Translating Museums

Shaila Bhatti is currently an Honorary Research Associate at the Department of Anthropology, University College London, where she also gained her PhD and held an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship. Over the last decade, she has conducted ethnographic research on museums in India and Pakistan with doctoral research focusing on the Lahore Museum in Pakistan. Her research and publications explore the history of museums in South Asia as well as their contemporary significance as moments of cultural and visual encounters for society in terms of collections, curatorial activities, exhibitionary practices and visitor interpretation. Her interests extend beyond museum anthropology to include the material and visual cultures of South Asia and local notions of cultural heritage, history and identity.

"The author conducts an ethnographic study of a famous and one of the oldest museums in Lahore, Pakistan and presents a discourse on comparative museology beyond the institutional norms of dominant euro-centricism. This is an important undertaking, as research and theories associated with the museums in Southeast Asia have long suffered from rather unsubstantiated claims associated with pursuit of euro-centric ideologies... The author makes a sincere effort to unveil the complexities associated with postcolonial museologies and her well-researched initiative will provoke further deliberations in this field of inquiry."--Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change "Bhatti's study invites us to move away from old models of investigating colonial museums to view them instead as sites of contested discourse, where individual agency is very much at play all of the time. Moreover, the emphasis on reception, that is, on how the audience experiences the museum, is somewhat novel in the South Asian context. Lastly, Translating Museums reminds us that museums are not just visual, but they are visceral, demanding our participation in a multi-sensory capacity." -Frank J. Korom, Museum Anthropology "The most famous museum in South Asia is paradoxically one that relatively few South Asian specialists have visited: and not many of them visit because it is in Lahore, Pakistan, while the great majority of such academics work in India, Nepal, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka... The book will be of interest to all who work in museums. It presents the history of this particular museum, talks at some length about its valuable collections and its methods of administration, and also has a lot to say about the several publics it caters to nowadays."-Visual Anthropology

• Chapter 1: Museums in Translation; Chapter 2: Colonial Mementos to Postcolonial Imaginings; Chapter 3: Museum Archons 1; Chapter 4: Visiting the Museum; Chapter 5: Nokta Nazar 1 of the Lahore Museum's ‘Audience'