Dictionary of Museology François Mairesse, ed. London, New York: ICOM and Routledge, 2023.

In recent decades, the museum has become a global phenomenon, a stage on which new ideas, social tensions, and creative approaches can play out. From rather static collections of artifacts more successful museums have evolved into living, often interactive, spaces where visitors want to feel inspired and challenged in a safe environment. To stay on top of the trends that may draw visitors in, museum professionals need constant training and open minds to be willing to depart from established ways of doing things. An increasing number of training courses are available to future GLAMs (Galleries Libraries Archives and Museums) employees that go hand in hand with a great variety of reference books. The growing interest in museum and heritage studies and the hunger for relevant, functional, and common terminology also propels the publication of thematic encyclopedias and dictionaries.

ICOM's Dictionary of Museology is a massive undertaking that aims to reflect the editorial committee's commitment to its key concepts put forth in 2017, including, but not limited to, activism, accessibility, deaccessioning, sustainable development, human rights, gender, participation, postcolonialism, and restitution. These are all things that we could call “hot topics,” some, or many, of which every collection must address one way or another otherwise they risk losing their relevance and, in consequence, some of their audience.

This volume has some interesting precedents like the multilingual Dictionarium Museologicum from 1986, or the French Dictionnaire encyclopédique de muséologie from 2011, the latter work edited by André Desvallées. François Mairesse is the general editor of the new dictionary reviewed here which has been published in French and English versions. While the book I have read and reviewed is written in English, there are references to French and Spanish equivalents for each entry to consider the variations in meaning and the fact that complete uniformity is not possible: while English may be universally spoken among museum professionals and a multilingual dictionary is beyond the scope of ICOM at this time, the French and Spanish words may convey another layer of meaning to native speakers.

I have recently completed a postgraduate diploma in museum and heritage studies, and as a student, I had access to the digital version of this dictionary, which has the advantage of being highly searchable. For the sake of this review, I conducted a test search: I wanted to see if the dictionary could provide relevant answers to less-than-straightforward questions. My test search was on something that has been intriguing me for a while, namely, what is the current discourse on heritage conservation, how much can we intervene, change, or even rebuild. At this point a little clarification is needed: while the dictionary styles itself as one of “museology,” it has a wider scope and includes many key words on heritage as well because these fields overlap and intertwine.

Looking at the example of the major reconstruction works happening at Buda Castle in Budapest, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that sees new-old buildings pop up and change the look and feel of the area all Hungarians knew growing up, I was wondering what guidelines professionals working on similar projects have or are advised to follow. What is the widely accepted approach, if any, to re-erecting buildings from scratch, sometimes relying on deductions and assumptions only since nothing of the original fabric or the original plans survive? What is the point in time where we should be returning to if the heritage site has undergone many changes throughout centuries of history? I start by looking up the entry “Heritage,” then “Conservation,” which provide a good point of departure to read about “Passive Conservation,” “Preventive Conservation,” “Preservation,” “Remedial Conservation,” and finally “Restoration.”

Restoration was originally understood as bringing something back to good condition. Viollet-le-Duc and Ruskin later developed contrasting attitudes, the former proposing the removal of earlier interventions and the recreation of missing elements by copy or conjecture, the latter advocating the strict maintenance of the monument allowing only for preventive conservation later. His opinion was picked up by SPAB (Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings) and by Georg Dehio who famously urged, “Conserve, do not restore” (Dehio 1905: 24). It appears, then, that restoration and preservation are contrary in their intention: restoration wants to recreate the non-existent while preservation aims to keep the building with all its historic fabric from deteriorating without any major alteration or intervention. I am redirected to other sub-entries such as “Original State,” “Authenticity,” and from there, to “Restoration” to “Original State,” to dig deeper into the topic.

In my test search I learn, among other things, that Article 3 of the Venice Charter suggests that we safeguard monuments “no less as works of art than as historical evidence” (482) but also that in Western perceptions, restoration to the original state comprises “actions aimed at bringing a work of art or building back to the state it is believed to have been in when it was created” (483). With the help of this dictionary, I might not have a definite answer to my pondering whether we can return old buildings back to their original state without any of the original fabric left to go on, but it offers as many angles as I can take in. This lack of a definitive conclusion reflects the fluidity of many of the topics that museum and heritage professionals encounter and is nothing to feel uncomfortable about. I have been given a good introduction, and I can choose where to take this research further.

This dictionary is comprehensive, compact, and relevant, which, considering the scale of the work and the number of contributors involved in the project, is no small feat. Every museum and heritage professional as well as anyone with more than a superficial interest in the field should have a copy of this wonderful book.

Dóra Bobory

Independent scholar

Dictionary of Museology François Mairesse, ed. London, New York: ICOM and Routledge, 2023.

I read the English printed version of the new Dictionary of Museology in Aotearoa New Zealand, which is located over 18,000 km away from France, where the book was edited. The blue color palette on its cover evokes the graphic identity of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), one of its publishers, and it is consistent with other publications such as the ICOM Code of Ethics. However, unlike the pocket-size code, which is the reference text covering the minimum standards and principles for the international museum community, the new dictionary is a heavy and less portable hardcover book, whose durability, stability, and longevity symbolizes, as well, the lasting nature of the academic work contained within its pages. Its digital version is already available for e-readers and other electronic devices, being a convenient form to make the search of information (such as authors, keywords, or quotes) easier and less time consuming. Hopefully, the contents of this dictionary will be accessible both virtually and physically for museum professionals, students, and workers that cannot afford the ICOM membership or any other institutional affiliation.

This specialized dictionary will play a crucial role supporting the academic development of students of museology that are critically engaging in the construction, application, contestation, and reinvention of theory and practice within different epistemic traditions. This resource enables them to navigate “museum language” independently, to trace and anticipate the evolution of key concepts and branches of museology, and to participate in contemporary discussions happening worldwide. However, it also serves as a roadmap for those whose research or professional work lies at the intersection of tangible and intangible heritage, culture, and media studies.

Edited by François Mairesse, a French museologist and scholar involved in previous editions of the dictionary who has worked extensively within UNESCO and ICOM, this massive collaborative exercise involved an international editorial committee from Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as a group of authors that included curators, academics, professionals, and consultants from various regions and institutions. The book comprises the usual sections expected in a dictionary (preface, introduction, lists of editors, authors, and acronyms), and while readers may prefer to scan it quickly to find the terms of interest, I highly recommend reading the introduction as an independent piece of research, due to its historical perspective. Here the history of the “dictionary project” itself is documented, which was driven by the desire to align the basic concepts of museology with recent developments in museum research. The creation of museum associations, particularly those linked to ICOM, such as CIDOC (International Committee for Documentation) and ICOFOM (International Committee for Museology of the International Council of Museums), helped in that regard. For instance, the former provided the framework for the publication of the first Dictionarium museologicum in 1986, and the latter began in the 1990s compiling compendiums and publications on basic concepts in museology, mostly in the French language. Mairesse takes us through a chronological overview of those earlier editions and specialized books, connecting these predecessors with the current edition, and explaining how the idea of reflecting different museological movements emerged worldwide since 2017.

The Dictionary of Museology expands on concepts and entries covered in the publications Key Concepts of Museology (2010) and the Dictionnaire Encyclopédique de Muséologie (2011), delving into major themes that will bring readers up to date with the latest debates in museum practice and museum studies, such as: artificial intelligence, co-curatorship, activism, digital, ecology, climate change, virtual museums, or gender identity. The reader will find definitions of terms related to various museum categories, their functions, and the entire ecosystem in which they are located. This includes safety procedures, conservation practices, curatorial approaches, legislation, conservation methods, and various roles within the sector. But this repertoire goes beyond just providing short entries, and includes in-depth articles that delve into historical, biographical, and geographical knowledge related to those topics. It includes a collection of essays on fields such as digital technology, sociology, and philosophy, also covering a wide range of topics such as design, marketing, politics, and natural sciences, which shows that the book can be approached with multidisciplinary lenses. Each key entry is translated into French and Spanish, two of the official languages of ICOM. At the end of each essay, there is a selection of related concepts and a bibliography.

The reader's focus will determine which entries are most appealing. For those interested in museum education, my recommendation would be to read the analysis of pedagogy (420) by Milene Chiovatto and Gabriela Aidar, from the Education Department at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, and Fernanda Castro, who chairs the Instituto Brasileiro de Museus. Those Brazilian scholars recognize the influence of constructivist pedagogical theories in Latin America, referencing Paulo Freire's Pedagogia do Oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1993) and emphasizing the need for dialogue in fostering freedom and social emancipation in the museum. In the same way, three authors bring together their expertise in feminist and anti-racist practices, to highlight the different shape that museum activism takes worldwide through the varied lenses of decolonization: Grenadian-born scholar Joan Anim-Addo based at the University of London; Viv Golding, British scholar and former chair of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Ethnography (ICME); and the cultural studies expert Wayne Modest based at the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands. They explore the meaning of activism through significant exhibitions, research, and collaborative projects, from southern Africa to the Marshall Islands, offering valuable insights for those readers motivated to “shake change within the elitist establishment” (18).

You only have to look at the comprehensive essay on restitution (476) by Kenyan scholar George Okello Abungu, to see the dictionary's relevance to contemporary debates. Abungu, archaeologist and chair of the International Standing Committee on the Traffic of Illicit Antiquities, highlights how discussions on restitution were already happening in African countries prior to their independence, largely due to their understanding of heritage as a symbol of freedom, and their view of restitution as a learning process rather than a “contest of return or no return” (479). It is also worth noting the contribution of Brazilian museologist Bruno Brulon Soares, now based at the University of Saint Andrews, Scotland, who refers to the Latin American experience when describing the genealogy of the Nouvelle Museologie (388). Initially theorized by French museologists, Brulon sheds light on the contemporary museum expressions that are creating social change through examples of experimental and community-based museology from outside the European orbit, serving as a foundation for socio-museology and critical museology. On the other hand, the term “New Museology,” popularized in English in the 1980s by Peter Vergo (1989), is examined by a museum scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand, Conal McCarthy, who has published widely on the historical and contemporary Māori engagement with museums. He traces the abandonment of the conventional European model in the 1990s in Australia, New Zealand, and North America where museums were transformed by collaborative and participatory approaches, particularly in the Pacific region where museums fostered partnerships with Indigenous communities, decentralizing curatorial practice through an inclusive philosophy, a shift that has had a profound impact on other former settler colonies such as South Africa, but also Latin America.

The entry on ecomuseums also caught my attention and would be of interest to those studying the development of museum categories over time, with a focus on heritage and sense of place. The British scholar Peter Davis, author of several books related to museums and the natural environment, uncovers the history of a term that has had various interpretations over time and that has been used lately as a synonym for community museums. Davis constructs a dialogue between two ecomuseums from Mexico and Scotland, highlighting their shared features such as the location within a particular territory, the empowerment of local communities and the identification of heritage resources (147).

Other standout essays are Sharon MacDonald's in-depth analysis of curatorship (113), which acknowledges the profound impact that decolonization, Indigenous curatorship, and community participation have had on the theoretical and practical construction of this field at the crossroads of art, museums, and architecture, and Ross Parry's exploration of the concept of digital media, since these institutions use, manage, create, and understand digital concepts, things, and operations (127). In particular, Parry traces the “adoption of” and “adaption to” digital technologies, from their disruption of museums, to their current role in shaping museum practice (127–130). An example of this disruption is presented by Wan-Chen Chang, based at Taipei National University of the Arts, who traces the trajectory of inventories from the Kenmotsucho (which recorded donated items in the Nara period in Japan), to the development of today's digital collections (260). On a different note, the dictionary also delves into how museums can act as “safe spaces” for presenting affect and emotion experienced in exhibition settings, offering interpretations such as enjoyment (164) and love (284) or explanations of the healing power of the museum (216).

Mairesse argues that this dictionary is not a perfect representation of the global museum field. While the selection of themes and contributors aims to reflect diversity, it is important that readers consider which voices and geographical areas have been influential in the production of museological knowledge. When it comes to numerical representation, the majority of authors who contributed to the book are affiliated with museums and institutions from Europe and North America. The implication of this is that the knowledge produced in other regions is overshadowed by the over-exposure of cases, exhibitions, museums, or thinkers located in the dominant Anglo-European North Atlantic sphere. Although throughout the book the dominance of Western perspectives in museum practice is acknowledged, as well as the European origins of museums, it would have been interesting if the editors had also explored non-Western collecting and heritage preservation practices, for instance, in their reflections on what a museum is. The American cultural anthropologist Christina Kreps (2003) noted that museological behavior, Indigenous models of museums, and a concern for the transmission of heritage in non-Western societies remain unexplored even though they have existed at least as long as the modern form of the museum. It is important to move beyond considering such viewpoints as mere “alternatives” or supplements to the mainstream conventions but as essential components of our theory and practice.

In addition, I would like to point out that nearly half of the authors of this dictionary are women. This is a remarkable achievement considering that women, particularly those from multi-ethnic backgrounds in the Global South, often face a lack of support in museums and academia and their work is often considered not “scientific” enough. While there was only one woman member of the editorial committee, the dictionary features a comprehensive list of authors, showcasing the backgrounds of 39 women experts and scholars from diverse regions in academic positions and in the public and private sector. I encourage readers to engage with the work of these female authors, because their journeys will motivate others and guide their careers in a field characterized by its multidisciplinarity. But this is also a call to involve more museum professionals from the Global South, Indigenous experts, and other colleagues working in collaborative community-based initiatives, who could offer original viewpoints on topics described broadly in the book, such as the case of women in museums and First Nations museums.

The Dictionary of Museology is a reference book like no other in our discipline and marks a milestone in museum studies and related fields. The history of this project should motivate us to keep envisioning a more inclusive field that incorporates more women from varied (and under-represented) backgrounds in the role of editors and authors, and which positions Oceanic, African, Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean museologies at the center of the museological experience.

Anamaría Rojas Múnera

International Committee for Museums and Collections of Ethnography (ICOM-ICME)

The Exhibition and Experience Design Handbook Timothy J. McNeil. Washington, DC: American Alliance of Museums, Rowman and Littlefield, 2023.

At its essence, the skills and disciplines involved in the practice of museum exhibition design are so varied and the roles so particular that the subject eludes easy capture and explanation. Into the chronic paucity of good sources wades Timothy J. McNeil with the newest and, to date, most focused and worthy of exhibition design-specific books: The Exhibition and Experience Design Handbook.

McNeil does a number of things right. Straight away, in the book's introduction, he acknowledges the inherent complexity of the design role by noting that every known aspect of design can apply to museum exhibitions. He also defines his audiences—that this is a book primarily for designers, secondarily for those others, the curators, educators, and others, who must entrust designers to express their specialized contributions to the exhibition in dimensional form. McNeil depicts the designer as working at the intersections of content, production, and the experience of the public. He is not afraid to say that the success or failure of an exhibition is defined by the public's experience of it and that the ultimate nature of that experience will be dependent on design. Nesting design at the same high level of importance with the content—the label texts and collections and objects that make up the “stuff” of exhibit craft—is a bold and necessary statement. He also does not shy away from admitting the notoriety designers have with more academic curators for insisting that museum experiences must captivate and entertain to inform and educate. McNeil takes the time to define his terms and, in the process, elevates both the “audience” (variously visitors, guests, participants) and designers to reciprocal, mutually supportive positions in the consideration of exhibitions.

From a museum values perspective, it is refreshing to see the degree to which humanistic priorities—a visitor-centered ethic—suffuses this interpretive project. For example, by centering chapter 1 on the people for whom a museum is for, McNeil at the outset establishes the importance of the museum visitor as the paramount concern, and all further elaborations flow from that critical principle. The author has clearly availed himself of a comprehensive immersion in the most progressive ideas in the museum field but also weaves these strands together with such general human-centered design practices as Design Thinking, Universal Design, and more, which are not limited to the design of museum exhibitions. Judy Rand's “Bill of Rights” for visitors, and Nina Simon's ideas about visitor participation, along with McNeil's own depiction of “popularist” design principles, are touchstones all tying back to the importance of design empathy, the ability of a designer to anticipate the needs of a museum-goer.

In taking this visitor-centered approach, McNeil instantly elevates his handbook above those who present exhibition design merely as a series of superficial style choices or as an inventory of elements to be considered: the objects, the labels and images, furniture, media, interactives, and so forth, which comprise the stuff of exhibitions. Nor is this book simply a recounting of the history of museum exhibition design. All of these elements are well-covered here. What sets this work apart is that McNeil gives us a systematic way to think about the exhibitions we design as self-activated experiences for the museum-going public. In this critical respect, this handbook owes more to the ideas of such foundational museum thought leaders as Kathleen McLean, Nina Simon, Beverly Serrell, George Hein, John Falk, and Lynn Dierking. Sections on accessibility and neurodiversity, well-being and healing put this handbook at the vanguard of expanded visitor-centered practice. McNeil does not take everything so seriously as to completely trade off the value of sensational museum spectacles. He devotes an entire chapter to the value of “Wow” moments and his assessments are thoughtful, and rigorous, never gratuitous.

McNeil faces a number of challenges, though. One of the most perplexing problems in museum design is the lack of common language. Perhaps because the career paths to exhibition design are idiosyncratic (industrial design, architecture, theater design, graphic design, and so forth) this results in a bewildering working lexicon. For a skeptical collaborator, this terminology soup can sound like a thin veneer over pure balderdash, counterproductively undercutting the efficacy of otherwise good design, raising doubts rather than assurances.

A strength of this handbook is that it gamely attempts to establish some fundamental terminology for framing each chapter of the guide. It could be a problem that McNeil uses his own buzzy term “design trope” to frame each chapter but, if after 12 chapters devoted to these tropes the reader still does not know what the author is driving at, one cannot blame it on obscure lingo. That said, a work that seeks to explain what is in essence a thing to be immersed in and to be experienced in unfolding time can hardly avoid wandering off the path of coherency, especially for the uninitiated. A lasting value of the handbook is that McNeil defines his terms, most usefully in sidebar glossaries, and parenthetically in mid-sentence if necessary. Still, every once in a while, he will drop a term like “positionality” or “discursive space” or “compelling riff” and as a four-decade veteran of the museum design field even I find myself scratching my head perplexed. Nonetheless, this is a solid piece of work that, because of the universal values of its approach, will stand the test of time as a useful guide to the exhibition design craft.

Dan Spock

North Carolina Museum of History

Hoarding New Guinea: Writing Colonial Ethnographic Collection Histories for Postcolonial Futures Rainer F. Buschmann. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023.

The collections of Indigenous material culture amassed by museums, colonial institutions, and private collections go beyond quotidian collecting. Rainer Buschmann, in this monograph Hoarding New Guinea, tells the history of collecting Indigenous material productions by Europeans and characterizes the logic and methods of this collecting as being irrational, drawing parallels with psychological hoarding disorder. The choice to characterize colonial collecting as hoarding rather than theft opens the door to several possibilities, as Buschmann explains: “‘theft creates its own deceptive fictions’ . . . I have opted for the more indistinct expression hoarding. This phrase still recognizes the colonial hierarchies and injustices inherent in forceful looting and the sometimes very rigid scientific designs on material culture. At the same time hoarding also suggests an Indigenous agency” (9). Using this idea of hoarding leads to Buschmann's main topic in this book. Analyzing historical documents from German New Guinea from 1870 to 1920, he argues that the collection, trafficking, and hoarding of Indigenous material cultures by Europeans was not only a top-down endeavor by museums and other colonial institutions, but rather individual actors both colonizer—that is, missionaries, anthropologists, and state officials—and colonized alike actively participated in the movement and exchange of material cultures. This shift in perspective from institutional actions to individual ones allows for a more thorough investigation of internalized colonial logic by colonizers, also accounts for Indigenous agency in the trading of material cultures and illustrates how Indigenous peoples adapted to colonial realities for survivance.

Hoarding New Guinea is divided thematically into two parts. The first two chapters set out to discuss the motivations and sociopolitical drivers that individuals and institutions had for amassing huge collections of Indigenous belongings and ancestors. Chapter 1 looks into the value of Indigenous objects for colonizers as well as their motivations for collecting. The chapter discusses the commodification of Indigenous objects by Europeans and how it is related to ideas of value and prestige of museum collections. Chapter 2 shifts the discussion away from museums and toward the individuals who collected Indigenous objects. The discussion of motivation here is to give a more nuanced understanding of the complex networks of people who colonized German New Guinea. Buschmann maintains that individuals, anthropologists, merchants, and missionaries alike had motivations independent of the institutions they worked under, for example, some anthropologists collecting for ethnographic collections often worked under a “salvage agenda” (58), while some missionaries took Indigenous belongings “as trophies of religious victories” (97).

The last two chapters move away from telling history from the colonizers’ point of view and toward Indigenous perspectives, in what Buschmann calls the “ethnographic borderlands” (107) of German New Guinea. One caveat here is that, as Buschmann acknowledges, written firsthand accounts by Indigenous peoples are mostly nonexistent in the archive, therefore the Indigenous perspectives presented are reconstructed through the examination of changes in the production of their material cultures and by looking for “Indigenous countersigns” (108) that exist in colonial archives. Chapter 3 explores the complicated nature of borderlands in German New Guinea, where between the German colonizers and Indigenous populations there was an incompatible understanding of how peoples traverse land. European scholars and colonizers endeavored to create boundaries to categorize and make the various peoples more easily identifiable, such as structuring geographic boundaries based on material cultures. The Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, already had networks of exchange that traverse the land and do not respect the boundaries created by Europeans. Buschmann discusses how these Indigenous networks of exchange served as a site for disruption, where “[t]heir fluidity could only clash with early ethnographers’ attempts to salvage and categorize . . . the very existence of these exchange systems problematized or even nullified the turn-of-the-century anthropological constructs that outsiders sought to impose” (128). Chapter 4 turns to examine the agency of Indigenous peoples in material exchanges with Europeans and how Indigenous peoples understood not only the value of European material cultures but also their own material productions for Europeans. Additionally, this chapter investigates the transformation of Indigenous material productions through usage of introduced materials, such as iron, which was used to produce objects of interest for themselves and for Europeans.

Hoarding New Guinea illustrates a complicated relationship between Indigenous people and their material productions and the European anthropologists, missionaries, and officials who sought to collect, traffic, and hoard Indigenous ethnographica. While Buschmann does not go into depth about the phenomenon of hoarding, the framing of movement/trafficking of Indigenous belongings and ancestors from German New Guinea to Europe as hoarding has proven to be a novel and fruitful contribution to the discussion of provenance, collections, and Indigenous histories. All in all, this monograph is well written, well researched, and engaging for the specialist and non-specialists alike, and will serve to be important for anyone interested in the study of colonialism and its institutions.

Brian Yang

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The Anticolonial Museum: Reclaiming Our Colonial Heritage Bruno Brulon Soares. New York: Routledge, 2024.

Like museums, museum studies is an increasingly global field. Moving beyond the anglophone sphere centered in the North Atlantic, more and more contributors from different parts of the world are expanding and diversifying the discipline, writing in English but drawing on literatures in their own languages and responding to varied museological developments. The ICOM (International Council of Museums) Dictionary of Museology edited by Francois Mairesse, in French and English editions (reviewed in this journal), is one reflection of this. Key publications in recent years from scholars working in French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Chinese provide distinctive perspectives on issues in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. In Museum Worlds too we have seen an increasing number of submissions from outside the English-speaking world, a welcome development that serves to globalize the subject, open up debates to a wider audience, and engage with unique perspectives, theories, methods, and models.

One of the brightest stars in this new firmament is Bruno Brulon Soares, an anthropologist and museologist from Brazil now working in Scotland. Brulon Soares writes in English, French, and Spanish as well as his native Portuguese, has been very active in ICOFOM (The International Committee for Museology), and draws on his experience of working in Latin America where museums have long responded to a host of local challenges—the climate crisis, political repression, demands from Indigenous peoples—through the social museology inspired by the famous Santiago Rountable of 1972. While grounded in this particular context, he has participated in international conversations, speaking back to the metropolitan center, rightly criticizing museum studies for its lack of diversity and inclusion (Brulon Soares and Leshchenko 2018), and drawing our attention to major topics the Global North struggles with, such as decolonization (see the ICOFOM series Decolonising Museology).

Brulon Soares first monograph in English is, therefore, a welcome addition to the literature and will be of value and interest to academics, students, and professionals as well as communities, artists, and activists outside the sector. Given the torrent of work on decolonization in the last few years, as well as a longer strand of academic research on ethnographic museums and colonization, representation and the display of the Rest by the West, this fresh perspective from the Global South has much to offer, steeped in European theory but inflected by the pragmatism of the Brazilian experience, and shaped by the author's own research and activism.

What struck this reader immediately was the nuanced and (relatively) positive analysis of these complex problems. While sharply critical of the dark history of imperialism within which museums are implicated, and contemporary “transformism” through which institutions give the appearance of change without, actually, changing the fundamentals of power and ownership, the book presents a subtle view of the current moment, including its paradoxes, challenges, and opportunities. He sees the museum as a locus for “multiple enunciations” (cover) of the different actors involved, and a space where, in contrast to the hip defeatism of much radical cultural commentary, there is the possibility of reconnection, “repair,” restoration, and revitalization—the R words rather than the D words (decolonization, destruction, and so on), which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Decolonization is a “disputed concept with fuzzy borders” (7), which means different things to different people in different parts of the world. The word “anticolonial” in the title, and the subtitle's call to reclaim “our colonial heritage,” avoids the black and white dichotomy of self/other, colonizer/colonized, human and nonhuman, which is a problem with much current discussion, aiming instead to

expose museums modernity and coloniality, which may have as a countereffect the enabling of pluriversal narratives and subaltern readings of our shared colonial history and heritage. By going beyond the decolonial conception of the borders and the persistence of the divisions between us and them that are no longer useful to understand relations of exchange and appropriation, this book seeks to theorise on the practical ways to tackle the margins and to disrupt the borders used to subjugate and dehumanise. (6)

Therefore decolonization “cannot only be about restitution” or giving access to the cultural goods of dominated groups, it is about inviting those people to “change our ways of thinking, to reshape our own understanding of cultural heritage” (10). It looks at both the center and the so-called periphery, and the relations between them, including the shared colonial heritage of Europeans and Indigenous peoples, which ties them both to the historical problem of the “colonial wound” (14). The book is therefore a “call to remember not to forget” (2).

The Anticolonial Museum is quite short, very readable, and well-illustrated with fascinating images, notably those (like on the cover) showing Indigenous protests in South America. The background history and theory are laid out in the early chapters, which are erudite and concise, but we quickly move on to the central argument, which is developed through contemporary issues canvassed in chapters 3 and 4, drawing on the author's own work with community museums in Rio di Janeiro. Threaded throughout the text are the ideas and concepts of Latin American scholars such as Paulo Freire, Walter Mignolo, and Mario Chagas.

I particularly enjoyed the last chapter, which reflects on three case studies of Indigenous participation in Brazilian museums. It is titled “Redistributing the Museum: Towards a Museology of Hope.” This is not naive optimism about present-day reforms or some romantic vision of the “impossible return” (112) to a precolonial past. Rather, argues Brulon Soares, “it is about knowing that the past is ours to be taken, re-translated and transgressed. It is about remembering our pains and loss, recognising our shared wounds, and acknowledging that the wounded also have a voice, no matter how disturbing it may be” (139). While this is a sobering conclusion, the final section of the chapter “In Defence of the Museum,” reminds us that museums can and do change, and that they should be “reshaped and reoriented to repair the harms and injustices that they have historically taken part in” (131).

Conal McCarthy

Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington

Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat Robert Janes. New York: Routledge, 2024.

Written just 32 years after Michael Ames's Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes (1992),¹ Robert Janes's Museums and Societal Collapse (2024), offers a new, similarly energetic challenge to museums to radically reimagine and transform themselves. Ames helped open the doors to the advent of critical museology, the politics of community engagement, cultural plurality, and advocacy for repatriation that has dominated museum discourse for the past three decades. Janes exhorts museums to consolidate and expand this vision—for them to become immersed in local communities, to witness, assemble, and exchange knowledges; in short, to function as “seedbanks of sustainable living practices that have guided our species for millennia” (4) and thereby become the “lifeboats” that can guide communities through the climate and social traumas that are unfolding around us. For Janes, museums have never been politically neutral and must repudiate and provide alternative narratives to the maladaptive neoliberal ideologies of unfettered economic growth, uncontrolled resource exploitation, and overconsumption. This is a bold, “inconvenient,” and polemical book, but like Ames's work, Janes's impressively charged synthesis and uncompromising convictions deserve to be widely read and debated by all those concerned with the future development and relevance of museums in an undeniably unsettled world.

The book is composed of three sections. The first three chapters synthesize the multiple, interconnected, and mutually amplifying sociopolitical and environmental crises that Janes describes as civilizational and ecological overshoots whose catastrophic effects are now unstoppable. He traces these ills as well as those of colonialism to the onset of modernity whose continuing influence haunts ill-conceived ideas of our relationship to nature and contemporary wishful thinking about the potential of new technologies, eco-modernism, and sustainable growth to save us. Although Janes notes “capitalism is the toxin that is collapsing the biosphere” (25), he recommends “a politics of shared sacrifice” as the only partial force to mitigate the encroaching crises (51). The next two chapters partly reactivate the old idea of museums as forums, this time focused on promoting understanding, teaching, and providing resources on the nature and effects of the polycrisis and practical lessons on reverting to a low energy life style.

The two shorter final chapters focus on the ability of museums to adapt to the crises and provide mentorship, the rise and importance of activism, and auto-reflections on, among other things, museum inertia, the fate of collections, and the unbreakable relationship between personal experience and professional work. There are well founded rants on museum vanity projects, their neoliberal flirtations, climate denialism, and debilitating and bad faith management models, but Janes's overall view of museums remains cautiously positive. He notes museums remain one of the most trusted institutions of society; they are accessible, accountable, and connected by diverse networks to a variety of communities; they express deep ethical values, possess incomparable deep-time perspective and expound cultural relativism—all of which distinguish them from the nation-state and recommend them as indispensable institutions in mediating the coming storm. Museums have harnessed tremendous social capital that imbues them with meaning and authority. “A competent museum,” he writes, “is testimony to the fact that a healthy society is a multitude of competing interests, aspirations, plans, and proposals that cannot be ignored in favour of economic utility” (57). Museums cannot fix the polycrisis but they can aid localized social cohesion, personal well-being and empathy, and help build resilience in those suffering the effects of societal and environmental collapse and trauma.

Although less discussed, Janes does not ignore outdated mission statements, negative value orientations, obsolete leadership models, and rigid and exclusionary organizational models. He even makes a case for unreformed institutions being “hospiced” prior to their inevitable collapse. Moreover, he rightly notes that much of the new thinking around the role of museums in civil society and institutional criticism is being generated by individuals, organizations, and reform groups outside of them, leaving them a long way off from becoming the ideal institutions he envisages. Although the need for transformation appears imperative, it feels that it may be small local museums that best fulfill Janes's vision while the large specialist museums and galleries with their unparalleled collections are consigned to oblivion or “hospiced.” Without elaborating on its implications, Janes perceptively notes that museums strive for perfection (118). This is perhaps one of their outstanding qualities, but a quality that depends on the kind of consensual and predictable foundation that may now be outdated and no longer plausible. Perfection in a time of unpredictable and mounting crises might then be one of the museum's most acute weaknesses. Whether we agree or not with Janes’ sobering eschatology, the irrefutable and irrevocable unsettling of a world that we have long thought to be stable and predictable raises existential questions about the museum's continued existence. Janes's latest book provides an excellent introduction to such unavoidable issues for students and professional workers, and even politicians alike. As Ames's Cannibal Tours and Glass Cases marked the transition from an operational to a critical museology in the English-speaking world, at the very least Janes's Museums and Societal Collapse lays bare the growing fracture and emergence of a much-needed activist museology.

Anthony Alan Shelton

University of British Columbia

Museums and the Climate Crisis Nick Merriman, ed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024.

Museums and the Climate Crisis is an edited volume of 16 chapters written largely by museum and heritage practitioners. The book explores how museums can respond (and are responding) globally to the complex set of interrelated issues constituting the climate crisis. The editor, Nick Merriman, is chair of the environment and ecology subgroup of the United Kingdom-based National Museum Director's Council (NMDC), and it is discussions from within this group and a conference on the topic in 2022 that inspired the volume.

Structured in two sections, the book first explores the conceptual “big picture” and then presents a range of case studies from different organizations including some that are well known for their work on the climate crisis such as the Australian Museum (Ahmed and Newell), large regional museums such as the Leeds Museums and Galleries in the United Kingdom (Broadest and Hardman) and other high-profile museums such as the Natural History Museum, London (Matterson).

Merriman's introduction offers a “manifesto” for an “ethical museum ecology,” presenting sentiments shared elsewhere to which, although well equipped to act on the climate crisis, the sector has been slow to respond. He argues that museums have an ethical imperative to act, but this requires radical change, including recognizing that social justice and environmental justice cannot be disentangled, and that the imperative for growth in the sector (more visitors, more programming, and so forth) needs to be reconsidered. Merriman's arguments echo some of the well-known challenges faced by museums on this subject, for example, their unhelpful and inaccurate image of neutrality. However, what stands out is the focus on challenging the status quo, in particular the necessity that museums must relinquish ideas of “waiting to be perfect” (13). There is a strong sense of urgency to this advice as time is running out to act, a sentiment echoed in other chapters (see Sutton and Fraser).

Ways of working in museums also feature in both Caitlin Southwick's and Maria Balshaw's chapters focusing on the climate crisis in relation to collections management and conservation. Both authors highlight the complexity involved in challenging ingrained professional standards and ideas of professionalism that prompt inactivity. A culture change is needed, but one that, the authors hint, appears tricky to transform overnight.

An important aspect of the book is the broader framing of the climate crisis as it focuses on much more than climate change including issues of biodiversity, species loss, and pollution. The volume also encourages museums to move beyond unhelpful nature/culture divisions and instead view museums more holistically. Likewise, the more theoretical chapters urge us to consider museums as nodes in a much wider ecosystem with the potential to influence (and be influenced by) this environment. Douglas Worts's chapter on the “Inside-Outside” model, for example, brings this idea into focus by recommending that museums leverage their activities for wider, long-term impact across the “living culture.” Likewise, Bridget McKenzie and Victoria Burns's chapter sees museums as transformative spaces where multiple narratives and diverse activities can come together to regenerate (rather than just sustain) social capacities. The chapter by Alison Tickell on the innovative work of Julie's Bicycle (a United Kingdom not-for-profit arts and culture organization) reminds us also that museums are part of the wider cultural sector with many shared challenges and opportunities. This understanding and the benefits it could offer often feel forgotten in the sector.

The volume attempts to offer international coverage, and although the dominant emphasis is on the United Kingdom there is balance in terms of the contexts represented. For example, South American museums are considered in Eduardo Carvalho's chapter and a Zimbabwean context is explored in the chapter by Simbarashe Shadreck Chitima. The latter points out that many of the strategies to “green” museums have been established largely in Western museums and Western publications and that a more nuanced approach is needed that considers different contexts, resources, political contexts, and staff knowledge. Importantly, the chapter highlights the value of Indigenous knowledge systems as adaptation strategies.

The case studies offer both inspiration on what action is possible and underway, and a more honest appraisal of practitioners’ experiences. For example, Jo Beggs and Dean Whiteside's chapter reflects some of the environmental design elements of the Whitworth Art Gallery's capital project that have been less successful. Likewise, Carole Destre and Nick Merriman's account of decarbonizing the Horniman Museum and Gardens highlights the complexity involved in this exercise. The latter raises unresolved questions around exactly how museums account for the carbon footprint of visitor travel (and whether this is something they should be considering at all). These details are vital to include because they help to normalize the principle promoted in Merriman's introductory chapter that museums need to act, even if imperfectly.

Where does Museums and the Climate Crisis leave our understanding? Overall, this is a timely and thought-provoking publication and, although there are other edited volumes that focus exclusively or partially on this topic, the book helps to update our knowledge and awareness. It reaffirms the sense that museums globally have been slow to engage and that this is both frustrating and unethical. However, the volume also helps to unpack why this might be, highlighting clashes of values, politics, funding cycles, and the lack of investment to decarbonize effectively. Significantly, the book also emphasizes some of the softer and perhaps less visible challenges, including workforce cultures of perfectionism and professionalism adding to the sense of inertia.

Anna Woodham

King's College London

Stories from Small Museums Fiona Candlin, Toby Butler, and Jake Watts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.

A key publication from the Mapping Museums project (2016–2021), Stories from Small Museums is notable for its accessibility. With an inviting title, clear and direct style, and appearance in high street bookshops it will appeal to a broad audience of scholars, students, and anyone with an interest in small museums.

This attention to accessibility has a significant impact on the framing of the volume. The authors begin with an overview of how their research was planned and conducted, calling attention to the specific roles played by Fiona Candlin, Toby Butler, Jake Watts, and other collaborators. This contextualizes their research processes for a general audience while offering a useful discussion of the choice to ground the volume in oral history interviews which explore—beyond the statistical elements of the Mapping Museums project—why and how people have opened small museums in the United Kingdom.

Defining these “micromuseums” is a key contribution of this volume. Challenging definitions of museums that require permanence or nonprofit status, the authors offer a practical definition of small, independent institutions that care for collections, have a demarcated space, and have some public displays (8). The volume draws on research with 40 institutions to show that, rather than being “curious anomalies,” these museums account for more than half of current United Kingdom museums while being routinely excluded from academic and professional discourse (3).

Keeping their emphasis on the stories of specific museums, the authors engage lightly with literature. They draw on an account of the heritage debates of the 1980s and 1990s to challenge continuing assumptions that the rise of small museums in the United Kingdom reflected nostalgia for declining British industries and resulted in democratic, grassroots organizations without practical or intellectual ties to the wider museum sector (14–16). These challenges frame the key claims of the volume: that small museums are diverse and complex, intersect with a wide variety of social, historical, and institutional forces, and are best understood by asking how, why, and by whom they have been brought into being.

The heart of this volume is the three central chapters that tell the stories of transport, war and conflict, and local history museums. Each chapter is grounded in the stories of a handful of museums, interspersed with quotes from oral history interviews. The focus on each museum's origin allows the authors to explore the factors that created them including money, time, skills, and access to spaces. Alongside this are discussions of the relationships among the people, places, and collections that have sustained these museums.

These evocative stories are particularly engaging in the chapter on transport museums, which focuses on the practical complications faced by people trying to house and care for trains, buses, and each other through networks of shared resources and skills. The Dinting Railway Centre in Yorkshire survived rent raises and the subsequent relocation of their locomotives because of, as Simon Bryant told the authors, “our love of the steam locos we look after and, dare I say it, our love of each other” (55). The authors work to balance their reflections on the role of small museums within the wider landscape of the United Kingdom museum sector with attention to the human stories that ground the oral history interviews. The quotes from interviews are always effective and resonant but are used relatively sparingly and could have been afforded more prominence.

In a closing critical chapter, the authors offer an analysis of class, gender, age, and race within the museums explored in this volume. They note their decision to keep this analysis separate from chapters that draw on interviews as “a means of balancing between the competing ethical demands of respect for the narrators and accounting for the uneven and unequal development of the sector” (35). This chapter makes the argument—well evidenced throughout the volume—that small museums emerged from groups diverse in age and class but tended to rely on the support of established institutions such as local councils which “supported micromuseums and founders in their own image” (161). Consequently, small museums have been founded and run almost exclusively by white people. To address this, the authors include three museums founded by people of color in this chapter. While the discussion of these museums—and the barriers to their existence—is a crucial element of the volume, their location in the critical analysis chapter separates the accounts of their founders from other interviewees and results in less emphasis on their specific histories, relationships, and collections than those of other museums discussed in the volume.

Stories from Small Museums is an ambitious volume that combines clarity with crucial arguments about the need to recognize the specific histories of small museums in the United Kingdom, beyond assumptions about nostalgic motivations or equitable community ventures. It covers diverse institutions and draws on detailed and carefully recorded oral history narratives, resulting in a volume offering critical scholarship alongside resonant human stories.

Kirsty Kernohan

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge

Adivasi Art and Activism: Curation in a Nationalist Age Alice Tilche. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022.

Alice Tilche's book significantly contributes to the field of anthropological research, museum curation, art markets and the politics of identity in contemporary India, as nationalist fervor dovetails with the global capitalist network of circulation and consumption. The book has dual objectives: first, to analyze how indigenous groups or Adivasis “reevaluate their traditions as art, making museums, performances, and works that circulate in the global art market,” and second, to establish how the distancing from their traditions and cultures results in an active “erasure . . . in favour of new (Hindu) religious and indigenous identities” (5). The research highlights how Hindutva, a cultural ideology that considers Hindus as the original habitants of India and seeks to establish their dominance in India, has trumped indigenous ways of being, resulting in an ambiguous and fluid identity for Adivasis, linked to “projects of mobility, in order to gain power, respect, and visibility” (191). The research is undertaken in the city of Chhota Udaipur, in the state of Gujarat, not an incidental choice, as it allows Tilche to trace the ideological shifts from Gandhi to Narendra Modi, the rise of communal violence, the developmental model, and the rise of “powerful transnational religious sects [who] have made dramatic inroads in rural and adivasi areas of the subcontinent” (6). As such, Gujarat and, specifically, Chhota Udaipur provide insights into the effects of “aesthetic-cultural-political revolution” (7) and how the “projects of preservation and erasure overlapped” as art and religion both sought to reform the region, participating in a “similar engagement with modernity” (8).

The book begins by contextualizing how the designation of “tribe” versus caste operates and is co-opted by the religious sects in their efforts toward the national integration of both through social reforms. In chapter 1, Tilche situates Indigenous museums within the larger project of museum-making in India and explains how they need to be understood “in relation to elite patronage,” including NGOs and the state who, following India's independence in 1947, utilized museums as “vectors of community-oriented modernization” (29). By comparing museums and temples, their functions, and the difference in distance and intimacy created by both, the analysis highlights new modalities of displays that have come forth. Chapter 2 narrates the evolution of social reforms where the erasure of the Adivasi identity is interpreted as the “victory of the nation against not just its foreign invaders but its internal others as well” (73). In this context, Tilche explores the history of Vacha: Museum of Voice, a tribal community museum that seeks to recenter Adivasi knowledge systems, and the curatorial impetus that went behind the displays in chapter 3. As a case study, it establishes how the indigenous vision should be understood as nuanced, where social mobility and modernist aspiration could mean the othering of the self. The museum then subsumes Adivasi voices within networks of patronage and alliances, while reifying internal tribal hierarchies.

Chapters 4 and 5 bring attention to the experience of living with Adivasi culture—the local gods, rituals, and the once-fluid Muslim and Hindu sacred spaces that welcomed and were honored by all. Chapter 5 dives deeper into the evolution and impact of the transformation of “Pithora from god to art” (124) and how it disrupted the collective knowledge sharing and labor that was once part of the ritual. Here we also see the way Adivasi symbols have come to be co-opted by the Hindu sects as a way of bringing in Adivasis within the larger history of Hinduism and establishing them as a primitive form of Hinduism.

Chapter 6 shifts our focus toward the built environment with the emergence of brick houses and grand Hindu temples and the varied ways Adivasis choose to curate their bodies to perform their new values aligned with sect requirements. Tilche frames these new manifestations and ways of being as “expectations of modernity” (155) that failed to materialize since “adivasiness remained a feeling and a state of mind that stuck to people's bodies” (160). Chapter 7 probes the link “between representation and empowerment by analyzing indigeneity as a project of opposition and inclusion” (163). Throughout the book Tilche brings self-awareness to her position as an outsider whose tastes and preferences at times desire seeing “tribal-ness.” However, there are some points where, in my reading, those preferences do escape, for example, when referring to the Vacha's curator's education as “second class” (100)—which then reads as though it is only formal education in urban centers that matters, and not lived experiences and proximity to a culture that continues to inform their day-to-day lives. Tilche reports a discussion with Virsinghbhai, an assistant curator and artist from the Adivasi community, that took place during a visit to the newly constructed BAPS Swaminarayan Temple in Bodeli. The Adivasi artist's appreciation of the temple's beauty and the “skill and mastery” of the craftsmanship lead him to go so far as to declare it “real art,” yet his statement is interpreted by Tilche as his acknowledgment that “the art that he himself produced was not” real (150). If Virsinghbhai's statement is read as an admission that his art, influenced by his lived and embodied experience, is not “real art” this raises questions about the effectiveness of the taxonomies that museums try to impose on living cultures and ways of being.

Alice Tilche's book is an important contribution to the growing field of South Asian museology, which has expanded considerably since the publication of Kavita Singh's (2002) seminal article. The research moves our attention away from the colonial–postcolonial/national binary, as explored in Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh's (2015) edited volume, No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia, toward the center–periphery relationship within a postcolonial context. The extensive research by the author positions the museum within the larger socio-cultural shifts in India and globally, making it a timely project. Though one finds little hope for the near future, the book accurately analyzes the present moment unfolding in India through the framework of the tribal museum.

Varda Nisar

Concordia University

It Speaks to You: Making Kin of People, Duodji and Stories in Sámi Museums Liisa-Rávná Finbog. Lewes, DE: DIOPress, 2023.

The book is based on Liisa-Rávná Finbog's dissertation in museology with the same title from the University of Oslo in 2021. Finbog is intertwined in an ongoing discourse on how Sámi traditional knowledge relates to the academic world and Western epistemology. She places herself within this frame on the side of the Indigenous methodological vantage point of being an insider, both as an Indigenous person and as a duojár, one who makes traditional Sámi handicraft. The term “craft” itself is one of Finbog's discussion objects as in her opinion this is an unjust translation of the Sámi term duodji. The Sámi are Indigenous peoples, covering northern Scandinavia and the bordering area of Russia, and there are 10 language groups spread over four countries.

The book gives an insight into the processes related to the transmission of knowledge within a cultural-specific framework. There is always something more to what is being done, than just the production of a handicraft product. The process itself is a conveyor of wisdom, ethics and bodily knowledge that enhances the identification of the persons involved within the Sámi communities. “In duodji, even if it is individual hands that shape the work, you are never alone in your practice. Aside from the will and consent of the material you are working with, the experiences of those before you are also voiced in the practice” (16). Finbog uses duodji as an example of the characteristics of an Indigenous epistemology, which lies in the attention to relations; nothing is said, done or thought without reference to kinship with others, in the past, present, and future.

Finbog uses her own childhood memories as an entry point to the importance of duodji. Both her parents belong to two different Sámi language groups, but as she grew up in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, Finbog's mother used get-togethers with duodji to immerse her daughter in Sámi language and cultural practices (24). From that experience, Finbog's understanding of the negotiating processes of Indigenous identities in our times is developed, between the past, often represented in museums, and the present, often represented in courses on duodji. The material that underpins the book is based on Finbog's relations with other duojárs, interviews, and workshops. The book also provides extensive references to the critical Indigenous methodology and related theories.

Finbog takes us back to archaeological discussions about prehistoric cultural contact, through historical sources juxtaposed with statements from her duojár mediators. Her point is that there has been a lengthy and entrenched colonial strategy of “killing” Indigenous knowledge, or epistemicide, which consequently led to a devaluation of Sámi languages and knowledges (2).

The book “aims to discuss how the relationship between museums and Sámi communities is expressed in the practice of duodji” (119), however, it primarily contains a discussion about Sámi ways of knowing and sharing knowledge, and how this is different from Western academic thought. As such, for a reader who wants an updated overview of recent discourses on academic knowledge the book provides a thorough presentation, although set within Finbog's own frame.

On the book cover, readers are promised an investigation of “the relation between museums, duodji, and Sámi source communities, showing how the formation of these relations have a massive impact on both Sámi identities and perceptions of sovereignty.” As a curator at one of the Sámi museums, I was disappointed that the examples referred to by Finbog and other duojárs are mainly with the non-Sámi Norwegian museums or online. When there is specific mention of one Sámi museum, it is Ájtte, which serves as a National Sámi museum within Sweden. The tremendous effort put out by the 15 Sámi museums spread out in the Sámi areas is not mentioned, neither is their role in helping reclaimers find their cultural roots recognized. This might leave the reader with an impression that there is no help to be found in the museum context for those seeking a renewal of their Sámi cultural heritage.

Finbog puts a lot of effort into portraying the colonial past and the struggles of those who, due to assimilation, have lost their Sámi identity. She claims, in accordance with her source material, that making duodji is an important way of identifying as a Sámi. The personal stories she highlights show the importance of items kept in the museums, and how the practice of copying them is a great source of renewal for individual Sámi. The museums are expected from a Sámi duojár perspective to be at hand when needed for searches for relics from deceased relatives, in the form of museal artifacts that may be reproduced in the present and thus provide a common ground for connection based on knowledge about family traditions, ancestral roots, and common ethical boundaries. The book gives insight into the struggles of reclaimers who are negotiating their newfound Sámi identities, and the writer offers a thorough interpretation of the historical issues of colonialization and assimilation, and how the work with duodji can support healing of broken connections in the present.

Jorunn Jernsletten

Várjjat Sámi Museum

À qui appartient la beauté? Bénédicte Savoy. Paris: La Découverte, 2024.

Bénédicte Savoy's latest book A qui appartient la beauté? (Who owns beauty?) examines the question of the restitution of objects held in Western museums. Over the last 10 years, the dispossessed have once again voiced their demands. European museums are still very reluctant to respond to these requests, but in recent years things seem to be moving. Savoy's work marks a major turning point in the treatment of this issue in France. The question chosen as the book's title perfectly sums up the complexity it addresses: Which country should exhibit a work of art? Which culture owns an object? How do European museums create beauty and turn everyday objects into works of art?

Bénédicte Savoy is a French art historian teaching at the Technical University of Berlin (Germany). Between 2016 and 2021, she held the International Chair entitled Cultural History of Artistic Heritages in Europe, Eighteenth to Twentieth Century at the distinguished Collège de France. In 2016, she was awarded the prestigious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). In 2018, together with the Senegalese economist and philosopher Felwine Sarr, she published the resounding Report on the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage (Sarr and Savoy 2018), commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron, which led in 2021 to the first restitutions of cultural property by France to Benin and Senegal.

Who owns beauty? (à qui appartient la beauté?) is a transcription of her first nine lectures at the Collège de France devoted to “Arts and cultures of the world in our museums” (Savoy 2017). She successively presents nine concrete and representative cases of “translocations” (12), the term she gives to objects extracted from their original context, often with real or symbolic violence, to be placed for their beauty in European museums. The objects she tracks with rigor and precision are from different places and of different ages: the bust of Nefertiti (Egypt, fourteenth century BC), the Pergamon Altar (present day Türkiye, second century BC), the polyptych of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (present day Belgium, fifteenth century), Raphael's Sistine Madonna (Italy, 1513), the bronze heads from the Summer Palace in Peking (China, eighteenth century), Watteau's Enseigne de Gersaint (France, 1720), the statue of the “Bangwa Queen” from Cameroon (Cameroon, ca. 1898), Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (Austria, 1907) and, finally, the “royal treasures” from Abomey (Benin, from 1889 to 1892).

Savoy distinguishes four periods of major translocation (26) in which the objects can be transversely placed. Period 1 is the eighteenth century, with major movements of entire collections purchased in France or Italy by the enlightened princes of the European courts in the wake of the first galleries opened to the public in northern Europe, the moment when museums as we know them today were invented (9). Raphael's Sistine Madonna was bought in 1753 by the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland for the Dresden Gallery in a context of economic asymmetry. Watteau's Enseigne de Gersaint was bought on the French art market in 1745 by the King of Prussia for the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. Period 2 begins with the French Revolution and the “artistic conquests” of Napoleon's Empire between 1794 and 1811 (26) in a context of political asymmetry. Van Eyck's Mystic Lamb was partially transported to Paris in 1794 after the annexation by France of current Belgian territories. Period 3 is the colonial period between 1860 and 1920, during which thousands of objects were collected by the European ethnological museums, as part of a “thirst for accumulation” of heritage (68) and a process of national affirmation that pitted London, Berlin, and Paris against each other (64). This was notably the case with the Chinese bronzes brought back by the French and British armies after the sack of the Summer Palace in Peking in 1860 (139), the Pergamon Altar transported to Berlin between 1878 and 1886 (64), the bust of Nefertiti legally removed from Egyptian territory in 1913 (38) but in a context of asymmetry of knowledge or the statue of the “Queen Bangwa” of Cameroon bought with thousands of other African objects (192) by the Berlin Museum of Ethnology in 1899 and the “royal treasures” of Benin taken by France in 1892 following a bloody military expedition to Abomey (current Benin) (225). Period 4, finally, is World War II and the Nazi spoliation, which the author explores through the case of Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer nationalized by the Third Reich and incorporated into Vienna's museums in 1938 (214–215).

Savoy's book addresses numerous highly useful questions in the context of contemporary requests for return of objects such as the legitimate ownership of a translocated artwork and the place it should be exhibited, and raises the importance of material culture in the construction of identities. It also emphasizes the role played by museums in creating the value of beauty: European museums manufacture beauty and lift objects that were never intended to be exhibited as works of art.

Savoy calls on museums to be more transparent about the provenance and history of the objects they display and argues for an international positioning to assist restitution requests, in the spirit of the Washington Principles adopted in 1998 for the restitution of property looted during World War II (218). Transparency is essential both for the “heritage justice” called for (189) and for the fair enjoyment of beauty in museums. But above all, beyond questions of heritage and museums, she raises the question of the relationship we would like to build with others in the future.

The historical rigor and honesty of Savoy's work has the potential to change perceptions. It is one of those books that enables us to think about highly emotional subjects by returning to the facts, in different periods and places, allowing readers to decentralize and leave the question in motion.

Anne Malmendier

Laboratoire d'Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains, Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB)

The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Heritage, and Death Trish Biers and Katie Stringer Clary, eds. Museum and Heritage Studies Series. London: Routledge, 2024.

Let me say this first of all: The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Heritage and Death will be an important point of reference for researchers and students in the areas the book covers for years to come. While there is obvious kinship between museums and heritage, museums and death, and, maybe somewhat less obvious, between heritage and death, bringing all three simultaneously into focus, as this book does, is unusual and unusually helpful. Exploring connections between heritage studies, museum studies, art galleries, and historic sites on one hand, and death, dying, and human remains as objects of collection, curation, and display on the other, the book seeks to examine the politics and ethics of these activities. As such the book offers, as the editors say, “a foundation for debate and a reference for how the dead are treated within the public arena” (1).

The book is, as the editors argue compellingly, timely. Whatever one may think about claims about the disappearance of death from contemporary public arenas, specifically in the Western world, the COVID-19 pandemic certainly served to make death present in everyday public life in a way it had not been before, at least not for some time. Growing public awareness of the social inequality of death—in spite of its reputation as the great leveler—and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, came to make questions about death, museum practices, and the construction of heritage even more ethically and politically acute than they had been before. At the heart of this movement are questions of politics and ethics in relation to knowledge production and what we might call social memory and public memorialization.

The book is divided into six substantial parts each containing five or six chapters. Part 1 focuses on acquisition, curation, and the conservation of the dead. Part 2 discusses ethical questions around exhibitions and display of the dead. Part 3 addresses the legacies of colonialism in museums, efforts at decolonization, and changing views on museum purposes and practices. Part 4 turns attention to death and heritage, mobilizing the notion of deathscapes in the process. Part 5 is on public education in museums and heritage, while Part 6 focuses on death studies and heritage in practice. The substantial parts of the book are framed by an introduction and concluding remarks by the two editors.

It is beyond the scope of this review to touch upon all the chapters in the book. At nearly 600 pages and over 30 chapters, a mention of all could only be superficial in the extreme. The authors of the different chapters are from a variety of different scholarly backgrounds and many of them are engaged as professionals in museum or heritage work. The chapters, in turn, vary significantly in the extent to which they offer an overview, as it were, of the area they speak to, or develop a more specific argument in relation to the existing literature. The chapters vary, too, in the extent to which they seek to make an explicit and direct ethical or political argument, even as such concerns inform the book as a whole. All the chapters are animated by a recognition of the power to move that death has, in particular death as materialized by human remains because they are so undeniably there. This is a point powerfully made, some time ago, by Kathrine Verdery (1999) when writing on the political lives of dead bodies. The point helps us to appreciate the dramatization of the many tensions around human remains. Human remains, often through processes of heritagization and museum curation, hold great power as foci of identification practices and political mobilizations. Human remains, often as they are held by museums, have been, and remain, key sites for the production of knowledge about two such fundamentally important, while debated, issues as the human body and human history and culture. Human remains are, moreover, sites of knowledge production often more or less explicitly intended to inform intervention: medical, biological, social, political, military even. There are many and powerful interests invested in dead human bodies and their remains. Still, the power that human remains have to move is, of course, grounded in the connections they have with other human beings, as Verdery pointed out, and the reminders they serve as of what may befall us too. Examining this power involves asking about the boundaries and constitution of the human, the body, remains, death, and the processes of inclusion and exclusion through which those domains are constituted. Such examinations are obviously deeply and inherently a matter of political and ethical practice. The Handbook will remain a source because it poses the questions that matter here the most so well, and because it provides interesting and important ways in which to think about these questions.

Arnar Árnason

Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen

Chinese Museums Today Chinese Museums Association, eds. Les Ulis: EDP Sciences and Science Press, 2023.

In order to better introduce the achievements of museums in China to a worldwide audience and to interpret and disseminate museum culture with Chinese characteristics, spirit, and wisdom, the Chinese Museums Association launched the project Chinese Museums Today in November 2022, with the support of the Tencent Foundation and the Chinese journals Chinese Museum, Museum, and Southeast Culture. Over 20 articles representing academic research, practical issues, and contemporary values were selected and edited from these three journals and the Chinese Museums Association's publications.

Chinese Museums Today was published by EDP Sciences and premiered globally in Naples in October 2023. The book consists of two parts, namely Introduction and Context and Insights. In the first part, Liu Shuguang as President of the Chinese Museums Association and Chair of ICOM-China, and An Laishun as ICOM ASPAC Chair, contribute an article “Riding the Waves and Forging Ahead: 40 Years in Retrospect and the Outlook for the Chinese Museums Association.” In it they clarify the background to this project as an initiative to introduce Chinese museums and museum studies to a global audience on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Chinese Museums Association. The second part is divided into theory, exhibitions, management, technology, education, international cooperation as well as archaeological sites and museums, covering all the major areas for Chinese museum development and research in the past decade.

Chinese Museums Today is like a mirror, reflecting a panoramic picture of the Chinese museum community. With more than 100 years of history, museums in China boasted rapid growth after the millennium and are now working hard on the delivery of public cultural services. In the past decade, both state-owned and non-state-owned museums have made continuous progress in the construction of venues and facilities, collection conservation, research, exhibitions, and free admission. By the end of 2022, the total number of registered museums reached 6,565, ranking among the most numerous worldwide. Around 34,000 on-site exhibitions and nearly 23,0000 educational activities were held throughout the year, receiving 578 million visitors. Moreover, almost 10,000 exhibitions and over 40,000 educational programs were launched online. Obviously, visiting museums has become a most lively aspect of the cultural lives of the Chinese public today. This vigorous development of Chinese museums is discussed in Liu and An's chapter, which provides a solid foundation for other chapters’ focuses on specific themes.

There are two key moments for the Chinese museum evolution in terms of institutional design: 2008 and 2015. In January 2008, the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Culture (predecessor of today's Ministry of Culture and Tourism) and the National Cultural Heritage Administration, jointly issued the Circular on Free Access to National Museums and Memorials for All. Free entry was part of a major national reform of museum governance in line with the rationale that museums were a public service benefiting all. In 2008 alone, the total number of visitors exceeded 100 million, which represented a 1.5-fold increase year on year, and, for some museums, the number grew by up to 10 times. Such great changes are discussed in the article included in this volume: “Reflections on Free Access Policy to Chinese Museums.” However, despite this success, it is now time for more critical reflection on this policy, and its achievements and problems.

Also in 2008, the National Cultural Heritage Administration and the Chinese Museums Association started to organize museum accreditation to upgrade museum governance including financial arrangements. Up to the fourth round in 2020, a total of 1,224 museums have been graded at three levels, then accounting for 22.1 percent of all museums in China. The venues that have been accredited have set excellent examples and been widely recognized. More details on this can be found in the chapter “Promoting High-Quality Development of Museums through the Museum Grading Process.” It is a pity, though, that the chapter did not trace and analyze the changing rationale of all the versions of grading methods and standards, which would help international readers to better understand the policy orientation and market demands throughout the period under review.

In 2015, the second key moment was the Museum Regulation initiated by the State Council that came into effect from 20 March, the first national regulation in the Chinese museum sector. Unfortunately, articles in the book seldom mention the regulation and its impact. For example, the regulation encourages museums to set up a board of trustees system as an organizational guarantee of their public attributes and effective governance. Additionally, this regulation has offered new opportunities for non-state-owned museums that represent nearly 30 percent of all Chinese museums.

In addition to these topics, several chapters discuss the economic value of Chinese museums, particularly their contribution to city tourism and soft power, which is becoming a rising concern for the Chinese government and the nation's museums.

To sum up, while it is fortunate that Chinese museums are currently experiencing a period of major development and prosperity, especially judging from the data presented in Chinese Museums Today, the next stage is to promote quality as well as quantity. We look forward to the time when museum experiences are so integrated into public lifestyles that “Have you ‘MUSEUMed’ today?” will be a daily greeting.

Yi Zheng and Lanzhou Luo

Fudan University, Shanghai