Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism

by Sandell; Richard

• ISBN13: 9780415247474
• ISBN10: 0415247470
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2004-07-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This important new work explores how evolutionary museums developed in the US, UK, and Australia in the late 19th century. This historical investigation also contributes to current debates, both on relationships between culture and the social, and to the rapidly changing practices of modern museums as they seek to shed the legacies of both evolutionary conceptions and colonial science, with the goal of contributing to the development and management of cultural diversity.

Table of Contents

List of figures	ix
Acknowledgements	xi
Introduction	1	(11)
Dead circuses: expertise, exhibition, government	12	(24)
The expert as showman	13	(6)
Time and space in the museum	19	(5)
Evolution as temporal conscience	24	(3)
Expertise, exhibition, government and new liberalism	27	(6)
International networks and the new museum idea	33	(3)
The archaeological gaze of the historical sciences	36	(28)
The odds and ends of history	39	(5)
Reading the rocks	44	(6)
Filling in time	50	(9)
History in motion	59	(5)
Reassembling the museum	64	(21)
Black-boxing evolution	66	(6)
Bureaucratising the past	72	(9)
Archaeological objects	81	(4)
The connective tissue of civilisation	85	(29)
Accumulating pasts: habit, memory and self-government	86	(5)
Archaeologising the self and the social	91	(8)
Evolution, culture and liberal government	99	(7)
Evolutionary accumulators	106	(8)
Selective memory: racial recall and civic renewal at the American Museum of Natural History	114	(22)
Evolution, ethics, government: philanthropy and the state	117	(4)
Nature's many lessons	121	(7)
Renewing the race plasm: accumulation and difference	128	(8)
Evolutionary ground zero: colonialism and the fold of memory	136	(24)
Colonial liberalism, culture and the state	140	(5)
Vicious circles and rigmaroles: the plan of creation	145	(3)
Shallowing the past	148	(6)
From `let die' to `let live'	154	(6)
Words, things and vision: evolution `at a glance'	160	(27)
The spaces in-between: evolution and its blind spots	161	(4)
Seeing and knowing	165	(5)
Classification and the arrangement of the visible	170	(4)
Object ventriloquism and evolutionary expertise	174	(6)
Developing clear-sighted attentiveness	180	(7)
Postscript: slow modernity	187	(3)
Notes	190	(16)
References	206	(20)
Index	226