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

Museum Temporalities analyzes how museums relate to time. It explores the hidden temporal assumptions and practices that define museums. How might these assumptions help us to better understand and address museums’ often problematic and painful relationship to the colonial past? Since the nineteenth century, the globalization of the museum has spread specific understandings of permanence and temporariness that inform museum display, separated the modern from the traditional, and promoted preservation and development in ways that tacitly assume a North Atlantic cultural outlook as the end point of history and the standard that determines a hierarchy of science, art, technology, craft, and natural history. Questioning linear and epochal genealogies that assume Enlightenment surveys of the classifiable universe as the origin of the museum, Modest and Pels present evidence that global exhibitionary complexes will fail to sufficiently address questions of decolonization and restitution if they do not make room for the ethnographic museum as a principal site where suggestions for the future of all museums can be generated. They show that any attempt to address the problematic and painful relationship that museums have to colonial pasts requires them to reorient their relationship to time. The chapters in this volume assembles building blocks for a theory and practice of museums that no longer assumes the need for identities, objects, and collections to be permanent; for the museum to be the end point of knowledge; and for "art" or "science" to be the universal measure to which other forms of cultural production can only aspire. This pathbreaking collection centralizes and develops current concerns in critical museology and is valuable reading for scholars and students