Acknowledgements
List of illustrations

Introduction: Academic anthropology and the Museum. Back to the Future
Mary Bouquet

PART I: ANTHROPOLOGICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH THE POST-COLONIAL MUSEUM

Chapter 1. The photological apparatus and the desiring machine: Unexpected congruences between the Koninklijk Museum, Tervuren and the Umista Centre, Alert Bay
Barbara Saunders

Chapter 2. Picturing the museum: photography and the work of mediation in the Third Portuguese Empire
Nuno Porto

Chapter 3. On the pre-museum history of Baldwin Spencer's collection of Tiwi artifacts
Eric Venbrux

PART II: ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEUMS AND ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEOLOGY 'AT HOME'

Chapter 4. Anthropology at home and in the museum: the case of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris
Martine Segalen

Chapter 5. 'Does anthropology need museums?' Teaching ethnographic museology in Portugal, Thirty Years Later
Nélia Dias

PART III: SCIENCE MUSEUMS AS AN ETHNOGRAPHIC CHALLENGE

Chapter 6. Towards an ethnography of museums: science, technology and us
Roberto J. Gonzalez, Laura Nader and C. Jay Ou

Chapter 7. Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum, London: Knowing, making and using
Sharon Macdonald

PART IV: ANTHROPOLOGISTS AS CULTURAL PRODUCERS

Chapter 8. Unsettling the meaning: critical museology, art and anthropological discourse
Anthony Shelton

Chapter 9. Inside out: cultural production in the museum and the academy
Jeanne Cannizzo

Chapter 10. The art of exhibition making as a problem of translation
Mary Bouquet

PART V: LOOKING AHEAD

Chapter 11. Why post-millennial museums will need fuzzy guerrillas
Michael M. Ames

Notes on contributors
Bibliography
Index

The museum boom, with its accompanying objectification and politicization of culture, finds its counterpart in the growing interest by social scientists in material culture, much of which is to be found in museums. Not surprisingly, anthropologists in particular are turning their attention again to museums, after decades of neglect, during which fieldwork became the hallmark of modern anthropology - so much so that the "social" and the "material" parted company so radically as to produce a kind of knowledge gap between historical collections and the intellectuals who might have benefitted from working on these material representations of culture. Moreover it was forgotten that museums do not only present the "pastness" of things. A great deal of what goes on in contemporary museums is literally about planning the shape of the future: making culture materialize involves mixing things from the past, taking into account current visions, and knowing that the scenes constructed will shape the perspectives of future generations. However, the (re-)invention of museum anthropology presents a series of challenges for academic teaching and research, as well as for the work of cultural production in contemporary museums - issues that are explored in this volume.

Mary Bouquet teaches Cultural Anthropology and Museum Studies at Utrecht University College. Her publications include Bringing It All Back Home to the Oslo University Ethnographic Museum , published by Scandinavian University Press (1996).