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Critical Cultural Heritage Series
Series editor Beverley Butler
THE POLITICS OF HERITAGE MANAGEMENT IN MALI
From UNESCO to Djenné
Charlotte Louise Joy
Djenné, in modern day Mali, is an UNESCO World Heritage Site and acclaimed an enduring wonder of the ancient African world. In this revealing study, the author critically examines how the politics of heritage management, conservation, and authenticity play essential roles in the construction of Djenné’s past and its appropriation for contemporary purposes.
INTANGIBLE HERITAGE AND THE MUSEUM
New Perspectives on Cultural Preservation
In this international study the relationship between museums and the new concept of “intangible heritage" is investigated. The rise of intangible heritage within the global sphere of UN cultural policy is charted and its implications for international politics as well as museological practice and critical theory is explored.
A Counterhistory of South Asian Museology
This study of the Lahore Museum in Pakistan is one of the first books to offer an in-depth historical and ethnographic analysis of a South Asian museum and reveals local perceptions and uses of museums in non-Western societies to be fraught with social, political, and cultural implications.
Materiality and non-verbal communication
This book demonstrates the importance of objects that, despite their 'ordinariness', lie at the heart of their makers’ and users’ systems of thought and practices. This concise book will interest all those who see the intertwining of ‘function’ and ‘style’ as the very mark of all cultural behaviour: anthropologists and archaeologists; sociologists, historians, philosophers, cognitive anthropologists and primatologists.
Pan-African Ideology and the Politics of Heritage
Katharina Schramm Foreword by Beverley Butler
978-1-59874-514-6 Paperback £24.95
978-1-59874-513-9 Hardback £64.50
Analyses how ‘home-coming’ is constructed by African hosts and Diasporan returnees and how a shared rhetoric of the (Pan-)African family is produced but also contested in practice.
EMPIRE AND LOCAL WORLDS
A Chinese Model of Long-Term Historical Anthropology
978-1-59874-405-7 Paperback £24.95
978-1-59874-404-0 Hardback £63.50
This book traces almost a millennium of history of the southern Chinese city of Quangzhou, a major international trading entrepot in the 13th century that declined to a peripheral regional centre by the end of the 19th century. Wang offers a Chinese paradigm for the study of civilization that is distinctly different from Eurocentric models.
Caring for Maori Meeting Houses Outside New Zealand Edited by Dean Sully
978-1-59874-310-4 Paperback £24.95
978-1-59874-309-8 Hardback £63.50
Through case-studies of Maori Meeting Houses located in the US and Europe, this volume challenges the transformation of sacred objects and places into commodities by western conservation traditions and attempts to decolonise conservation practice.
Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa
Edited by Ferdinand De Jong & Michael Rowlands
978-1-59874-307-4 Hardback £24.95
A demonstration of the role that memory and heritage play in a variety of postcolonial contexts, with case studies from West Africa. It features a range of settings, from televised ritual performances in Mali to monument conservation in Djenne and slavery memorials in Ghana.
RETURN TO ALEXANDRIA
An Ethnography of Cultural Heritage Revivalism and Museum Memory
978-1-59874-191-9 Paperback £24.95
978-1-59874-190-2 Hardback £63.50
Presents a critique of the concepts and values that underpinned the Alexandria Library project. Butler discusses how the project privileged Alexandria’s Greek heritage over1500 years of Islamic scholarship and how it established an island for the cultural elite in an urban slum. She also discusses the challenges faced by scholars in overcoming these problems.