Displaced Things in Museums and Beyond: Loss, Liminality and Hopeful Encounters

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 approach - a displacement anthropology – to the museum, anthropology and material culture.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 144 pages
Publication date: 30 November 2020
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Displaced Things in Museums and Beyond offers a fresh perspective on the lives, effects, and possibilities of things. Starting from the perspectives of things themselves, it outlines a distinctive approach to museums, anthropology, and material culture. The book explores how 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 conceptualize and examine displacement and its implications and possibilities, Dudley develops her arguments through the 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.

Displacement emerges as a fundamental aspect of understanding the lives of things and their relationships with human beings, as well as the places, however defined, that they make and pass within. This book will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of museums, heritage, anthropology, culture, and history.

Weight: 256g
Dimension: 154 x 233 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780415840477