CHARTING THE BOUNDARIES: Indigenous models and parallel practices in the development of the post-museum

The globalisation of the museum concept has seen the idea of a public institution for collecting and displaying culture spread throughout the world as part of local strategies for nation-building, reinforcing or asserting cultural identity, preserving material culture and cultural expressions, and communicating knowledge, ideas and histories. Although often considered to be conservative and immutable, the museum actually possesses a changing and contested history of development and purpose, evolving in response to the cultural, political and epistemological frameworks in which it operates both within the EuroAmerican or Western context (Bazin 1967; Bennett 1995; Hooper-Greenhill 1992, 2000) and, increasingly, in numerous other global cultural arenas (Ardouin and Arinze 1995, 2000; Bedekar 1995; Bolton 1994; Eoe and Swadling 1991; Geismar and Tilley 2003; Healy and Witcomb 2006; Kreps 2003; Simpson 1996, 2006 a and b).