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Museum Fatigue Reads, April 5, 2014

April 5, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Mustang Wanted Compilation Google Glass Diaries The Camera That Changed the World People’s Park Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life The Dawn of Modern Tourism [Infographic] Open Access Maps at The New York Public Library The Global Flow of People: Global Migration from 1990-2010 The Incredible GDP Map that Shows Half of U.S. Output is Generated by a Few Cities Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon and its Workers Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption Climate Change 2014: Impacts, […]

Categories: Museum Fatigue Reads • Tags: Amazon, Climate Change, games, Google Glass, maps, migration, New York Public Library, Taiwan, tourism, visual anthropology

“Moroccan” (Tourist) Things

January 8, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Categories: Collecting, Material Culture, Photo Essays, Representation, Souvenirs, Tourism • Tags: Morocco, Orientalism, souvenir, tourism, tourist experience, travel

The Mona Lisa: Art in the Age of Digital Consumption

August 3, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

The Mona Lisa is undoubtedly one of the most recognizable images in the world. Perhaps second only to the Eiffel Tower, it is an icon of the tourist experience of Paris. So, when we arrived at the Louvre with thousands of other tourists, of course, the first thing we did was go to see it. I have heard that often when tourists first see the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre, the portrait is much smaller than they expect. The idea, […]

Categories: Museums, Random Reflections, Tourism, Video clips, Visual Anthropology • Tags: art, Mona Lisa, Photography, Pierre Bourdieu, tourism, visual anthropology, Walter Benjamin

Reimagining Campus Space: Fantasy as Social Practice

May 2, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in—and this inverts the scheme of the Panopticon. — Michel de Certeau,The Practice of Everyday Life “…fantasy is now a social practice.” —Arjun Appadurai, “Global Ethnoscapes” In his book, The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau describes how the tactics of everyday life resist the strategic efforts of […]

Categories: Pilgrims, Travelers, Tourists, Teaching • Tags: Michel de Certeau, pedagogy, sociocultural anthropology, teaching, tourism

Remembering Culture at the Terracotta Warrior Museum

January 1, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

In my early twenties, when becoming an anthropology professor was still a far off aspiration, I spent a few years as a tour guide leading groups to China for Pacific Delight Tours. Experience as a guide on the front lines of the culture industry in the early years of China’s Post-Mao development provided me with a wealth of opportunities to see first-hand how tourist itineraries were drawn, sites were narrated and tourists experienced Chinese “Culture.” Here I have to make […]

Categories: Fieldwork, Museums • Tags: memory, museum, Terracotta Warriors, tourism