The Museum Methonymies2.doc

“The Metonymies of the Museum: The exegesis of visual culture between semiotic theory and anthropology” is a book of semiotic theory and cultural anthropology of the museum that develops and proposes concepts, categories, notions, terms, parameters and updating axiological clearances required for the development of the interpretative, hermeneutical work and textual and textualized reading of visual culture phenomena as these are expressed in the museum or in our understanding of culture according to the museum, that is, in different forms of the memory and heritage of culture considered in a visual sense, from collecting, restoration or conservation, through museography itself and the visual expressions of the museum in culture, to varied modalities of visual culture associated with memory, imagination and subjectivity of ancient cartographies, the visual as expressed in the immediacy of daily life or in empirical field work or in contemporary art.

Beyond internal considerations to the museological and museographic universe where the concepts are constrained to issues of exhibition design, although without excluding them since the book in fact also includes a chapter referring to a specific curatorial and museographic practice as well as a chapter on Postmodern Work, in its generality the book develops and proposes a broad and encompassing perspective for the theory and practice of interpretation, reading and textual elucidation of the visual, of methodological, theoretical and axiological scope for theory and empirical evidence around a wide variety of museum types from anthropology and archeology museums to contemporary art museums. More than a book about the museum, it is a book about how to read, interpret and elucidate, from the theory of the text, phenomena of visual culture according to the museum, both in experiences of exegesis of visual texts of culture, through research, and museology to field work. The book offers an updating and enriching perspective for the interdisciplinary understanding of visual culture related to memory, cultural heritage and heritage in a postmodernist sense. Semiotic theory and cultural anthropology thus come together in an innovative and enjoyable interdisciplinary development.