Overview

The Museum of Babel: Meditations on the Metahistorical Turn in Museography is a thought‑provoking, transatlantic reading of contemporary exhibits of the museum’s own past. Museums everywhere now exhibit ‘evocations’ of their own pasts, often in the form of refashioned, ancestral cabinets of curiosities. Moving beyond discussions of ‘the return to curiosity,’ Thurner calls this retrospective trend the metahistorical turn in museography. Providing engaging and lively meditations on exhibits of the museal past in art, natural history, archaeology, and anthropology museums, including the Prado, the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, the Ashmolean, the British Museum, the Louvre, Coimbra’s Science Museum, Brazil’s scorched Museu Nacional, Mexico’s Museum of Anthropology, Argentina’s Museo de la Plata, and the Venice Art Biennale, Thurner argues that the ongoing metahistorical turn in museography is exposing the museum’s true vocation, which is to be a museum of itself, or metamuseum. In a word, The Museum of Babel is a provocative meditation on the museum’s true vocation. As such, it will be essential reading for museologists, curators, museum professionals, historians and philosophers of art and science, anthropologists, and students in an array of related fields, including museum studies, cultural studies, global studies, history, archaeology, anthropology, design, and art history.

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9781138565326

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Mark Thurner is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, History and Humanities at FLACSO Ecuador. He has held research and teaching positions at the University of London, the University of Florida, the University of Turin, the City College of New York, the Catholic University of Peru, the University of San Marcos, the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, and the Colegio de Mexico. His research has been further supported by the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright-Hays Programme, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust.

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