Possessors and possessed : museums, archaeology, and the visualization of history in the late Ottoman Empire / Wendy M.K. Shaw.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shaw, Wendy M. K., 1970-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Museums--Turkey--History.

Museums.

Museums--Collection management--Turkey--History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 269 pages) : illustrations, maps

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, c2003.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Possessors and Possessed analyzes how and why museums-characteristically Western institutions-emerged in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Shaw argues that, rather than directly emulating post-Enlightenment museums of Western Europe, Ottoman elites produced categories of collection and modes of display appropriate to framing a new identity for the empire in the modern era. In contrast to late-nineteenth-century Euro-American museums, which utilized organizational schema based on positivist notions of progress to organize exhibits of fine arts, Ottoman museums featured military spoils and antiquities long before they turned to the "Islamic" collections with which they might have been more readily associated. The development of these various modes of collection reflected shifting moments in Ottoman identity production. Shaw shows how Ottoman museums were able to use collection and exhibition as devices with which to weave counter-colonial narratives of identity for the Ottoman Empire. Impressive for both the scope and the depth of its research, Possessors and Possessed lays the groundwork for future inquiries into the development of museums outside of the Euro-American milieu.

Contents:

Moving toward the museum : the collection of antique spolia

Parallel collections of weapons and antiquities

The rise of the imperial museum

The dialectic of law and infringement

Technologies of collection : railroads and cameras

Antiquities collections in the imperial museum

Islamic arts in imperial collections

Military collections in the late empire

Islamic and archaeological antiquities after the Young Turk Revolution.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-260) and index.

ISBN:

9786612356803

9780520928565

0520928563

9781282356801

1282356801

9781597348249

1597348244

OCLC:

475928328