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The business of museums is to explain the past by showing and explaining material culture (objects, things) to visitors. Much effort has been devoted to improving the presentation of the objects themselves, and even more to explaining their importance, their context and their relevance. This book is a critical examination of the techniques used today, their success or failure and the connections between recent work in museums and contemporary studies of text, meaning signs and symbols.
The early collections from Africa in Liverpool's World Museum reflect the city's longstanding shipping and commercial links with Africa's Atlantic coast. A principal component of these collections is an assemblage of several thousand artefacts from western Africa that were transported to institutions in northwest England between 1894 and 1916 by the Liverpool steam ship engineer Arnold Ridyard. While Ridyard's collecting efforts can be seen to have been shaped by the steamers' dynamic capacity to connect widely separated people and places, his Methodist credentials were fundamental in determining the profile of his African networks, because they meant that he was not part of official colonia...