Southeast Asian Museums : On a Slow Path to Maturity
The museum in the Western sense was formulated in this region during the 18 th century, but because of social, political, and economic situations has not developed consistently. In the West, the definition of museums has gradually changed, moving from the post-museum (Hooper-Greenhill), to contact zone (James Clifford), and civic laboratories (Tony Bennett), each signaling a particular shift in how museums are imagined (Barrett 2011). These define the museum variously as a gathering place, a venue for collaborative action and interaction, and as a part of the community. Recently, there has been more focus and debate on the relationship between museums and the communities they serve. This kind of definition has not been coherently applied to museums in the Southeast Asian context. It is impossible to address the Southeast Asian museum as a whole, because each country in the region has a specific context and these are quasi-incomparable. In the prenation state, museums in this region were introduced and constructed according to the Western concept, whether by the colonial powers or through auto-colonization. From the colonial period to the present, museums in Southeast Asian have only slightly changed in each country according to their economic and socio-political contexts. This means that Southeast Asian Museums: On a Slow Path to Maturity
Performance and problems of the housing sphere in Russia
Systematization of risks in the field of housing-and-communal services and recommendations on the neutralization of problem zones were offered. The objective is the diagnostics of the situation in the sphere of housing-and-communal services and the identification of risk zones. The author concludes that the information on risk factors is necessary for the creation of the system of risk prevention, and assumes further development of the measures for the effective management in this sector.
Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris
During the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris emerged as the entertainment capital of the world. The sparkling redesigned city fostered a culture of energetic crowd-pleasing and multi-sensory amusements that would apprehend and represent real life as spectacle. Vanessa R. Schwartz examines the explosive popularity of such phenomena as the boulevards, the mass press, public displays of corpses at the morgue, wax museums, panoramas, and early film. Drawing on a wide range of written and visual materials, including private and business archives, and working at the intersections of art history, literature, and cinema studies, Schwartz argues that "spectacular realities" are part of the foundation of modern mass society. She refutes the notion that modern life produced an unending parade of distractions leading to alienation, and instead suggests that crowds gathered not as dislocated spectators but as members of a new kind of crowd, one united in pleasure rather than protest.