Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism

by Tony Bennett

Contributing to current debates on relationships between culture and the social, and the the rapidly changing practices of modern museums as they seek to shed the legacies of both evolutionary conceptions and colonial science, this important new work explores how evolutionary museums developed in the USA, UK, and Australia in the late nineteenth century.

Genres: Museums

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Tony Bennett is an English academic who has also worked in Australia. Bennett is an important figure in the development of the Australian approach to cultural studies known as "cultural policy studies."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Be...


Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

for the singer please go to:
Tony Bennett

Reviews

[Ardidn .epub · Rating 3 out of 5]

No es un mal libro pero siento que a momentos le faltó hablar de lo que decía que hablaría. Se supone que busca observar cómo el impacto del desarrollo de las ciencias naturales evolucionistas y el liberalismo impacta en el museo inglés, estadounidense y australiano. Creo que en término de manejo de nombres, ideas y desarrollos científicos es increíble, pero me sucede que vuelve siempre a referirse a que todo esto se materializa en estrategias puntuales y no llega a decir cuáles son estas. Está constantemente explicando ideas, pero a la hora de pensar en su cristalización y como eso se VE en el museo de fin de siecle, creo que queda algo corto. También es por partes algo repetitivo.
Igual es un libro muy interesante y si pudiera le daría 3.5 estrellas

[Candy Wood]

Bennett’s title refers to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where Marlow describes the African natives as “prehistoric man,” beyond the memory of the white travelers. He focuses mainly on natural history museums and ethnographic collections, both linked after Darwin by the urge to display (or sometimes to deny) evolution. His scope is global, with detailed examples from Britain, the US, and Australia. Foucault’s ideas are everywhere, and those of many other theorists and scholars as well. The account is mainly historical, with ways in which assumptions changed but not as much focus on what goes on in museums today. I was especially struck by the description of the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh, designed in the 1890s to lead visitors down from the camera obscura at the top through widening contexts that would encourage them to go out with new ideas of urban development: not at all like today’s museum exhibitions that lead visitors out into the shop.