Museums, Truth, Governance: The Civic Agency of the Country/culture Couplet

There will be three aspects to this presentation. First, I will briefly review the concerns that have informed my contributions to museum studies since the publication of The Birth of the Museum in 1995. These have been informed chiefly by two aspects of Michel Foucault’s work: his conception of “the politics of the truth” and his perspective of “governmentality.” In bringing these into conversation with one another, I have explored various ways in which, through their exhibition practices, museums have imbued different regimes of truth with specific forms of civic agency meant to act on and shape the attributes of their publics in specific ways. I will then bring these perspectives to bear on the ways in which the public career of the Country/culture couplet has been fashioned by a complex set of exchanges between Indigenous and Western knowledges, most notably anthropology and archaeology. These have shaped the couplet as an intercultural civic agent that is active across a range of decolonising and reconciliatory agendas. This will, finally, set the scene for a consideration of some of the distinctive forms that the Country/culture couplet has been given, and of the civic tasks that it has been assigned, in recent curatorial projects across different sections of Australia’s museum and gallery sector.

Tony Bennett is an Emeritus Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and an Honorary Professor in the Humanities Research Centre and Department of Sociology at the Australian National University. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the UK Academy of the Social Sciences. His most recent books include Making Culture, Changing Society (2013), Museums, Power, Knowledge (2018), and Habit’s Pathways: Repetition, Power, Conduct (2023). He is also the convening author/editor of Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums and Liberal Government (2017), Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Social Divisions and Inequalities (2021), The Australian Art Field: Practices, Policies, Institutions (2020), and Assembling and Governing Habits (2021).

ZOOM details:
https://anu.zoom.us/j/89904694774?pwd=90gBbHXQh2diwsgVLusL4lFW1zAH7D.1&jst=1 

Meeting ID: 899 0469 4774 - Password: 483641