. Allison-Bunnell -- 6. On interactivity: consumers, citizens and culture / Andrew Barry -- 7. Supermarket science? Consumers and "the public understanding of science" / Sharon Macdonald -- 8. Nations on display: technology and culture in Expo '92 / Penelope Harvey -- 9. Strangers in paradise: an encounter with fossil man at the Dutch Museum of Natural History / Mary Bouquet -- 10. Can science museums take history seriously? / Jim Bennett -- 11. Birth and breeding: politics on display at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine / Ken Arnold -- 21. Balancing acts: science, Enola Gay and History Wars at the Smithsonian / Sharon Macdonals -- Index

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