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Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley CA: University of California Press,1998), xvii + 326 pp. $24.95 (paper).
This collection of essays, written for various publications and purposes between 1988 and 1995, lays out a fairly vast terrain for the study of ethnographic representation. The disparate topics and wide-ranging material make for a sometimes jagged cover-to-cover read, though in some ways that has more to do with the subject at hand than to the author's style or knowledge of her material. The book is well worth digesting in toto, though individual chapters are sufficiently stand-aloneish for the cultural studies reader-on-the-go. Chapters one ("Objects of Ethnography") and six ("Destination Museum") accomplish the bulk of Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's heavy-duty theory, while other chapters, such as "Ellis Island" and "Plimouth Plantation," among others, provide nicely packaged case studies.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's core mission is in fact straightforward: identifying and problematizing the "agency of display" inherent in all representation, and the ultimate impossibility for ethnographic practitioners-whether they be museum curators, festival organizers, or armchair scholars-to achieve an "unmediated" environment. As she writes in her introduction, Destination Culture is "an attempt to theorize the artifact and logic of exhibition in the context of lively debates about the death of museums, ascendancy...