Museums and their Communities

Sheila Watson, Sheila Watson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134142972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Museum Administration
• Index: Business

Using case studies drawn from all areas of museum studies, Museums and their Communities explores the museums as a site of representation, identity and memory, and considers how it can influence its community.

Focusing on the museum as an institution, and its social and cultural setting, Sheila Watson examines how museums use their roles as informers and educators to empower, or to ignore, communities.

Looking at the current debates about the role of the museum, she considers contested values in museum functions and examines provision, power, ownership, responsibility, and institutional issues.

This book is of great relevance for all disciplines as it explores and questions the role of the museum in modern society.

Part One

Changing Roles of Museums Over Time and Current Challenges

Introduction to Part One

MUSEUMS ARE EVER CHANGING, adapting to the pressures of the society in which they exist and which they seek to serve. Museums are increasingly expected to be responsive to their audiences and to justify and actively develop the roles they play within society. There are visitors and museum workers who find these changes exhilarating, while, for others, they are threatening. Some museum professionals are anxious lest what is perceived to be the functional work of the museum, the collecting, researching and documenting of material culture, is swamped by pressures that range from financial to political and social. At the same time there is in some quarters a feeling that challenges to old certainties about knowledge and the ordering of things has gone too far, in others that it has not gone far enough.

The first four authors explore the changing meaning of museums in the last century and a half and serve as a general introduction to the whole reader. Weil, Halpin, Davis and Hooper-Greenhill provide different perspectives on museum development and the challenges facing an institution in society attempting to become more responsive towards individuals and community groups. All four authors present different but complementary ideas of what museums might become. All foreground the responsibility of the museum towards its communities.

Weil’s concept of museum development is optimistic and visionary. For Weil museums have infinite possibilities. Placing the development of the museum within a historical framework he traces how museums developed in the nineteenth century to express a particular view of the world. They were didactic, espousing an understanding of the way nature was organised and how people evolved (or not in the case of some so-called primitive societies). They also promulgated the idea that history and success were synonymous and therefore celebratory. Museums were morally uplifting. They were controlled by those who saw themselves as superior to many of their visitors who, in turn, were expected to consider themselves fortunate to be allowed to visit such treasure houses of educational opportunities. At the same time, as Weil points out, these museums were perceived by themselves and their audiences to be ‘disinterested, neutral and objective’ (Weil 2002: 202, this volume p. 37).

It is now recognised that museums are not necessarily inherently and unquestionably benevolent nor are they neutral. Weil considers why this change in attitude has come about and considers how museums might develop as a result of the financial and ideological pressures they are currently facing. He adopts a positive view of the museum of the future, arguing that it will be ‘ideologically neutral … available to the supporting community to be used in pursuit of its communal goals’ (Weil 2002: 200, this volume p. 35).

Weil recognises that for individuals, museums and their objects have particular meanings that are unique and allow them to experience something about themselves and their own individual identities. He notes that in a postmodern world the visitors’ experiences and their expectations can be seen as being as important as those of the curators. At the same time, museums, he believes, are places that can ‘contribute importantly to the health of human communities’ (2002: 208, this volume p. 42), where people can not only be safe but where they can also engage with ‘interchange’ (ibid.) and debate. Weil challenges all those who study, write about and work in museums to think in a creative and forwardthinking way about the potential of museums for individuals and communities. His writing sets the scene for all the chapters that follow.

Halpin’s survey of developments in museological thinking complements Weil’s, and both consider different ways in which museums can conceptualise their futures as being in service to their communities.

Davis’s analysis of what a community is illuminates the difficulties museums face when they try to define the meaning of the communities they serve. Starting with a consideration of cultural identity and the importance of iconic objects to a community’s sense of itself, he discusses both the limitations and possibilities of objects as agents of identity formation within communities. Davis uses the term ecomuseum, an idea originating in France in the 1960s and one that has spread across the globe. In a survey carried out in 1998 he identified some 166 ecomuseums in twenty-five countries (Davis 1999). While this does not constitute a large number compared with the total number of museums worldwide, nevertheless, ecomuseums represent an interesting and dynamic development in museum thinking. The idea of the ecomuseum is an evolving one and the chapter selected only indirectly explains it, so it is worth spending a little time here considering what is so special about them. Davis has argued that one key element distinguishes ecomuseums from others. ‘In the ecomuseum the local population must have primary and ultimate responsibility for their museum: the people are the curators’ (Davis 1999: 75). Other distinguishing factors appear to be a sense of territory (the museum is more than a building) and the sense of ownership by the community. In addition ecomuseums embrace far more than objects collected for display or stored within a building. They can include ‘intangible local skills, behaviour patterns, social structure and traditions. … (as well as) the tangible evidence of landscapes, underlying geology, wildlife, buildings and objects, people and their domestic animals’ (Davis 2005: 370). Davis points out that implicit within the concept of the ecomuseum is the idea that the local community is responsible and empowered to take control of all heritage resources within their local environment, and that the community itself has a strong sense of place. In the introduction we noted the many ways in which people conceptualise communities and how location or place is but one of many ways communities identify themselves. Perhaps the complexities of community identity are one of the reasons why the idea of the ecomuseum is difficult to implement in practice, and these complexities, along with museum reactions to them, are explored by Davis in the extract chosen for this reader.

Davis also considers briefly the issue of cultural property and its restitution, a topic that will be dealt with in more detail in another reader in this series, but one that nevertheless reminds us that there is a conflict of interest between material culture that is seen as universal in significance and the claims of the local people from which such culture originated. Hooper-Greenhill and Appleton both consider, albeit from different perspectives, The Ghost Dance Shirt as a case study of restitution and its relevance to its source community.

All the authors suggest that museums can no longer rely on interpreting objects inside buildings in a traditional manner. Museums have to think beyond their existing interpretation strategies, and work hard to develop new relationships with communities both within the museum walls and beyond. At the same time we recognise that in a postmodern world the ideas and attitudes people bring with them to the museum affect not only their interpretation of what they see, but also the experiences they take away with them. Some of these ideas and attitudes will have been developed by the communities to which these individuals belong, and Hooper-Greenhill’s use of the concept of interpretive communities offers us a theory of understanding how communities relate to material within museums. At the same time her post-museum concept challenges some existing assumptions about what museums are and can aspire to be in the future.

Museum relationships with their communities are overtly political. Sandell considers to what extent museums can and should attempt to combat prejudice, social inequality and discrimination. Social exclusion is both about individuals being excluded from society and thus from relevant communities, and also about groups that find themselves isolated and excluded from a range of opportunities and benefits that accrue to most people living in society. Like Weil he views the potential of museums for individuals and communities in positive and life-changing ways, and he considers the theoretical issues that underpin such activities and cites specific examples as to how museums can make a difference. Museums in the United Kingdom have developed a very wide range of initiatives to support the Labour government’s social inclusion agenda. Public grants such as the Single Regeneration Budget Challenge Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund all require museums to demonstrate how they are responding to community needs.

Appleton takes issue with some of the views held by Weil, Sandell and others in this section and provides us with a reminder that there is no consensus about the role of museums and their relationship with their communities. She surveys the impact of Thatcherism and ‘cultural leftism’ on museums in the United Kingdom from a radically different perspective from Sandell’s. We can compare her opinion on the restitution of The Ghost Dance Shirt with that of Hooper-Greenhill’s to see how contentious the issue of community ownership of material culture can be. For her and her supporters, debates about the objectivity of knowledge and social inclusion have led to a crisis of confidence in museums and a dumbing down of intellectual debate. Her call to respect collections and curatorial expertise is a call to a lost mythical golden age of museums. However, although she overstates her case, some of her demands for a return to a respect for collections perhaps reflect some disquiet among the museum profession in the United Kingdom that objects and their curation have been undervalued in recent years, as exemplified by the Museums Association report Collections for the Future (Museums Association 2005).

Graburn considers tourists, a group of visitors that museums traditionally target in their marketing and whose needs can sometimes override those of local people. Although he does not use the term community as such, preferring the word ‘group’, he considers the complementary and sometimes competing needs of tourists and the local inhabitants of a place and looks at the responsibilities museums have towards the tourist. He reflects on how this community of interest (tourists) has impacted on the way museums present themselves and their communities of location to the outside world. He reminds us that, to a certain extent, with the rise of travel opportunities and the increased importance of the tourist industry, museums belong to ‘all of us’. Both he and Davis suggest that some art and heritage have become of universal importance and cannot be claimed as being only of special significance to one community or another, although this universal ownership is becoming increasingly contested by communities of origin.

These authors assume that museums have a primary responsibility towards society and that it is incumbent on those working in the museum to identify this purpose and direct their energies towards supporting this. The exception here is Appleton, who sees museums abandoning a duty to knowledge and scholarship as they engage more with their publics and communities. Museums have always served as agents of the state (Weil 2002). The role they are expected to play has changed over time as new imperatives within society require public validation. Witcomb examines both Bennett’s ideas that the museum is an agent of civic reform, working with communities to foster cultural diversity, and also Clifford’s (1997) concept of the museum as a contact zone. She writes as a museum practitioner and an academic, providing interesting examples of the way theory can help inform practice and, at the same time, be tested by museum case studies. Drawing on her experiences in Australia and using examples from Canada, Witcomb suggests that some theories, although useful in helping us understand some of the key issues facing museums, when applied to practical examples of museums engaging with communities, expose the complexities of the relationships between different groups within communities. Her case study of the Portuguese in Australia illustrates all too well Davis’s argument that communities are complex and very difficult to understand. Her chapter exposes some struggles relating to power and these issues will be considered more fully in Part Two.

Finally Simpson considers whether or not museums are a Western concept and suggests that we can be too eager to impose our idea of what a museum is and can be on indigenous groups. Her chapter suggests that museums can come in many forms and have a variety of roles for communities. However, in common with previous authors, she finds that community needs are complex and sometimes a cause of contention within communities themselves.

These chapters raise issues that will be explored further in later sections. They illustrate that, as fashions in museum thinking come and go, debates continue about the purposes of museums, who are the museum communities and how best to serve their needs.

References

Clifford, J. (1997) ‘Museums as contact zones’, in J. Clifford Routes: Travel and Translation in the late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 188–219.

Davis, P. (1999) Ecomuseums: A Sense of Place, London and New York: Leicester University Press.

Davis, P. (2005) ‘Places, “cultural touchstones” and the ecomuseum’, in G. Corsane (ed.) Heritage, Museums and Galleries, Abingdon: Routledge, 365–376.

Museums Association (2005) Collections for the Future, London: Museums Association.

Weil, S. (2002) ‘The museum and the public’, in S. Weil Making Museums Matter, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 195–213.

Chapter 1

The Museum and the Public

Stephen Weil

Source: Making Museums Matter, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002, pp. 195–213.

FOR THE SAKE OF SIMPLICITY in addressing the topic of ‘The Museum and The Public,’ I will be using those two big words – ‘museum’ and ‘public’ – as if each had behind it some single, monolithic, sharply defined reality. Neither, of course, does. Museums are almost infinite in their variety and occupy a field with fuzzy edges. The public is not singular but plural, in no way sharply bounded but perceived and defined differently from one observer to the next. Likewise, from time to time I may employ that always slippery pronoun ‘we’ in a way that seems too encompassing. Feel free to disassociate yourself from any such use. In general, ‘we’ will be intended to refer to a majority – or at least plurality – of the people who spend substantial time thinking, talking, or writing about the museum and its situation.

I will propose that the relationship between the museum and the public must be understood as a revolution in process, a revolution in the most fundamental sense of that term. At the museum’s birth – some two hundred years ago in Europe and only a little more than one hundred years ago in America – its position vis-à-vis the public was one of superiority. Commonly used spatial metaphors made this rela...