Description
Displaced Things in Museums and Beyond looks anew at the lives, effects and possibilities of things. Starting from the perspectives of things themselves, it outlines a particular, displacement approach to the museum, anthropology and material culture.
The book explores the ways in which the objects are experienced in their present, displaced settings, and the implications and potentialities they carry. It offers insights into matters of difference and the hope that may be offered by transformative encounters between persons and things. Drawing on anthropological studies of ritual to conceptualise and examine displacement and its implications and possibilities, Dudley develops her arguments through exploration of displaced objects now in museums and dislocated or exiled from their prior geographical, historical, cultural, intellectual and personal contexts. The book’s approach and conclusions are relevant far beyond the museum, showing that even in the most difficult of circumstances there is agency, distinction and dignity in the choices and impacts that are made, and that things and places as well as people have efficacy and potency in those choices.
In Displaced Things, displacement emerges as fundamental to understanding the lives of things and their relationships with human beings, and the places, however defined, that they make and pass within. The book will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of museums, heritage, anthropology, culture and history.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Part I Departures
Chapter 1 Displaced things
Displacement anthropology
Perspectives of things
Optimistic things
Chapter 2 Separating things
Separations
Stages
Pathways
Part II Liminal things
Chapter 3 Representational things
Thresholds
Hesitations
Representation
Loss
Chapter 4 Subjunctive things
Suffering
Habit
Longing
Communitas
Part III Reincorporations
Chapter 5 Hopeful things
Potent things
Displacement reversals
Familiar strange
Bibliography
