to be influenced by concerns about social justice and community building, as well as by public policy-oriented approaches. The recent period might be understood as representing a third phase of museum studies which brings together but also challenges previous ways of understanding museums and their relationship to society and the governance of such. However, despite its concern with cultural processes on the one hand, and its engagement with politics on the other hand, this phase continues to struggle with how to identify and then conduct research at the actual interface between politics and museums. This struggle might be understood in some respects as itself being a productive outcome reflective of cultural processes. However, it has also created a disciplinary gap that has contributed to the argument that culture and the arts form an example of minor politics that is of low priority in the realm of political decision-making (Gray 2011).
This gap further evidences the observations by Thomas and others about the difficulties associated with integrating theory and practice, particularly for museum studies, which, as an inherently interdisciplinary field of studies, means that people come to it with specific ideas formed by prior disciplinary training. Instead of resulting in work that acts as more than a sum of its different discipli-nary parts, what often happens is that work tends to fit within one of three main groups of scholarship: (1) museological publications that deal with practical and policy concerns as well as grounded theoretical issues; (2) disciplinary-specific debates about the conflicting demands of professional and public interests, focusing especially on the relationship between the museum, the discipline (e.g., anthropology or sociology), and the people who are represented; and (3) cultural studies articles in which museums are presented as locales in which power, repre-sentation, and diversity can be fruitfully debated. These categories were outlined in 1998 by Parezo, who observed that “members of these three camps tend to ignore each other’s insights, and this results in the loss of historical contextualisa-tion and erroneous statements about the theoretical nature of past writing on museums” (Parezo 1998, 183).
In addition to being developed in and in relation to the high-profile history and culture wars playing out in the public sphere, the new museology developed out of a strong commitment by museum scholars to theoretical ideas gaining popularity through the period. The new museology’s primarily political and theoretical orientation was directly influenced by the 1989 publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by Habermas (1989), and other key critical theory texts of the period (e.g., Foucault 1974; 1977, 1989; Bourdieu and Darbel 1991). Although, on reflection, the new museology may have overemphasized its alignment with disciplinarity and academic discourse over or even at the expense of practice, its intentions were, for the most part, to bring theoretical insights into practice (Vergo 1989; Macdonald and Fyfe 1996; Macdonald 2002). Indeed, many proponents of the new museology, particularly those seeking to empower source communities through collaborative projects, presented this reunification as a serious political project and goal for their work (e.g., Clifford 1997; Witcomb 2003).
The new museology’s aim to link theory and practice is evident (even if not fully realized or accomplished) in a large number of publications from the period. In her review of one representative anthology of the time, Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World (Macdonald and Fyfe 1996), Nancy J. Parezo from Arizona State Museum commented on the complexity and tensions arising from this aspiration as well as the increasing separation between museum work and the discipline of anthropology. In a piece that effectively rehearsed the concerns raised by Thomas (at the outset of this Introduction), Parezo argued that the distinction and divisions may be counteracted where disciplinary and practice-based approaches are addressed in a shared context and con-versation. As examples of this kind of work, Parezo cites the “richly theorized works” published in Museum Anthropology through the 1990s, that
raise issues that are of importance to anthropology in that they deal with how research is conducted and its results are disseminated and how the peoples with whom we work are to be fully integrated into anthropological endeavours and discourse–in short, with the basic production, dissemination, and use ethics of anthropological knowledge. (Parezo 1998, 183)
It is an argument also made by Lynn Meskell (2009) in relation to the relationships between archaeological work and the field of heritage studies.
Overview
The challenge we set for contributors to this volume was twofold. First, we wanted to devise a volume that would encourage conversation across the categories outlined by Parezo and across the distinctions proposed by Thomas. Second, we wanted to avoid the problem of a volume on museum theory being relentlessly concerned with the museum in general from the perspective of externally derived and high-level forms of abstraction. While we did not want to neglect this kind of theorizing altogether, we wanted to find a structure that enabled other kinds of theorizing to emerge. The details of this approach and how it has panned out through the volume are detailed in a following section, but included asking scholars from other disciplinary and theoretical fields to write about museums, and asking museum professionals to address the conditions for (and resistance to) theoretical reflexivity in the museum. As such, the volume represents an attempt to move beyond theoretically driven analyses of museums toward a situated form of theorizing about museums. Our starting point was to invite chapters that would theorize relationships between museums, knowledge, and experience and to devise a collection that would open up dialogue between museums and the academy, and probe links between museum studies and other disciplinary formations (such as cultural studies, art history, anthropology, natural history, and history) in ways that speak to the opportunities such conversations have both to theorize museums and also to use museums to do theoretical work.
Our editorial approach, then, has been to invite contributions that identify and probe specific kinds of conjunctures and points of praxis, rather than those that would interpret museums from the vantage point of particular theoretical frame-works, one after another. We are interested in the idea of the conjuncture and, by association, of “conjunctural knowledge” as that which is “situated in, and applica-ble to, specific and immediate political or historical circumstances; as well as an awareness that the structures of representations which form culture’s alphabet and grammar are instruments of social power, requiring critical and activist examina-tion” (During 1993, 97). This approach speaks effectively to the types of moments that the book presents, where constituents and collaborators (let alone museum professionals and other stakeholders) do not permit the theory or abstraction or traditions of detached critical distance to avoid the need to understand the felt specificities of the historical and contemporary empirical conditions pertinent to their museums.
To this end, the book has been framed around three themes: “Thinking about Museums,” “Disciplines and Politics Disciplines and Politics,” and “Theory from Practice/ Practicing Theory.” In “Thinking about Museums” we have gathered work focused on understanding the nature of museums as institutions and their role in the public sphere. While these contributions mostly start from theory, they are always responsive to particular historical conjunctures, situating museums in response to the history of ideas or particular political and sociological conjunctures or, alternatively, wanting to completely reconceptualize the philosophical basis on which we think about museums and their collections in the first place. Part II, “Disciplines and Politics,” presents work by scholars based in specific disciplines and with particular theoretical orientations whom we have asked to consider contemporary museums from the point of view of those interests. These chapters both reflect and generate a conversation between museums and specific kinds of knowledge–such as those produced by disciplines such as art history, history, anthropology, and science–as well as by specific types of research questions such as inquiries into the relationship between museums and the public sphere and museums and the formation of subjectivity. Part III, “Theory from Practice/Practicing Theory,” includes chapters by scholars whose work begins with (and often in) museums but reaches out to and across a range of disciplines in an attempt to theorize, better understand, and challenge what is going on both in museums and in relation
