This book attempts to provide an exploration of a time where different cultures where regarded with an almost morbid curiosity, and how the views of Europeans from the 19th century to today have changed. Dutch edition with English and French summary.

Color frontis. + 320 pp. with 194 illus. (many in color), 4to.

Essays by various theosophical contributors to commemorate the Centenary of the foundation of the Theosophical Society in 1875. Covers a wide range of topics on the Ancient Wisdom. dw, 1975

Lost Museums: A Symposium on the Ephemerality & Afterlives of Museums & Collections

MAY 6 – 8, 2015

BROWN UNIVERSITY & THE RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN

PROVIDENCE, RI

Held in conjunction with the year-long exhibition project on Brown’s lost Jenks Museum, the symposium addresses the history of museums from a new direction: not their founding, but their disappearance. We know a great deal about how museums are born and how new collections come into being, but not nearly enough about how these fragile institutions pass out of existence, how artifacts decay and disappear as times and interests change.

What happens to a collection when once-prized objects are no longer seem valuable? Or when ethical standards shift, as in the movement to repatriate cultural artifacts to the peoples or nations from which they were taken? How and why are specimens and artifacts deaccessioned or traded away? How do changing ideas about the evidentiary, educational, and research values of artifacts affect what seems worth saving? How do wars, natural disasters, and other cataclysmic events shape collections and impact institutions of heritage, preservation, memory, and knowledge production? What can we learn from museums that have been forgotten and then revived in a new cultural context? Is permanence a virtue, or might we embrace notions of ephemerality in museums?