The Museum in Asia advances an understanding of the flourishing museum landscape in the region by offering a variety of conceptual tools and frameworks through which museum development can be analysed and understood.
Informed by the key theoretical tenets of critical museology and heritage studies, this volume seeks to deconstruct the idea of museology and the museum phenomenon in East, South and Southeast Asia to identify common themes and trends unique to Asia. Drawing on case studies from ten different countries in Asia, including China and India, it proffers a set of analytical tools to think through how we can understand and conceptualise the study of museums and museology in Asia. Contributions to this edited volume are drawn from both Asian and Western academic contexts, thus offering both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ perspectives on the museum phenomenon in Asia.
The Museum in Asia is the first academic book to explore the museum phenomenon in Asia from theoretical perspectives informed by critical museology and heritage studies, making it an essential text for the teaching of courses relating to museum studies, cultural heritage studies or Asian studies. Academics, students and professionals who are interested in learning more about the theory behind the museum phenomenon in Asia will find this book to be a useful resource.
List of figures
Series Preface
Sandra H. Dudley
Preface
Yunci Cai
Acknowledgements
Yunci Cai
List of Contributors -
1 A Manifesto for Museums in Asia
Yunci Cai
Section A: Reconsidering Knowledge Structures
2 Numinous Objects and Their (Re)Contextualisation in Local Museologies
Christina F. Kreps
3 Religion on Display: A Comparative Study of the Museum of World Religions and Exhibition Spaces in Temples in Taiwan
Valentina Gamberi and Shu-Li Wang
4 Tracing the Lineage of Linear Exhibition Narratives in Chinese Museology
David Francis
Section B: Rethinking Colonialism
5 Defining, Designating and Ruling the Other in the Spaces of the Raffles Museum, Singapore, 1823 – 1960
Chin Siew Elselt/Ang
6 ‘Unity in Diversity’: Museums and Representation in Myanmar
Sandra H. Dudley
7 Swapping Time between Contemporary Ainu and Kaitaku Settler Colonial History
Roslynn Ang
Section C: Localising Museums
8 Transforming Chemde Museum: Monastic Curating and Co-Curating in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery in Ladakh
Louise Tythacott
9 Community-based Museums in Thailand and their Indigenous Curatorial Practices
Paritta Chalermpow Koanantakool
10 Curating the Dead: A Case Study of Localising Strategies in a Private Museum in Vietnam
Graeme Were
11 Vaacha: Preservation and Erasure in an Indigenous Museum
Alice Tilche
Section D: Negotiating Politics
12 The Impact of India’s Partition on Museums of the Punjab
Himanshu Prahba Ray
13 Exhibition Diplomacy: The Chinese Experience
Da Kong
14 Jianchuan Museum Complex: Ethics and Politics in China’s Private Museum Practice
Zhang Lisheng
15 Rethinking Heritage Diplomacy on the Maritime Silk Road
Yunci Cai
16 Museums as Sites of Indigenous Revitalisation: Dialogues between National Museums, Indigenous Artisans, and Indigenous Communities in Taiwan
Marzia Varutti and Geoffrey Gowlland
Section E: Embracing Contemporaneity
17 Intersections between Private Lives, Public Housing, and National Narratives: Community Museums in Hong Kong and Singapore
Ian Y.H. Tan
18 A Systematic View on Digital Practices in Museums: Exploring the Contradictions That Museum Practitioners Experience in the Republic of Korea
Juhee Park
19 From Digitisation to Digital Repatriation: A Case Study of International Dunhuang Project
Zheng Zhang
20 Post-disaster Practices in Japanese Museums after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami
Marina Masuda
Index
Biography
Yunci Cai is Associate Professor of Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of Leicester, United Kingdom. She has research interests in cultural politics and museologies in and out of Asia. Her monograph Staging Indigenous Heritage: Instrumentalisation, Brokerage and Representation in Malaysia (Routledge 2020) explores the cultural politics of four Indigenous cultural villages in Malaysia.
"At last, a comprehensive account of current museum developments in Asia, the new frontier of museology. Cai is an expert guide – inclusive, critical, balanced – while attending to politics, practice and, importantly, local perspectives."
Professor Conal McCarthy, Professor of Museum and Heritage Studies, Victoria University of Wellington"The Museum in Asia is an exciting collection of essays, providing an important corrective to museological debates that are all too often determined by European and North American contexts. As Yunci Cai argues in her introductory manifesto, Asian museums must be understood within their own socio-historical, cultural and political contexts and needs. This is precisely what the critical perspectives presented in this book offer."
Professor Paul Basu, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum and Professor of Anthropology in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford
