South Pacific Museums: Experiments in Culture is a collection of outstanding analyses of museums in the South Pacific, written by cultural, museum and architectural critics, and historians. A series of snapshots introduce the reader to key museums in the region and longer essays explore these museums in broad terms.Over the last 50 years, museums have been regarded by many scholars and cultural critics as archaic institutions far from the cutting edge of cultural innovation. This judgement is being proved wrong across the globe, with innovative museums staking out new territory. Nowhere is this more striking than in the South Pacific where new and redeveloped institutions have included the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the National Museum of Australia, the Melbourne Museum, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the Museum of Sydney, the Gab Titui Cultural Centre in the Torres Strait, the Auckland Museum, the Centre Culturel Tjibaou and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre.South Pacific Museums make sense of these museums as part of the complex field of heritage, where national economies meet global tourism, cities brand themselves, and indigeneity articulates with colonialism. The effect is one of cultural experimentation. Part One, 'New Museums', introduces three different museums in distinctive national contexts - Te Papa, the Centre Culturel Tjibaou and the National Museum of Australia. Essays in this part grapple with the role of these museums in the nation at particular historical moments under specific political pressures. Part Two, 'New Knowledges', documents practices and exhibitions at the point of tension between indigenous and non-indigenous interests in the museum. Part three, 'New Experiences', explores the ways in which museums in the South Pacific are producing that ineffable cultural phenomenon - experience.

Indigenous museums and cultural centres have sprung up across the developing world, and particularly in the Southwest Pacific. This book looks to the future of museum practice through examining how these museums have evolved to incorporate the present and the future in the display of culture.

In this comparative, international study Marilena Alivizatou investigates the relationship between museums and the new concept of “intangible heritage.” She charts the rise of intangible heritage within the global sphere of UN cultural policy and explores its implications both in terms of international politics and with regard to museological practice and critical theory. Using a grounded ethnographic methodology, Alivizatou examines intangible heritage in the local complexities of museum and heritage work in Oceania, the Americas and Europe. This multi-sited, cross-cultural approach highlights key challenges currently faced by cultural institutions worldwide in understanding and presenting this form of heritage.

Aiming to explore theoretical advances in tourism studies, this book explores the relationship between tourism, sustainable development and empowerment. The theoretical framework is explored across three levels through five case studies drawn from the South Pacific.

Looking ahead to the 21st century, Sustainable Tourism explains the current thinking process that underlies the emerging international principles of more sustainable development in travel and tourism. Using international illustrations it draws on experience and good practice as they are being increasingly applied around the world in the late 1990s. In sharp contrast to the problem analysis approach adopted by so many authors to this subject, this book is focused on the pro-active role the private sector industry can play in partnership with the public sector to achieve solutions through its day-to-day operations and marketing, expecially in product enhancement and quality controls. Case material, contributed by senior professionals in the industry, include: *Kruger National Park, South Africa *Quicksilver Connections, Barrier Reef, Australia *Edinburgh's Old Town, UK *Ironbridge Gorge Museum, UK *Rutland Water, UK. Industry illustrations are drawn from British Airways, Grecotel, Inter-Continental Hotels and Resorts, the International Federation of Tour Operators, P&O and TUI. Professor Victor Middleton has had some thirty years' international experience of marketing practice covering most of the private and public sectors of travel and tourism. He holds appointments as Visiting Professor at Oxford Brookes University and University of Central Lancashire. Dr Rebecca Hawkins runs her own business specialising in environmental aspects of tourism projects and has undertaken a number of pioneering programmes in this role. She was Deputy Director of the World Travel and Tourism Environment Research Centre at Oxford Brookes University, where she worked with Victor Middleton.

The Contemporary Museum issues a challenge to those who view the museum as an artefact of history, constrained in its outlook as much by professional, institutional and disciplinary creed, as by the collections it accumulated in the distant past. Denying that the museum can locate its purpose in the pursuit of tradition or in idealistic speculation about the future, the book asserts that this can only be found through an ongoing and proactive negotiation with the present: the contemporary. This volume is not concerned with any present, but with the peculiar circumstances of what it refers to as the ‘global contemporary’ – the sense of living in a globally connected world that is preoccupied with the contemporary. To situate the museum in this world of real and immediate need and action, beyond the reach of history, the book argues, is to empower it to challenge existing dogmas and inequalities and sweep aside old hierarchies. As a result, fundamental questions need to be asked about such things as the museum’s relationship to global time and space, to systems and technologies of knowing, to ‘the life well lived’, to the movement and rights of people, and to the psychology, permanence and organisation of culture. Incorporating diverse viewpoints from around the world, The Contemporary Museum is a follow-up volume to Museum Revolutions and, as such, should be essential reading for students in the fields of museum and heritage studies, cultural studies, communication and media studies, art history and social policy. Academics and museum professionals will also find this book a source of inspiration.

Capturing the richness of the museum studies discipline, Museum Revolutions is the ideal text for museum studies courses, providing a wide range of interlinked themes and the latest thought and research from experts in the field.