Museums are prime locations for studying the identification Clark describes, and each nation's museum handles this rhetorical process differently. I extend Clark's insight by examining national museums, those collections of ' treasures ' that are ordered into a particular narrative of display. Greg Clark (2004) argues that the rhetorical materials of a national place can transform individual experiences into shared, communal truth. How, then, do we identify with these communities-becoming, for example, Americans rather than Turks or Britons? My current research examines the nationhood narrative as rhetorical identification, the symbolic means by which we persuade others that we share common substance. Gainsville: University Press of Florida.īenedict Anderson (1983) noted famously that all communities beyond the family are imagined.

Archaeological Site Museums in Latin America. Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly. Crossroads of Culture: Anthropology Collections at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Casino and Museum: Representing Mashantucket Pequot Identity. Discussion and Review of: Bodinger de Uriarte, John. Each work helps demonstrate why museums in their many guises remain critical terrains for the negotiation of identity, history, and culture in the push for more collaborative accounts of our world and the circulation and display of things. The books under consider- ation here all help demonstrate how museums as relational entities-containing dynamic relations between persons and things, as well as generating them-are emergent processes. Over the last 40 years museums have become important sites to understand the politics and poetics of heritage management, display, and knowledge production.

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