The Museum in the Cultural Sciences, edited by Peter N. Miller
Peter N. Miller, editor
In early twentieth-century Berlin, Wilhelm von Bode sparked a controversy with his sweeping proposal to reorganize a group of the city’s museums. Debates about the role and structure of museums played out in 1907 and 1910 with two striking series of articles that appeared in the journal Museumskunde: Journal for the Administration and Technology of Public and Private Collections. The first was a six-part essay by Otto Lauffer on history museums, and the second was a ten-part piece by Oswald Richter regarding ethnographic museums. Together, they initiated a century of significant dialogue. The Museum in the Cultural Sciences offers the first full English translations of these articles, which remain influential in conversations about the implications of art, historical, and ethnographic museums. They show how sophisticated the discussion of museums and museum display was in the early twentieth century and how much could be gained from revisiting these reflections today. Accompanied by short commentaries from museum professionals, these articles offer an intervention into and intensification of the current debate about the function and purpose of museums.
Table of Contents
Series Editor's Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: What Kind of Knowledge Is Museum Knowledge?
Peter N. Miller
PART I From the Pages of Museumkunde
A Note on the Text
The Historical Museum: Its Character, Its Work, and How It Differs from Museums of Art and Applied Arts
Otto Lauffer
On the Ideal and Practical Tasks of Ethnographic Museums
Oswald Richter
PART II Reflections on Reading Lauffer and Richter Today
Youth and Arrogance
Julien Chapuis
Oswald Richter and the "Purity of the Specific Local Culture"
Edward S. Cooke, Jr.
"Certain Secondary Tasks of Ethnographic Museums": Richter's Writings and the Role of Ethnographic Museums in Germany's Colonial Period
Viola König
Perfecting the Past: Period Rooms Between Disneyland and the White Box
Deborah L. Krohn
Categories with Consequences
Alisa LaGamma
Visions of Juxtaposition: Peiresc/Bataille, Monuments/Documents
Peter N. Miller
The Future in the Past
H. Glenn Penny
Triangulating Art/Artifact: Indigenous Studies as the Third Term
RuthB. Phillips
Richter and Us
Jeffrey Quilter
An Attempt at Order in a Time of Flux
Matthew Rampley
Words and Things
Anke te Heesen
Mix It Up: Five Observations on Collections and Museums
Nicholas Thomas
Life and Death in the Museum
Céline Trautmann-Waller
Photographs: Showcases, and Multiple Agencies: Modes of Representation and Directions of Gaze
Eva-Maria Troelenberg
The Museum Beyond Walls
Mariët Westermann
Conclusion: Max Weber in the Museum
Peter N. Miller
Contributors
Index
Sample Chapter
Introduction: What Kind of Knowledge Is Museum Knowledge?
Peter N. Miller
Other Details
ISBN
9781941792162
Page Count
317 pages
Publication date
2021
Binding
Hardcover
