摘要：On the cover of Museum Frictions, we see a group of tourists looking at a monument in the NewMexico desert. This nondescript stone cairn marks the spot where the first atomic explosion tookplace at 5:29 am on July 16, 1945. It is being photographed by a group of people who lookJapanese, but might be Native American. They look at us looking at them, framing the sceneand drawing attention to its construction, the madeness that is characteristic of all museums andheritage sites. A father and his child pose in front of this testament to the dawn of the atomicage, the girl clutching a toy plane. The Enola Gay flies overhead, a grisly reminder of theculmination of this scientific experiment when America dropped the bomb on Nagasaki andHiroshima. Now the scene of official military commemoration, the Trinity site is the subject ofa powerful artwork called Nuclear Enchantment by artist Patrick Nagatani. They are woventogether in a thoughtful meditation by Joseph Masco in one of the documents which enlivensthe book. 'As comparative modes of display,' concludes Masco, 'the physical site of the firstatomic explosion pales in comparison to the photographic fantasy, as Nagatani's ambiguouschallenge to the present articulates the vital need for critical public engagement¡ªa sorting outof memory, history, and ideology¡ªin an increasingly nuclear age' (Masco in Karp and Kratz2006: 106).This book offers a critical engagement with public cultures and global transformationsas they are being played out in contemporary museums and heritage organizations in today'sworld. It is the third in a well known series, co-edited with various others, by distinguishedAmerican scholar Ivan Karp who runs the Centre for the Study of Public Scholarship at EmoryUniversity. This work began in 1991 with the groundbreaking Exhibiting Cultures, followed notlong after by the equally popular Museums and Communities (1992), both compiled from paperspresented at conferences at the Smithsonian and published by the Smithsonian InstitutionPress. The two edited collections were widely praised and became standard references in thegrowing field of museum studies, establishing the agenda for museum practice, research andscholarship in the 1990s. Now we have the last volume Museum Frictions (2006), published byDuke University Press, who have happily retained elements of the design and layout that markthe whole series as a unified project. This review assesses the third volume in its own terms,but refers back to the earlier two volumes in order to consider questions about the developmentof museum studies in the intervening 15 years. How does Museum Frictions stand up to itspredecessors and the clutch of new museum readers that have appeared in recent years.Perhaps more importantly, what does it say about the present state of museums, and ofmuseum studies
