(19)--V1_09_Reflexive博物馆学概论.pdfVIP

9 Reflexive Museology lost and found Shelley Ruth Butler In theory Critical, reflexive museology appeared as a theoretical project in the late 1980s as scholars based in North America, Europe, and Australia published articles, books, and edited volumes critiquing Western museums and their role in civic society. Foundational volumes include Museums, the Public and Anthropology (Ames 1986), The New Museology (Vergo 1989), and Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Karp and Lavine 1991). Essays were the building blocks of critical museology, and contributors researched and taught in a variety of disciplines and departments, from anthropology, history, and cultural studies to literature, perfor- mance studies, and art history. The social sciences, the humanities, and fine arts were all implicated. Some scholars, such as Michael Ames, Ivan Karp, Anthony Shelton, and Susan Vogel, combined museum administration and curatorial expe- rience with critical scholarship. From the start, there was a productive tension between critical museum studies and the possibility of translating it into curatorial practice. This chapter explores the contemporary status of critical, reflexive museology in theory and practice. My starting point is to describe a landmark case of a flawed reflexive exhibition, Into the Heart of Africa, which showed at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, Canada, in 1989–1990. I describe the exhibit’s contro- versial use of irony and its canonization in the museum literature, and ask what has happened to reflexive museology over the last two decades. In my chapter title, I refer to reflexive museology as being lost and found. It is lost, I argue, in the sense that the specific notion of postmodern reflexive museology has receded from con- temporary museological debates. Yet, reflexivity is also found, implicit in exhibi- t