“Is it real?” asks a French journalist as reported by contributing author, Howard Morphy, in the third section of the Museum Frictions anthology. She is watching a ceremonial performance by Yolngu people at the opening of the new National Museum of Australia in 2001 (489). Such a question, or the more pointed variation “What is real in a museum?” underlies the whole of this extensive (almost daunting) volume. It is a question that has already been addressed in the two books that precede it in the same series, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991) and Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992). As the Duke promotional flyer claims, the volumes have “become defining books for those interested in the politics of museum display and heritage sites,” linking museological investigation to the fields of anthropology and ethnography, as well as to wider interests in the construction of heritage, and to more focused discussions of museum management, interpretation, and curatorship. However, the central issue concerning who has the authority to define either the “realness” or the meaning of an object remains persistent.

Claims to such authority were critical to the establishment and then the development of the museum—both in its emergent public form in the nineteenth century and for its renewal in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Recent challenges to the authority of the museum and its displays, and a greater degree of interactivity with its users, have altered some of the assumptions about whose story is told, to whom it is told, and for what purposes. All of which has become a more conscious part of management processes—a discourse including the growth of training; a greater focus on leadership and governance; and a recognition of the role of fund-raising, advocacy, and public relations within the museum world. Two other matters are critical. First, the relations with various communities (whether of place or interest group, and increasingly global and internet-linked) are vitally important, involving engagement and trust rather than the presumptions of multiple, replicable, and essentially passive audiences. Secondly, the relationship between a museum (and its collection) and its environment matters in several senses. What is its place in history, its place in the nation, and of course its place in a region or locality? These all deserve examination in order to understand better the formation of a collection and how the objects within it might best be understood.

These rather abstract issues have been changed by several globalizing factors, most notably the effects of new communication technologies. The internet’s use for community benefit and cooperation as well as the general search for information, together with museums’ collective presence on the web, is broadly positive. This has been a period both of political liberation and of violent international interference. The potential for a shift in world politics toward placing common resource and welfare issues ahead of political or narrowly sectarian divisions has yet to be seen, but cultural institutions are playing an increasing part in these debates. And amid the growth in global cultural tourism (counterintuitive to the growing awareness of global warming) are increasing links between the local and the international, along with an increased assertiveness for the rights of cultural and national groups as well as individuals.

Interspersed between the essays in the Museum Frictions anthology (itself the product of a sequence of Rockefeller Foundation seminars) are a number of “documents.” The most prominent (and rather absurdly in juxtaposition with the Museo Salinas in Mexico City, a collection of images of the corrupt political leader Carlos Salinas de Gortari, arranged in the micro-museum of a collector’s bathroom) is the “Declaration” made by eighteen museum and gallery directors in December 2002. It reasserts, defensively, the integrity of their collections, and the importance of retention of objects from other cultures, acquired in earlier periods, and now frequently requested for restitution. It ends, “Museums are agents in the development of culture, whose mission is to foster knowledge by a continuous process of reinterpretation. Each object contributes to that process. To narrow the focus of museums whose collections are diverse and multi-faceted would therefore be a disservice to all visitors” (247). The more exciting contrast is between arguments for retention by mainstream museums and the numerous examples cited—from Mexico, Australia, and most tellingly from post-Apartheid South Africa, where museum development is itself part of reconciliation and the promotion of understanding—in which conflict and oppression had previously designated the cultural objects of subservient peoples to be seen only in a debased role.

Museum Frictions is organized in three sections: “Exhibitionary Complex Update,” “Tactical Museologies,” and “Remapping the Museum,” although several essays could have appeared in any of the three. The first section reexamines Tony Bennett’s influential 1988 essay, “The Exhibitionary Complex” (New Formations 1 (1988): 73–102; much anthologised, including in Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, eds., Thinking about Exhibitions, London: Routledge, 1996), which itself underpins the whole book. This section also includes a delightful intervention by artist Andrea Fraser within the Bilbao Guggenheim. Bennett’s original essay looked beyond the museum to examine both its ability to make influential exhibitions and its links with nineteenth-century international expositions and zoological gardens; he did so utilizing a Foucaldian analysis that has influenced future debates. Bennett returns here (“Exhibition, Difference and the Logic of Culture” [46–69]) in order to address changes in an increasingly globalized world. His examples range from the difficulties of the reconstruction of “national” museums in post-Apartheid South Africa (when attracting tourist monies is an avowed policy of the new government) to the changing scene of the North East of England, with distinctions drawn between an early interactive industrial open-site museum such as Beamish and the millennium project of the Life Interactive World in Newcastle. In all cases the increasing overlap between Disney-type theme parks (or equivalently the Guggenheim branch in Los Vegas) and renewed public museums is considerable. Referring to changes in display methods, Babara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett summarizes the difficulties but also the importance of recognizing significant intangible heritage (music, ceremonies, performances, language) in addition to conventional heritage, and with it the shift of observation of a habitus, a way of life, to the conscious preservation of a habitat, with buildings or objects to be conserved for the future. In a world where “culture” is seen by some as divisive (not least in a terrorist context), the assumption of cultural rights becomes more strained: “This is why heritage is a mode of metacultural production that produces something new, which, although it has recourse to the past, is fundamentally different from it” (196).

In the second section, readers are led from the struggle to form a public art gallery in Peru (and the alternate strategies employed by artists to make sense of their position at the “periphery”), to Cambodia in the post-genocide period in which the rebuilding of Cambodian “heritage” is fraught with difficulty (tourists are advised to visit the Angkor Wat temple but little else), to transformative change in community museums in South Africa and Mexico. The District Six example (Ciraj Rassool’s “Community Museums, Memory, Politics and Social Transformations in South Africa: Histories, Possibilities and Limits” [286–321]) is brilliantly told by a participant-observer, a history professor who is a trustee of the museum. The changing role of the museum in the land-claim process—in a district that has been cleared and almost eradicated under White rule, and is then caught between being a museum with only a community purpose and one that is an exemplar of compelling interest to outside visitors, relying for its development (and survival) on foreign investment—is both illuminating and moving.

In the third section, readers are offered analyses of South Africa’s Kruger National Park (where the management of animals and people provides the sharpest example of former racist assumptions in the organization of the land), two complementary analyses of the formation of slavery displays in the United States and Ghana (and the complex questions that follow the partial lifting of the silence around the “Black Holocaust”), and a pair of essays relating to the engagement with curating and interpretation by Australian Aboriginal artists and producers. In Morphy’s detailed analysis (“Sites of Persuasion: Yingapungapu at the National Museum of Australia,” 469–499), a powerful case is made for interactivity: “Indigenous societies have to use the very institutions that created earlier interpretations to change the climate of opinion about their way of life. . . . The more successfully they achieve this, the more they will be involved in a process that influences the very way in which institutions themselves change” (495).

As well as the many exemplars better informing debate about what is changing within museums and heritage sites, Museum Frictions offers inspirational ideas to those who run them. Interactivity is here to stay, yet its significance is not a matter of particular technologies of display but of all the ways in which visitors are users (in some cases, owners)—close-up or distant—and take part through events and even governance. The museum is not an enclave. It cannot be separated from its surroundings and history, although these may need to be made more explicit. And the real—the search for the authentic—will remain enigmatic. Indeed the role of museums and galleries in helping to disentangle different layers of the authentic will continue as one of its most important functions.