ABSTRACT
Museums have become an international phenomenon (Germany 1999; Kinzer 2003; McGuigan and Plagens 2001; Muschamp 1997, 1998; New York Times 2001, 2003; Skidmore College 2001; Szanto 2001), related closely to the global culture industry, itself potentially encompassing contingent issues of colonialism/imperialism (Hitchens 1997), community assertion (Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum 2001), memory (Klein 2001), heritage and tourism (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998), and economic development (Kifner 2000) – with each of these being frequently interconnected to one or more of the others, as in ‘heritage and tourism’. Yet Prosler (1998) has correctly observed that critical museum scholarship has largely ignored museums in developing or Third World countries.
