Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Examining international case studies including USA, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Laurajane Smith identifies and explores the use of heritage throughout the world.

Challenging the idea that heritage value is self-evident, and that things must be preserved because they have an inherent importance, Smith forcefully demonstrates that heritage value is not inherent in physical objects or places, but rather that these objects and places are used to give tangibility to the values that underpin different communities and to assert and affirm these values.

A practically grounded accessible examination of heritage as a cultural practice, The Uses of Heritage is global in its benefit to students and field professionals alike.

Uses of heritage

The power of music to influence mood, create scenes, routines and occasions is widely recognised and this is reflected in a strand of social theory from Plato to Adorno that portrays music as an influence on character, social structure and action. There have, however, been few attempts to specify this power empirically and to provide theoretically grounded accounts of music's structuring properties in everyday experience. Music in Everyday Life uses a series of ethnographic studies - an aerobics class, karaoke evenings, music therapy sessions and the use of background music in the retail sector - as well as in-depth interviews to show how music is a constitutive feature of human agency. Drawing together concepts from psychology, sociology and socio-linguistics it develops a theory of music's active role in the construction of personal and social life and highlights the aesthetic dimension of social order and organisation in late modern societies.

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Music in Everyday Life

Ecological Engineering: Journal of Ecotechnology. Editor-in-chief William J. Mitsch. Elsevier. 4/yr. DFL 361, $195.

Science in action

Starting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continuing up to the present, Imagining the Balkans covers the Balkan's most formative years. From the down fall of the Ottoman Empire, through the turbulent nationalist years of the nineteenth century, up to World War I, the idea of the Balkans was fiercely, often violently, contested. In the wake of WWI, the beginnings of a tradition, largely enforced by academics, emerged stigmatizing the Balkans. Since then, the region has suffered from the neglect, abuse, and scant regard of both western Europe and the world. The result has been in many direct ways to compound the Balkan's poverty, internal violence, and lack of national self-image. A startling history of ideas, Imagining the Balkans provides a much needed exploration into a region too long neglected.

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Imagining the Balkans

Acknowledgments Prologue 1. The European Memory Complex: An Introduction 2. Making Histories: Europe, Tradition and Other Present Pasts 3. Telling the Past: The Multitemporal Challenge 4. Feeling the Past: Materiality, Embodiment and Place 5. Selling the Past: Commodification, Authenticity and Heritage 6. Musealization: Everyday Life, Temporality and Old Things 7. Transcultural Heritage: Reconfiguring Identities and the Public Sphere 8. Cosmopolitan Memory: Holocaust Commemoration and National Identity 9. The Future of Memory - and Forgetting References

Memorylands : Heritage and Identity in Europe Today

A Companion to Museum Studies captures the multidisciplinary approach to the study of the development, roles, and significance of museums in contemporary society.
 * Collects first-rate original essays by leading figures from a range of disciplines and theoretical stances, including anthropology, art history, history, literature, sociology, cultural studies, and museum studies.
 * Examines the complexity of the museum from cultural, political, curatorial, historical and representational perspectives.
 * Covers traditional subjects, such as space, display, buildings, objects and collecting, and more contemporary challenges such as visiting, commerce, community and experimental exhibition forms.

A Companion To Museum Studies

1. Negotiating Difficult Heritage: Introduction 2. Building Heritage: Words in Stone? 3. Demolition, Cleansing and Moving On 4. Preservation, Profanation and Image-Management 5. Accompanied Witnessing: Education, Art and Alibis 6. Cosmopolitan Memory in the City of Human Rights 7. Negotiating on the Ground(s): Guided Tours of Nazi Heritage 8. Visting Difficult Heritage 9. Unsettling Difficult Heritage

Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond

The emergence of the nation-state, the public, and the public museum in the late eighteenth century, were intimately bound together. The French Revolution of 1789, regarded as a key moment in the dawn of the nation-state era in Western Europe, was a revolution of ‘the people’ which saw the replacement of an aristocratic order with a new more horizontal and democratic conception of a collectivity of equals. As such, the opening up of the formerly princely collections was an eloquent symbolic assertion of the new ideals of ‘egalite, fraternite et liberte’. That which was private and aristocratic was made public and ‘of the people’; the special, exclusive sphere of the elite was breached and opened up to the scrutiny of those who had previously

Museums, national, postnational and transcultural identities

What goes on behind closed doors at museums? How are decisions about exhibitions made and who, or what, really makes them? Why are certain objects and styles of display chosen whilst others are rejected, and what factors influence how museum exhibitions are produced and experienced? This book answers these searching questions by giving a privileged look behind the scenes at the Science Museum in London. By tracking the history of a particular exhibition, Macdonald takes the reader into the world of the museum curator and shows in vivid detail how exhibitions are created and how public culture is produced. She reveals why exhibitions do not always reflect their makers original intentions and why visitors take home particular interpretations. Beyond this local context, however, the book also provides broad and far-reaching insights into how national and global political shifts influence the creation of public knowledge through exhibitions.

Sharon Macdonald

Papers

Memorylands : Heritage and Identity in Europe Today

A Companion To Museum Studies

Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond

Museums, national, postnational and transcultural identities

Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum