Museums

Question 1

What are the roles and effects of museums? (Pres)

Answer 1

• Nation-Building (‘totalizing classificatory grid’)
• Construction of the past of the nation (archaeology)
• serialisation (other nations, race)
• creation of culture (‘imposition of culture’)
• education
• differentiation of peoples (hierarchies)

Question 2

What does Sylvester suggest museums can do?

Answer 2

they can instruct, edify, hide, impose and differentiate peoples through visual means rather than laws etc

Question 3

What can one see in the nation building policies of new states? (Anderson)

Answer 3

a genuine popular nationalist ehtnsiasm, and a systematic instilling of nationalist ideology through mass media, education system etc

Question 4

What defined how the colonial state imagined its domination, the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain ,and the legitimacy of its ancestry? (Anderson)

Answer 4

The Census
The Map
The Museum

Question 5

When did interest increase in museum and history of colonies? (Anderson)

Answer 5

When modern colony for attached to a metropole came into play, idea it reflected superiority

Question 6

How did museums create hierarchies in colonial times? (Anderson)

Answer 6

• they would reflect the builders of monuments and the colonial natives in a certain hierarchy.
• In Dutch east indies idea that builder and natives were not of some race
• In Burma, secular decadence was imagined such hat they were not capable of their ancestors achievements anymore

Question 7

What helped forge a link between nation building and art/museums? (Sylvester)

Answer 7

International competition

Question 8

What does Ernest Gellner suggest the key to nation building is? (Sylvester)

Answer 8

• imposing a high culture on society, where previously low culture had taken up the lives of the majority.
• In his view it was mass education that made people aware of who they were and who they wanted to be, by narrating a common history, culture and set of civic obligations

Question 9

What matters of nation building? (Sylvester)

Answer 9

-that there are reference points that people can begin to identify, talk about, and return to see over, knowing that others like themselves are exposed to these too

Question 10

What does the Martyrs’ museum in Tehran reveal? (Gruber)

Answer 10

-how a cultural institution can provide a dramatic field in which visitors engage in communal acts of remembrance and mourning, thereby uniting them into a civic body

Question 11

What have museums in modern times become within Europe and America? (Gruber)

Answer 11

-the new official repositories for the representation and transmission of local, national and universal values

Question 12

What do museums preserve? (Gruber)

Answer 12

Values

Question 13

How do history museums create a collective memory in their viewing public? (Gruber)

Answer 13

by formulating dominant narratives about places and people

Question 14

What is the martyrs’ museum in Tehran dedicated to? (Gruber)

Answer 14

commemorating the deceased heroes of the 1979 revolution and the martyrs of the iran-iraq war

Question 15

What is the martyrs’ museum trying to promote? (Gruber)

Answer 15

Martyrdom as a worthy cause

Question 16

How is the martyrs museum laid out? (Gruber)

Answer 16

to be a meditative ritual space

Question 17

How does the martyrs’ museum treat other religion? (Gruber)

Answer 17

recognises them in order to neutralise zones of contestation

Question 18

How is memory made visually operational and enacted in the Martyrs’ museum? (Gruber)

Answer 18

-through a carefully scripted mise-en-scene