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storeroom. They do, however, draw upon actual discussions that we have had, and speak in ways that we hope are true to the comments and feelings expressed by curators who 2 30 Europe we have met during our research fieldwork, and whom we quote directly in the rest of this chapter.1 That research field is museums, primarily those within the UK that have a remit to collect recent and/or contemporary everyday life. Our focus here is on what for many curators working in this context is a major challenge, and one that for some at least makes them feel that the role of
Pākehā by focusing on everyday objects and their messy and entangled production, consumption, use and exchange. It realises the aim of recognising that (sub) urbanisation and popular culture are great drivers of change, and telling cross-cultural histories in a post-settler society is both historically more accurate and museologically more necessary than ever. Conclusion: the twenty-first-century history curator So, this brings me back to a persistent question: How do contemporary curators in museums deal with everyday life and its material aspects, when they are
Many of the chapters in this book engage with issues of time and temporality, either explicitly or indirectly. The linear or progressive time implied by the neologism ‘curatopia’ can and should be productively critiqued, not least in terms that recognise the infolded and paradoxical nature of the present – or ‘presence’ – in everyday life. What we understand phenomenologically, through immediate perception, may return later to haunt us and the objects around us as a folding-over of time. The curator deciding what to collect for the future, how to interpret it in the present and what it meant in its originary past, is also curating time – an intractable but dynamic project.
– that holds a particular grasp on the imagination of many people today. A fixation on the artificially preserved corpse is likely a modern rather than an ancient one; 10 for most people in the modern West, death is clinicised and separated from everyday life. Rather few Western museum visitors – especially children – will actually have witnessed a corpse. This is one reason why when visitors encounter an Egyptian mummy in a museum context their first response is often to question its authenticity. 11 It ought to be
’s occupation landscape, our work also draws upon and contributes to a body of scholarship focused on bringing back the names of victims of Nazi persecution, revealing the ‘textures in everyday life – the ordinary in the extraordinary’ and determining the fate of missing persons. 49 This work represents the first detailed investigation of the lives, and landscape inhabited by, the forced and slave labourers in Alderney. It goes beyond the studies of other scholars who have approached the subject from a single
the main University building, and Lundagård, with runic stones from the Viking period, busts of dead scholars, and buildings from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular. Most centuries since the foundation of the city are represented. So the past is everywhere, but it is neither foreign nor distant. The past is familiar and present in my everyday life. The architecture of Universitetsplatsen can easily be recognised in old pictures where the great changes of recent times have not yet taken place: an academic
and evidence. Barrett (1988, 27) was critical of a lack of engagement with the material world. Similarly, Gardner (2004, 7) suggested that problems of subordination and domination needed a more in-depth analysis. Both these writers adopted elements of the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1977) on the daily practice of everyday life into their analysis to address these concerns. The relevant parts of Bourdieu’s (1977, 1990) work are concerned with developing a theory of practice for the study of society. For archaeologists, his most influential idea has been the concept of
backgrounds, while people from other social backgrounds, both rural and urban, lived around them. Few other monument types are this numerous while being a part of everyday life for so many people. Perhaps the only potential parallel is parish churches, but their survival is less evenly spread than the tower house and they tell us only of religious life. As tower houses were occupied by merchants, we could perceive them as having some overlap with vernacular architecture. In Ireland, we have no upstanding medieval vernacular buildings surviving; our knowledge of them instead
everyday life in both camps. Poor sanitation and badly constructed barracks were exacerbated by the nominal rations and lack of medical treatment provided to inmates. Conditions in Helgoland worsened to such an extent by December 1942, that a German commission from Berlin was sent to investigate and enforce changes. 110 However, these changes failed to materialise and, as in Sylt labour camp, both the architecture of the site and the beatings that the guards inflicted continued to result in the ill health
saw protests, demonstrations, and actions that same summer. That the defence of a World Heritage site may threaten a modern development became apparent in Dresden, just as it obviously threatens everyday life in Venice; but can the World Heritage Convention itself come under threat as an international convention despite the present consensus? Yes: if “Pax Americana”, the global world order after the Second World War with organisations such as the UN and UNESCO, falls, the convention will fall as well. Michel Batisse wrote, “[l]ike many international agreements