"Memorylands offers a detailed mapping of the complex and varied ways in which memory, heritage and history interact to make the past present within Europe. Macdonald argues that this has profound implications for what she calls European cosmopolitan conviviality. Drawing on ethnographic research across a number of European countries, the book demonstrates why memory and heritage matter in terms of contemporary cultural policy, politics and cultural production. Macdonald draws on her own extensive research, supplemented by a wide-ranging synthesis of ethnographic writing, to make a decisive anthropological intervention into ongoing debates in memory and heritage studies." - Laurajane Smith, The Australian National University
"With an impressively light touch and a no less impressively wide-ranging grasp of complex arguments, Sharon Macdonald has given us a coherent, convincing, and historically deep account of what heritage has been and where it may be going. Through her concept of ‘past presencing’, she successfully traces and illustrates its socio-cultural trajectories through sometimes wildly differing terrains of memory, nostalgia, and conservation. Her examination of the European contexts in which so much of the interest in heritage has emerged, moreover, is uncompromisingly anthropological, allowing her to offer an enlightening reversal of the Eurocentrism with which the topic has hitherto so often been approached." - Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University.
Acknowledgments Prologue 1. The European Memory Complex: An Introduction 2. Making Histories: Europe, Tradition and Other Present Pasts 3. Telling the Past: The Multitemporal Challenge 4. Feeling the Past: Materiality, Embodiment and Place 5. Selling the Past: Commodification, Authenticity and Heritage 6. Musealization: Everyday Life, Temporality and Old Things 7. Transcultural Heritage: Reconfiguring Identities and the Public Sphere 8. Cosmopolitan Memory: Holocaust Commemoration and National Identity 9. The Future of Memory - and Forgetting References
Sharon Macdonald is Anniversary Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of York, UK and Visiting Professor in the Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt University, Berlin. Her authored books include Difficult Heritage (Routledge, 2008) and Reimagining Culture, and, as editor, The Politics of Display (Routledge, 1997) and The Companion to Museum Studies (Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2007).