Pasts Beyond Memory

Tony Bennett is Professor of Sociology at the Open University, UK and a Director of the ESRC Research Centre on Socio-cultural Change. His current interests focus on the sociology of culture, the history and theory of museums, and cultural policy. His recent publications include The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge 1995) and Culture: A Reformer's Science (1998).

• Introduction  1. Dead Circuses: Expertise, Exhibition, Government  2. The Archaeological Gaze of the Historical Sciences  3. Reassembling the Museum  4. The Connective Tissue of Civilisation  5. Selective Memory: Racial Recall and Civic Renewal at the American Museum of Natural History  6. Evolutionary Ground Zero: Colonialism and the Fold of Memory  7. Words, Things and Vision: Evolution 'At a Glance' Postscript: Slow Modernism  Endnotes  References  Index

"Sure to be a major intervention in museums and cultural studies...an important and provocative text....I expect this book to be as important as Birth of the Museum, which is saying something." - Ivan Karp, Emory University