Annual theme “Excess“
Interdisciplinary Lecture Series (WS 2019/20)

3 December 2019

Too much stuff?

Sharon Macdonald

Sharon Macdonald is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Social Anthropology in the Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she founded and directs CARMAH – the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage. A principal investigator on the Excellence cluster Matters of Activity, she also directs the project Making Differences – a multi-researcher ethnography of museum developments in Berlin. Her fascination with questions of excess can be seen in her book Memorylands (Routledge, 2014), which explores the implications of the turn to such extensive cultural remembering in Europe, as well as the simultaneous forgetting that this memory phenomenon may hide or even encourage. How both museums and people in their homes decide what to keep from the excessive number of things that might be retained for the future is the focus of the Profusion theme that Macdonald directed in the recently completed Heritage Futures project, from which a book is forthcoming.