Do Museums Still Need Objects?

About this book

By closely observing the cultural, intellectual, and political roles that museums play in contemporary society, while also delving deeply into their institutional histories, historian Steven Conn demonstrates that museums are no longer seen simply as houses for collections of objects. The author ranges across a wide variety of museum types - from art and anthropology to science and commercial museums - asking questions about the relationship between museums and knowledge, about the connection between culture and politics, about the role of museums in representing non-Western societies, and about public institutions and the changing nature of their constituencies.

Contents

Introduction: Thinking about Museums Chapter 1. Do Museums Still Need Objects? Chapter 2.Whose Objects? Whose Culture? The Contexts of Repatriation Chapter 3. Where Is the East? Chapter 4. Where Have All the Grown-Ups Gone? Chapter 5. The Birth and the Death of a Museum Chapter 6. Museums, Public Space, and Civic Identity Notes Index Acknowledgments

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Biography

Steven Conn is the author of Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the Past, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.