assemblages of meaning. He used this idea to challenge the generally accepted understanding that theory is primarily aligned with academic disciplines and discourse–a pre-sumption that overlooks the reality, which is that museums have been and con-tinue to be key sites for the creation of theory. He explained:
If it has been taken for granted for several generations that the locus of innovation in disciplines such as anthropology has been “theory,” there is now scope to think differently and to revalue practices that appeared to be, but were actually never, sub-theoretical … [I have] not tried to map out in any rigorous way what an understand-ing of “the museum as method” might entail. My general point is simply that one can work with contingencies, with the specific qualities and histories of artifacts and works of art, in ways that challenge many everyday or scholarly understandings of what things are and what they represent. (Thomas 2010, 8)
Thomas argued that understanding the museum as method means coming to terms with the role played by contingency –that is, the specificities of chance and unpredictability–in day-to-day museum work. From our perspective as the editors of this volume on museum theory, his ideas intersect with and affirm broader dis-ciplinary discussions occurring in other sectors about the opportunities for renewal and innovation that can arise from debates over disciplinary crisis. The broad church of the humanities, for example, is often discussed as being caught in a per-petual cycle of crisis, dissonance, and renewal, a process that is often explained as being productive and as generating opportunities for the future. Focused on the specific discipline of anthropology and its relationship to the museum, which is the main vehicle through which the public have come to know the discipline, Thomas’s main concern is that “mainstream anthropology arguably continues to drift away from the museum as a research resource or site of analysis,” even despite the revival of debate around art and material culture that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s (Thomas 2010, 6).
The unpredictability that Thomas identifies as being potentially valuable for attempts to develop museum theory (Thomas 2010, 7) can be understood as having similarities with theories first raised by John Tunbridge and Gregory Ashworth in 1996 in relation to ideas about dissonance.1 In the context of the interdisciplinary field of heritage studies, for example, Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996, 21) argued that heritage is, at its core, dissonant because the messages, values, and meanings that different people create about heritage and the pasts it represents are always going to be interpreted and understood differently by individuals and groups with different backgrounds, experiences, interests, and agendas. While discord, conflict, contest, and lack of agreement in the way that the past is represented can perhaps be most readily perceived in relation to places and instances of “difficult” heritage (representing historical brutality, genocide, wars, and so on), dissonance is, in their view, inherently and inevitably created when something takes on the status of “heritage.”
Thomas’s ideas, and those of Tunbridge and Ashworth (1996) and others, pro-vide a useful and timely series of links and contextual relationships with the con-cerns motivating this book, including: first, the analysis of the disciplinary affiliations of museum work; second, our attention to demonstrating the museum as a locus of theory, where theory is generated within the museum; and, third, the discussion about disciplinary crisis that can extend from this analysis. Unlike Thomas, however, our intention in building this collation of contributions has been to explore the issues of disciplinary control (through affiliation) and crisis through a discourse about conjunctural politics. While we take his point about the tendency for the new museology to be preoccupied with the contemporary poli-tics of museums, perhaps at the expense of broader projects of theorizing muse-ums on their own terms, our aim in this book has been to investigate the hypothesis that every aspect of museum work is–and has always been–political. Hence, the case studies and discussions included herein have been invited for the contribution that they can make to understanding and challenging ideas about the interrelationships between culture and politics.
Background
Museums have long been understood by museum studies researchers as sites of politics and culture, where themes of power, citizenship, and democracy have played out in or been ignored by officially sanctioned spaces of representation.The first phase of museum studies, affiliated with history, art history, sociology, cultural studies, and Foucauldian cultural theory, addressed the process of nation building that had motivated the development of mid-nineteenth-century public museums. Scholars situated museums as agencies of liberal governance which, through their capacity to represent and construct imagined communities, are involved in molding citizens who are informed and able to take part in modern democratic life (Sherman 1994; Bennett 1995; 1998a). The new museology was influenced by postcolonial theory, cultural theory (identity politics), and the “history wars” of the era (Luke 2002). Boosted by a post-1989 surge in scholarship concerned with the public sphere, the new museology became popular in the 1990s because of its contention that the political work of museums extended to the capacity of these institutions to represent the interests and concerns of disadvantaged and minority groups to the broader national community (Karp, Lavine, and Kreamer 1992; Macdonald and Fyfe 1996; Simpson 1996; Sandell 2002; Kreps 2003; Peers and Brown 2003; Witcomb 2003).
Thus, while the new museology, sometimes also called “critical museology,” might have emerged out of the concern to show how museums were embedded within a network of power relations that supported dominant interests, it has often also been employed by researchers wanting to counteract or challenge the image of museums as governmental apparatuses. Informed by postcolonial stud-ies and development anthropology, and motivated by themes of equity and human rights, the new museology became a useful tool for those seeking to critically ana- lyze the intellectual and philosophical bases on which museums–traditionally aligned with the colonial enterprise–have relied in their representation of indig-enous peoples and those belonging to ethnic minorities, in order to push for an agenda of change. It follows then, that the new museology has also been applied and extended by researchers aiming to provide information and understanding about the creation of museums for and by individuals and groups whose heteroge-neous beliefs and life experiences are represented by collections and exhibitions. It contributed to critiques of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century anthropology (and other disciplines) for essentializing difference and aiding colonial expansion through the structural classification of non-Europeans as culturally, historically, and racially inferior. Its reflexive outlook, which has also been adopted by contem-porary anthropology, has influenced many of the national museums that were enacted and conceptualized during the formative 1980s–1990s period as national governments in settler nations allocated substantial funding to cultural projects (prime among them national museums including the National Museum of Australia, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and the National Museum of the American Indian) on the grounds that they would exhibit and affirm the public policy initiative of multiculturalism, which is a civic project that is, as Thomas (2010, 6) reminds us, “resonant of an anthropological legacy” (also Bennett 1998a).
The new museology also emphasized attempts to promote relationships between museums and source communities, where the source communities were positioned as authoritative and often controlling agents (Clifford 1997; Ames 2000; Kreps 2003; Peers and Brown 2003). It was greatly influenced by changes occurring in the European ecomuseum movement, the Australian Indigenous keeping place movement, and the American Indian tribal museum movement, which had each grown apace throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These movements impacted main-stream museum practice too, with Te Papa and the National Museum of the American Indian offering perhaps the clearest illustration of the way in which changes in indigenous museum practice have been a contributing factor in influ-encing the transformation of national museums globally. However, at the same time as the new museology was gaining popularity among visitors as well as researchers and practitioners investigating the public/political influence of muse-ums (particularly in relation to indigenous claims for recognition, rights, represen-tation, and repatriation), post-9/11 expressions of anxiety about cultural (ethnic) difference challenged the cultural policy initiatives in the West which had previ-ously celebrated precisely such diversity. Changing priorities in public policy affected the museological sector, leading to attempts to revive the instrumental role that culture and museums might play in building a sense of national