Artifacts and Allegiances – How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display

"The world is constantly shaped by how it is seen and imagined. Museums are among the basic media for this phenomenon, presenting collections by empires or nations, distinguishing art from broader material culture, offering ideas of progression, or claiming novelty. Levitt's terrific new book shows how this process works with systematic comparisons and a thoughtful analysis. Vital for understanding cosmopolitan culture and more local contexts today."--Craig Calhoun, Director, London School of Economics and Political Science

"A book of travel stories, a snapshot of emergent cosmopolitan art worlds, and one of the best illustrations of how a theoretically rich, multi-sited global ethnography is possible--without a trace of the jargon and pontification found in so much global social theory."--Adrian Favell, Professor of Sociology, Sciences Po, Paris

"Unearths a story of quiet, nearly invisible, heroism as curators mount exhibitions to encourage us to appreciate cosmopolitan values and engage with cultural difference. This is a beautifully researched and crafted book written by one of the most imaginative sociologists I know."--Robin Cohen, Emeritus Professor and Former Director of the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford

"Exhibiting the same storytelling ease that new age museums do, Levitt shows how the turnstile of the self-perceived interior and exterior of the nation, or the cosmopolitan-nationalism continuum, is located at the very heart of museums."--Kwok Kian Chow, National Gallery Singapore

"Peggy Levitt has written a fascinating story about the various strategies and trajectories museums are taking locally in their struggle for cultural relevance in the twenty-first century. Readers are taken along on her journeys to institutions in three regions of the world and are immersed in reflections about diversity, migration, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism, about global gazes and situated ways of acting. This volume links museum studies and anthropological studies of global diversity, connecting the local to scalar connections with regional, national, and global processes."--Thomas Fillitz, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna