Tony Bennett is Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. His research spans across museum studies, cultural studies and sociology. His contributions to museum studies include The Birth of the Museum (1995), Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism and, as co-author, Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums and Liberal Government (2017).

Preface; Acknowledgements; List of Figures; Note on the text; Introduction: Museums, Power, Knowledge; PART 1. CIVIC ENGINES; Chapter1. The Exhibitionary Complex; Chapter 2. The Multiplication of Culture's Utility; Chapter 3. Museums, Nations, Empires, Religions; PART 2. MACHINERIES OF MODERNITY; Chapter 4. Museums and Progress: Narrative, Ideology, Performance; Chapter 5. Pasts Beyond Memories: The Evolutionary Museum, Liberal Government and the Politics of Prehistory; Chapter 6. Pedagogic Objects, Clean Eyes and Popular Instruction: On Sensory Regimes and Museum Didactics; Chapter 7. Exhibition, Difference and the Logic of Culture; PART 3. ASSEMBLING AND GOVERNING CULTURES; Chapter 8. The 'Shuffle of Things' and the Distribution of Agency; Chapter 9. Collecting, Instructing, Governing: Fields, Publics, Milieus; Chapter 10. Aesthetics, Culture and the Ordering of Race: Boas and the Boasians; Chapter 11. Re-collecting Ourselves: Indigenous Time, Culture, Community and the Museum; Notes; References; Index