A Transnational Museum World of "Intangible Pasts"

Abstract

This is the third volume in a series of museum- and exhibition-related essays built upon a significant sequence of major conferences. In 1991 Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine edited Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display followed a year later by Karp and others editing Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, both published by the Smith- sonian Institution Press. The present work evolved through considerable brainstorming at several gatherings held between 2001 and 2005, generously supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Whereas the first two volumes privileged museums in the United States and Western Europe, this one is primarily oriented to Third World museums, and transnational connections and comparisons. The authors are primarily anthropologists, sociologists, and historians of art. Although only one contributors might strictly be called an Americanist—Fath Davis Ruffins, a senior curator at the National Museum of American History in Washington—the project has significance for historians of American culture and politics as well as public historians, and should be placed alongside Thomas Bender's edited volume, Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002) and other works that have appeared calling for greater attention to Atlantic history and what Akira Iriye and others have designated as international history. Ivan Karp, a social anthropologist, was formerly curator of African cultures at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. He currently holds an NEH endowed chair at Emory University where he directs the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship. This third volume swings the focus of a project initially launched in 1989 even closer to his original interests. When the long-term enterprise began, its rationale sought to assert a more inclusive narrative of the United States in contemporary and traditional cultural produc- tion, supporting, among other projects, exhibitions of African American, Asian