Rhetorics of Value: Exhibition Design and Communication in Museums and Beyond

by Corinne A. Kratz

Overview

In Rhetorics of Value, Corinne A. Kratz explores how exhibition design creates and conveys values that have the potential to touch, educate, and engage visitors. Drawing on case studies from the Victoria and Albert Museum, museums in South Africa and Kenya, a Hawaiian resort hotel, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, among others, Kratz shows how exhibits help shape and narrate cultural categories, values, and histories while provoking questions and evoking memories and experiences. She crosses contexts to consider ethnographic, history, and art exhibits in national and community museums and other display settings. Through these examples, Kratz traces how exhibition designers combine objects, texts, images, lighting, audio, space, and narratives to craft a complex, multilayered communicative form that visitors experience as they move through museums. By investigating the relationship between audience reception and exhibition design strategies, Kratz contends that through design, exhibits can shape the ways we know, the stories we tell, and our contours of meaning and engagement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478028390
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	04/29/2025
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Corinne A. Kratz is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and African Studies Emerita at Emory Universityand Research Associate of the Museum of International Folk Art. She is coeditor of Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, also published by Duke UniversityPress, and author of The Ones That Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition and Affecting Performance: Meaning, Movement, and Experience in Okiek Women’s Initiation.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations  ix
Acknowledgments  xv
1. Looking into the Void: Exhibition Design and Communication  1
2. Rhetorics of Value: Fashioning Worth and Meaning through Cultural Display  23
3. From Tippoo’s Tiger to Kauai Lagoons: Constituting Authorities, Defining Diversities, and Poetics of Similarity and Difference (co-authored with Ivan Karp)  65
4. What Makes Exhibitions Ethnographic?  101
5. Portable Technologies: Adapting and Transforming Ethnographic Exhibits and African Museums  137
6. Redesigning Popular Histories and Facing Race Through Exhibition  171
7. Alchemies and Encounters in Exhibit Design and Communication  211
Appendix A. The Riddle of Exhibit Design: Essential but Overlooked  239
Appendix B. The Field of Visitor Studies and Exhibit Design  245
Notes  249
References  299
Index

Editorial Reviews

Rhetorics of Value makes a major contribution to the theory of museum exhibitions by focusing on the relationship between the design of exhibitions and the way they are open to interpretation and their impact. Covering a diverse set of exhibitions, this important book will engage with a wide audience and will influence discourse in museum studies, cultural studies, African studies, and anthropology more generally.

Museums, Infinity, and the Culture of Protocols: Ethnographic Collections and Source Communities - Howard Morphy

A lifetime of research and reflection comes together in this richly conceived book. This is a timely addition to critical museum studies, a field that has evolved with and thanks to Corinne A. Kratz. She brings her perspective as ethnographer, curator, and visitor to a stunning range of exhibitions with theoretical sophistication and a clear moral compass.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett