Macdonald
Biographic Data
| ID | 15885 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Macdonald |
| FAMILY NAME | Macdonald |
| SIGNATURE | MACDONALD |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sheffield |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5941-4388 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 323 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Helping people access benefits: Millions of unclaimed federal dollars are available
Accessing these benefits has brought and could bring additional millions of unclaimed federal dollars to eligible individuals across Canada. There is still much to be done
Populist truth-making: A conceptual approach to populism in the context of European museums
This article develops the concept of populist truth-making as a device to study the effects of populist politics on museums in Europe. Despite a growing interest in the (mis)uses of the past by populist politics in heritage and memory studies, our understanding of how populist politics affect museums and other heritage institutions is still limited. With reference to our cross-European ethnographic study of museums and populism, this conceptual a…
Changing Phenomenologies of Objects of National Socialism: Toward a Curatorial Phenomenology
This article explores “awkward objects,” specifically objects related to National Socialism. The author adopts a phenomenological approach, focusing on the meanings and uses of “awkward” and related terms, and examining how curators and others have described and treated objects of National Socialism in practice. Through an ethnographic examination of the challenges curators face in managing the collection and display of objects related to Nationa…
National Showing Off and Telling Off: Reflections from the Ethnological Museum in Germany's Humboldt Forum
This article considers the implications of using ethnological collections in the making of a national museum. It focuses on the case of the recently opened Ethnological Museum within the Humboldt Forum, Berlin, Germany, about which there has been much public debate and criticism, including about Germany's own colonialism. Through an analysis of the modes of display used by the Ethnological Museum, the article identifies how these variously engage…
Ethnographic Practice in the Present
In its assessment of the current "state of play" of ethnographic practice in social anthropology, this volume explores the challenges that changing social forms and changing understandings of "the field" pose to contemporary ethnographic methods. These challenges include the implications of the remarkable impact social anthropology is having on neighboring disciplines such as history, sociology, cultural studies, human geography and linguistics, …
Faire décroître les collections pour le patrimoine du futur
Cet article fait le point sur les frustrations des conservateurs dans (ce que nous appelons) « la lutte contre la profusion ». Les conservateurs expriment la difficulté d’acquérir la culture matérielle du quotidien face aux vastes collections déjà existantes. Ils expliquent que celles-ci ont été créées, en partie, par la crainte de voir disparaître ce qui devait être préservé. L’accumulation sans limite, et tout garder pour toujours, posent quest…
Transforming the Ethnographic: Anthropological Articulations in Museum and Heritage Research
De-growing museum collections for new heritage futures
This article focuses on curators’ frustrations with (what we call) ‘the profusion struggle’. Curators express the difficulty of collecting the material culture of everyday life when faced with vast existing collections. They explain that these were assembled, partly, from anxiety to gather up what was anticipated at risk of being lost. Unlimited accumulation, and keeping everything forever, are being called into question, especially through the d…
A Spindle, an Awl, and the Construction Tools of Tla'amin Histories in the Twentieth Century
This article was published as MacDonald, K. (2020). A Spindle, an Awl, and the Construction Tools of Tla'amin Histories in the Twentieth Century. Native American and Indigenous Studies, 7(1), 3-35. doi:10.5749/natiindistudj.7.1.0003. No part of this article may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or distributed, in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photographic, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the…
"Reframing Islam in the "Refugee Crisis
In September 2015, those of us who are part of this conversation met in Gothenburg, brought together by the Museological Framings of Islam project. Europe was in the midst of what was widely referr
Heritage
Heritage has emerged as a key area of contemporary anthropological concern, with debates previously framed in terms of culture and tradition now being discussed as heritage. The rise of anthropological interest in heritage is a response to the configuration of culture and cultural debate in terms of heritage and to an anthropological turn within heritage practice itself. While anthropological studies have shown heritage being used instrumentally …
No Museum is an Island: Ethnography beyond Methodological Containerism
This article addresses the question of how to go beyond the conceptualisation of museums as islands in museum ethnography without losing the ethnographic depth and insights that such research can provide. Discussing existing ethnographic research in museums, the ethnographic turn in organization studies, and methodological innovation that seeks to go beyond bounded locations in anthropology, we offer a new museum methodology that retains ethnogra…
Heritage Futures
Heritage Futures is a four-year collaborative international research programme (2015–2019) funded by a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) ‘Care for the Future’ Theme Large Grant, and supported additionally by its host universities and partner organisations. The research programme involves ambitious interdisciplinary research to explore the potential for innovation and creative exchange across a broad range of heritage and related fiel…
New Constellations of Difference in Europe's 21st‐Century Museumscape
This article addresses some of the recent, ongoing, and planned reconfigurations of museums in Europe in light of their implications for the making of cultural difference, diversity, and citizenship. It argues that these are configured not only through the internal content of particular museums but also through divisions of classificatory labor and hierarchies of value between kinds of museums and their locations within cities and within nations—…
Brexit Referendum: First reactions from anthropology
Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropologyMy immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006).In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it w…
Is ‘Difficult Heritage’ Still ‘Difficult’?: Why Public Acknowledgment of Past Perpetration May No Longer Be So Unsettling to Collective Identities
This article discusses ‘difficult heritage’ as the phenomenon of nations or other collectives publicly signaling and commemorating past atrocities that they committed and for which they are ashamed. Through a focus on public commemoration and heritage of World War II in Europe, it shows that there has long been reluctance to acknowledge such potentially identity-disrupting pasts. This, however, is changing, with Germany at the forefront of a turn…
Accessing audiences: Visiting Visitor Books
Museum visitor books, although held by almost all museums, are rarely used as a research source. This article explores their potential to provide insights and information about audience views, experiences and understandings. To do so, it focuses primarily on visitor books at the Documentation Centre of the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, Germany. The article highlights questions about using such books as a research source and to thi…
Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities
Many social theorists have suggested that we are currently living in a period in which the identities of the past are becoming increasingly irrelevant and in which new identities, and new identity formations, are being created. The major identity colossus forged in the nineteenth century, and subsequently spread over much of the globe - nation-state identity - has been the subject of particular debate; and theorists have attempted to identify alt…
Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today
Memorylands is an original and fascinating investigation of the nature of heritage, memory and understandings of the past in Europe today. It looks at how Europe has become a ’memoryland’ – littered with material reminders of the past, such as museums, heritage sites and memorials; and at how this ‘memory phenomenon’ is related to the changing nature of identities – especially European, national and cosmopolitan. In doing so, it provides new insi…
The Museum as mirror: Ethnographic reflections
Heritage Complex
Hemme, D., M. Tauschek and R. Bendix (2007) (eds), Prädikat ‘Heritage’. Wertschöpfung aus kulturellen Ressourcen (Berlin: LIT), 368 pp., Pb: €29.90, ISBN-13: 978-8258-9892-2. Kockel, U. and M. Nic Craith (2007) (eds), Cultural Heritages as Reflexive Traditions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 240pp., Hb: £52.00, ISBN- 13: 978-1-4039-9748-7
Reassembling Nuremberg, Reassembling Heritage
This article explores the reassembly of the city of Nuremberg, Germany, through its heritage post- World War II. It does so primarily through consideration of two aspects of post-War heritage assembly and reassembly. First, it looks at the reconstruction of the city in the aftermath of bombing, with particular attention to the reassembling of historically significant architecture, though also in light of debates about reconstruction (of former bu…
Museum Europe
This article is concerned with some of the implications of the fact that Europe is so widely seen as a place replete with heritage, museums and memory, and also with the continuing expansion in numbers and types of heritage, museums and memory. It seeks to explore some of the ways in which heritage, in particular, is understood (including what it calls 'sticky heritage'), and especially the cultural and social work that it is often seen as able t…
Asbos and Control Orders: Two Recurring Themes, Two Apparent Contradictions
When the Government first proposed the creation of the Control Order, many commented on its apparent similarity with the Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Looking beyond the obvious similarities, the aim of this paper is to draw out two deeper themes which marked the development of both remedies. For each theme an apparent contradiction will also be identified. The paper concludes by arguing that these two recurring themes and two apparent contradicti…
L'anthropologie de la Grande-Bretagne: Une Discipline en Plein Essor
International audience
Misunderstanding Science: The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology
Misunderstanding Science? offers a challenging new perspective on the public understanding of science. In so doing, it also challenges existing ideas of the nature of science and its relationships with society. Its analysis and case presentation are highly relevant to current concerns over the uptake, authority, and effectiveness of science as expressed, for example, in areas such as education, medical/health practice, risk and the environment, t…
Undesirable Heritage: Fascist Material Culture and Historical Consciousness in Nuremberg
This article seeks to explore the relationships between heritage and identity by drawing on analytical discussions of material culture and historical consciousness and focusing on an empirical case of ‘undesirable heritage’, that is, a heritage that the majority of the population would prefer not to have. The case is that of the Nazi or fascist past in Germany, with specific reference to the former Nazi Party rally grounds in Nuremberg. By lookin…
Brexit Referendum: First reactions from anthropology
Brexit Referendum: first reactions from anthropologyMy immediate reaction to the results of the British Referendum on leaving or remaining in the EU was to remember Alexei Yurchak's book, Everything was forever, until it was no more (Yurchak 2006).In the book, Yurchak describes the feeling of many people in Russia when the Soviet Union broke up: it came as a complete shock because they thought it would never happen; but once it had happened, it w…
Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities
Many social theorists have suggested that we are currently living in a period in which the identities of the past are becoming increasingly irrelevant and in which new identities, and new identity formations, are being created. The major identity colossus forged in the nineteenth century, and subsequently spread over much of the globe - nation-state identity - has been the subject of particular debate; and theorists have attempted to identify alt…
Reassembling Nuremberg, Reassembling Heritage
This article explores the reassembly of the city of Nuremberg, Germany, through its heritage post- World War II. It does so primarily through consideration of two aspects of post-War heritage assembly and reassembly. First, it looks at the reconstruction of the city in the aftermath of bombing, with particular attention to the reassembling of historically significant architecture, though also in light of debates about reconstruction (of former bu…
Theorizing Museums - Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World
Mediating heritage: Tour guides at the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds, Nuremberg
This article draws on media theory in order to theorize the role of tour guides as a form of cultural mediation. It does so by analysing the work of tour guides at a site of ‘difficult heritage’, the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, Germany. The work of tour guides is here conceptualized primarily as a process in which guides, and the organization for which they work, are engaged in trying to encode preferred readings. The empirical …
Accessing audiences: Visiting Visitor Books
Museum visitor books, although held by almost all museums, are rarely used as a research source. This article explores their potential to provide insights and information about audience views, experiences and understandings. To do so, it focuses primarily on visitor books at the Documentation Centre of the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, Germany. The article highlights questions about using such books as a research source and to thi…
Words in Stone: Agency and Identity in a Nazi Landscape
This article considers questions of agency, materiality and identity through a focus on a landscape largely shaped by the German National Socialists in the 1930s: the former Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg. It looks at Nazi ideas about architecture and the agency of buildings as 'words in stone' and the Nazi intention that the built heritage would endure and continue to 'speak' over time. It then goes on to discuss some of the post-war stru…
Cultural imagining among museum visitors: A case study
(1992). Cultural imagining among museum visitors: A case study. Museum Management and Curatorship: Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 401-409
Consuming science: Public knowledge and the dispersed politics of reception among museum visitors
Dans le cadre general des etudes de la reception de l'audience, cette etude concerne, a travers l'exemple de visiteurs de musees et de leur conceptualisation de leur premiere visite, les consequences de la consommation de produit culturel sur les politiques meme de la reception. Le vocabulaire metaphorique attribue aux musees (temples) et a la science (religion profane) est ici remplace par des termes economiques et touristiques tels que consomma…
Rites of Marrying: The Wedding Industry in Scotland
Part 1 Contexts of Scottish marrying: the legal framework the churches in Scotland christian marriage and Scottish liturgy. Part 2 Engagement: getting married the engagement - rings, announcements and parties and presents being engaged. Part 3 Learning the lore - planning and the wedding industry: the reception the ceremony and all the rest. Part 4 Casting, dressing and participation: the bride and her dress the bridal party the bridegroom and th…
De-growing museum collections for new heritage futures
This article focuses on curators’ frustrations with (what we call) ‘the profusion struggle’. Curators express the difficulty of collecting the material culture of everyday life when faced with vast existing collections. They explain that these were assembled, partly, from anxiety to gather up what was anticipated at risk of being lost. Unlimited accumulation, and keeping everything forever, are being called into question, especially through the d…
The Gaelic Renaissance and Scotland's Identities
As the Scottish parliament is negotiated into existence, one of the issues for debate concerns the languages that will 'officially* be spoken there (McLeod 1998). In particular, as Margaret Ewing (SNP MP for Moray) put it in a debate in early 1998: 'De* ma tha daoine ag iarraidh bruidhinn ann dGhaidhlig?' 'What if people want to speak in Gaelic?'. Will Gaelic be one of the official languages of the parliament? And will it be given recognition as …
New Constellations of Difference in Europe's 21st‐Century Museumscape
This article addresses some of the recent, ongoing, and planned reconfigurations of museums in Europe in light of their implications for the making of cultural difference, diversity, and citizenship. It argues that these are configured not only through the internal content of particular museums but also through divisions of classificatory labor and hierarchies of value between kinds of museums and their locations within cities and within nations—…
Museum Europe
This article is concerned with some of the implications of the fact that Europe is so widely seen as a place replete with heritage, museums and memory, and also with the continuing expansion in numbers and types of heritage, museums and memory. It seeks to explore some of the ways in which heritage, in particular, is understood (including what it calls 'sticky heritage'), and especially the cultural and social work that it is often seen as able t…
Reimagining Culture: Histories, Identities and the Gaelic Renaissance
Since the 1960s, policies to 'revive' minority cultures and languages have flourished. But what does it mean to have a 'cultural identity'? And are minorities as deeply attached to their languages and traditions as revival policies suppose? This book is a sophisticated analysis of responses to the 'Gaelic renaissance' in a Scottish Hebridean community. Its description of everyday conceptions of belonging and interpretations of cultural policy tak…
Ethnographic Practice in the Present
In its assessment of the current "state of play" of ethnographic practice in social anthropology, this volume explores the challenges that changing social forms and changing understandings of "the field" pose to contemporary ethnographic methods. These challenges include the implications of the remarkable impact social anthropology is having on neighboring disciplines such as history, sociology, cultural studies, human geography and linguistics, …
No Museum is an Island: Ethnography beyond Methodological Containerism
This article addresses the question of how to go beyond the conceptualisation of museums as islands in museum ethnography without losing the ethnographic depth and insights that such research can provide. Discussing existing ethnographic research in museums, the ethnographic turn in organization studies, and methodological innovation that seeks to go beyond bounded locations in anthropology, we offer a new museum methodology that retains ethnogra…
The Presented Past: Heritage, Museums and Education
Faire décroître les collections pour le patrimoine du futur
Cet article fait le point sur les frustrations des conservateurs dans (ce que nous appelons) « la lutte contre la profusion ». Les conservateurs expriment la difficulté d’acquérir la culture matérielle du quotidien face aux vastes collections déjà existantes. Ils expliquent que celles-ci ont été créées, en partie, par la crainte de voir disparaître ce qui devait être préservé. L’accumulation sans limite, et tout garder pour toujours, posent quest…
Asbos and Control Orders: Two Recurring Themes, Two Apparent Contradictions
When the Government first proposed the creation of the Control Order, many commented on its apparent similarity with the Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Looking beyond the obvious similarities, the aim of this paper is to draw out two deeper themes which marked the development of both remedies. For each theme an apparent contradiction will also be identified. The paper concludes by arguing that these two recurring themes and two apparent contradicti…
L'anthropologie de la Grande-Bretagne: Une Discipline en Plein Essor
International audience
Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History
Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World
Introduction: Sharon Macdonald (Sheffield University). Part I: Contexts: Spaces and Times:. 1. Museums and Globalization: Martin Prosler (Tubingen, Germany). 2. How Societies Remember the Past: John Urry (Lancaster University). Part II: Contests: Differences and Identities:. 3. Museums as Contested Sites of Remembrance: The Enola Gay Affair: Vera Zolberg (New School of Social Research, New York). 4. Into the Heart of Irony: Ethnographic Exhibitio…
Boadicea: Warrior, mother and myth
Boadicea, as national legend has it, was a great British queen who led her people to battle against the Roman invaders. Her scythed chariots and rearing stallions, together with a sense of victory and patriotism, are embedded in our national memory. In fact, however, she was not queen of Britain, and our vision of her is greatly distorted. Indeed, the more closely we look at what is actually known about Boadicea, the more puzzling appears the fac…
Images of Women in Peace and War
Rewriting the museums' fictions: Taxonomies, stories and readers
The set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe.... Should the fiction disappear, there is nothing left of the Museum but (‘bric-a-brac’), a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects which are incapable of substituting themselves either metonymically for the original objects or metaphorically for their representations. (Donato 1979: 223)
Posing Questions about the Purposes of MuseumsThe New Museology.Peter Vergo
Science on display: The representation of scientific controversy in museum exhibitions
This article raises issues concerning popular representations of science, and in particular of scientific controversy, through a case-study of the treatment of food poisoning controversy in a museum exhibition. It is argued that the science that is created for the public is shaped not only by the overt intentions of the exhibition makers but also by constraints inherent in structural aspects of the exhibition-making process and exhibition philoso…
Cultural imagining among museum visitors: A case study
(1992). Cultural imagining among museum visitors: A case study. Museum Management and Curatorship: Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 401-409
Rites of Marrying: The Wedding Industry in Scotland
Part 1 Contexts of Scottish marrying: the legal framework the churches in Scotland christian marriage and Scottish liturgy. Part 2 Engagement: getting married the engagement - rings, announcements and parties and presents being engaged. Part 3 Learning the lore - planning and the wedding industry: the reception the ceremony and all the rest. Part 4 Casting, dressing and participation: the bride and her dress the bridal party the bridegroom and th…
Persons and Powers of Women in Diverse Cultures: Essays in Commemoration of Audrey I. Richards, Phyllis Kaberry and Barbara E. Ward
Contents: S. Ardener, Persons and Powers of Women: An Introduction - J. Gladstone, Audrey I. Richards (1899-1984): Africanist, Humanist - C. Berndt and E.M.Chilver, Phyllis Kaberry (1910-1977): Fieldworker among Friends - E. Croll, Barbara E. Ward (1919-1983): Sex Roles and Conscious Models - P. Caplan, Engendering Knowledge: The Politics of Ethnography - J. La Fontaine, The Persons of Women - E.M. Chilver, Women Cultivators, Cows and Cash Crops …
Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception
Supermarket science
Consuming science: Public knowledge and the dispersed politics of reception among museum visitors
Dans le cadre general des etudes de la reception de l'audience, cette etude concerne, a travers l'exemple de visiteurs de musees et de leur conceptualisation de leur premiere visite, les consequences de la consommation de produit culturel sur les politiques meme de la reception. Le vocabulaire metaphorique attribue aux musees (temples) et a la science (religion profane) est ici remplace par des termes economiques et touristiques tels que consomma…
Misunderstanding Science: The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology
Misunderstanding Science? offers a challenging new perspective on the public understanding of science. In so doing, it also challenges existing ideas of the nature of science and its relationships with society. Its analysis and case presentation are highly relevant to current concerns over the uptake, authority, and effectiveness of science as expressed, for example, in areas such as education, medical/health practice, risk and the environment, t…
Inside European Identities: Ethnography in Western Europe
The Presented Past: Heritage, Museums and Education
Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World
Introduction: Sharon Macdonald (Sheffield University). Part I: Contexts: Spaces and Times:. 1. Museums and Globalization: Martin Prosler (Tubingen, Germany). 2. How Societies Remember the Past: John Urry (Lancaster University). Part II: Contests: Differences and Identities:. 3. Museums as Contested Sites of Remembrance: The Enola Gay Affair: Vera Zolberg (New School of Social Research, New York). 4. Into the Heart of Irony: Ethnographic Exhibitio…
Theorizing Museums - Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World
Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology, the Nation State and the Universal Exhibition
Visions of Anthropology: What's the Goddamn Point of It All
It was this student outburst that inspired Jerry D. Moore to write his introduction to anthropology, Visions of Culture . Lawrence A. Kuznar's Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology and Jeremy MacClancy and Chris McDonaugh 's Popularizing Anthropology also grapple with that question that seems to beset not only students but also many professional anthropologists today: what's the goddamn point of it all? As all three of these books describe, anthro…
The Gaelic Renaissance and Scotland's Identities
As the Scottish parliament is negotiated into existence, one of the issues for debate concerns the languages that will 'officially* be spoken there (McLeod 1998). In particular, as Margaret Ewing (SNP MP for Moray) put it in a debate in early 1998: 'De* ma tha daoine ag iarraidh bruidhinn ann dGhaidhlig?' 'What if people want to speak in Gaelic?'. Will Gaelic be one of the official languages of the parliament? And will it be given recognition as …
Reimagining Culture: Histories, Identities and the Gaelic Renaissance
Reimagining Culture: Histories, Identities and the Gaelic Renaissance. SHARON MACDONALD. Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997; 258 pp. Sharon Macdonald has written timely and important book that deserves serious attention from anyone interested in the anthropology of Europe. The Gaelic Renaissance - the teaching, promoting, and studying of Scottish Gaelic - is part of an attempt to put Scotland's heritage to the fore in the public mind. Her work thus …
Reimagining Culture: Histories, Identities and the Gaelic Renaissance
Since the 1960s, policies to 'revive' minority cultures and languages have flourished. But what does it mean to have a 'cultural identity'? And are minorities as deeply attached to their languages and traditions as revival policies suppose? This book is a sophisticated analysis of responses to the 'Gaelic renaissance' in a Scottish Hebridean community. Its description of everyday conceptions of belonging and interpretations of cultural policy tak…
Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 . Steven Conn
British Social Anthropology
Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History
Mediating heritage: Tour guides at the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds, Nuremberg
This article draws on media theory in order to theorize the role of tour guides as a form of cultural mediation. It does so by analysing the work of tour guides at a site of ‘difficult heritage’, the former Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, Germany. The work of tour guides is here conceptualized primarily as a process in which guides, and the organization for which they work, are engaged in trying to encode preferred readings. The empirical …
Sociology (38 works) · History (30 works) · Political science (28 works) · Art (22 works) · Museums and Cultural Heritage (22 works) · Anthropology (21 works) · Law (19 works) · History (17 works) · Politics (15 works) · Archaeology (14 works)