Review Essay: Museoloy as Cultural Studies   A Companion to
Museum Studies . Sharon Macdonald, ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing , 2006 . 592 pp.  I read this collection of 33 essays
on museum studies with one large question in mind: does
anthropology still have anything to contribute to this
burgeoning field? I hoped that this collection might supply an
answer, in part because several of the contributors are
anthropologists, but mainly because its editor, Sharon
Macdonald, is one of the best ethnographers of museums there is.
Her interest in museums began through studying cultural
heritage. In her case, it was fieldwork in the Scottish
Highlands—a place whose people are often in the business of
representing themselves to others and who are therefore
quintessentially reflective about the self-conscious nature of
cultural production in a museumified world. Macdonald went on to
do a wonderfully nuanced ethnography of a science museum—of how
the experts and professionals in the museum decide on what
stories t