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Memorylands investigates the nature of heritage, memory and understandings of the past in Europe today. It addresses the ongoing apparent memory obsession evident in a proliferation of museums, heritage sites and memorials, and arguments about the changing nature of identities - especially national, European and global. Its aim is to provide a new perspective on the place of the past, especially as manifest in museums, heritage and memorials, in different parts of Europe. This book will address the important questions of how the past is understood in Europe today, how this informs contemporary identities, and what roles public and material culture play in this. This is a topic of considerable academic and policy discussion, and it relates directly to expanding areas of interest in identities, memory, material culture, Europe, and tourism. Drawing especially, though not exclusively, on concepts and arguments in anthropology and historical consciousness, this volume argues for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the cultural assumptions involved in relating to the past. It seeks to theorise the different ways in which materialisations of identity in heritage organisations work; and to relate these to different forms of identification within Europe. It uses case-studies to bring together examples from the margins as well as the metropolitan centres of Europe, from relatively small-scale and local cases as well as the national and avant-garde, and from the potentially identity-disrupting (or difficult) as well as identity-affirming.

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Sharon Macdonald is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is author of Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum (2002), and editor of A Companion to Museum Studies (Blackwell 2006) and Theorizing Museums (with G. Fyfe, Blackwell 1996).

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