An intimate portrait of the man behind one of America’s fastest growing religions, Falling in Love with Joseph Smith offers a surprising and provocative window into the Mormon experience.When award-winning documentary film writer Jane Barnes was working on the PBS Frontline/American Experience special series The Mormons, she was surprised to find herself passionately drawn to Joseph Smith. The product of an Episcopalian, “WASPy” family, she couldn...

Heritage’s revival as a respected academic subject has, in part, resulted from an increased awareness and understanding of indigenous rights and non-Western philosophies and practices, and a growing respect for the intangible. Heritage has, thus far, focused on management, tourism and the traditionally ‘heritage-minded’ disciplines, such as archaeology, geography, and social and cultural theory. Widening the scope of international heritage studies, A Museum Studies Approach to Heritage...

The collection, interpretation and display of art from the People’s Republic of China, and particularly the art of the Cultural Revolution, have been problematic for museums. These objects challenge our perception of ’Chineseness’ and their style, content and the means of their production question accepted notions of how we perceive art. This book links art history, museology and visual culture studies to examine how museums have attempted to reveal, discuss and resolve some of these issue...

Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories is a wide-ranging collection of essays exploring the stories that can be told about objects and those who choose to collect them. Examining objects and collecting in different historical, social and institutional contexts, an international, interdisciplinary group of authors consider the meanings and values with which objects are imputed and the processes and implications of collecting. This includes considering the entanglement of objects and...

"The original Tourist Gaze was a classic, marking out a new land to study and appreciate. This new edition extends into fresh areas with the same passion and insight of the object. Even more essential reading!"- Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor, Warwick UniversityThis new edition of a seminal text restructures, reworks and remakes the groundbreaking previous versions making this book even more relevant for tourism students, researchers and designers. ′...

In a series of richly detailed case studies from Britian, Australia and North America, Tony Bennett investigates how nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums, fairs and exhibitions have organized their collections, and their visitors.Discussing the historical development of museums alongside that of the fair and the international exhibition, Bennett sheds new light upon the relationship between modern forms of official and popular culture.Using Foucaltian perspectives ...

Landscapes is a timely and well-written analysis of the meaning of cultural landscapes. The book delves into the layers of meaning that are invested in ordinary landscapes as well as landscapes of spectacle and power. Landscapes is a powerful and vivid application of the new cultural geography to case studies not previously visited within cultural geography texts.

Examining international case studies including USA, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Laurajane Smith identifies and explores the use of heritage throughout the world.Challenging the idea that heritage value is self-evident, and that things must be preserved because they have an inherent importance, Smith forcefully demonstrates that heritage value is not inherent in physical objects or places, but rather that these objects and places are used to give tangibility to the values that ...

One might believe that museum studies is a stable field of academic inquiry based on a set of familiar institutional forms and functions. But as institutions museums have never been stable or singular, and neither has the discipline of museum studies. Museum studies as a field of academic inquiry has received little critical attention. One result of this neglect has arguably been a lack of invention in museum studies; another is the distancing of academic museum studies from museum practic...

Tune in to HGTV, visit your local bookstore's magazine section, or flip to the 'Homes' section of your weekend newspaper, and it becomes clear: domestic spaces play an immense role in our cultural consciousness. The Domestic Space Reader addresses our collective fascination with houses and homes by providing the first comprehensive survey of the concept across time, cultures, and disciplines.This pioneering anthology, which is ideal for students and general readers, featur...

On Collecting examines the nature of collecting both in Europe and among people living within the European tradition elsewhere.Susan Pearce looks at the way we collect and what this tells us about ourselves and our society. She also explores the psychology of collecting: why do we bestow value on certain objects and how does this add meaning to our lives? Do men and women collect differently? How do we use objects to construct our identity?This book breaks new ground...

This book explores the links between tourism and festivals and the various ways in which each mobilises the other to make social realities meaningful. Drawing upon a series of international cases, festivals are examined as ways of responding to various forms of crisis - social, political, economic - and as a way of re-making and re-animating spaces and social life. Importantly, this book locates festivals in the constantly changing, socio-economic and political contexts that they always op...