Museums

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Museum Summary

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Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology

museums

The popular image of the museum, a neoclassical temple acting as national treasure chest or tomb for the relics of past civilizations, visited by families on rainy afternoons, was well established by the end of the nineteenth century in much of Europe and North America. However the origins of the museum, as idea and institution, remain obscure, although its later development in European society has been well described (Impey and Macgregor 1985). Since their invention over 100 years ago in Sweden, open air or ‘living history’ museums, which usually feature costumed artisans at work in period homes or studios, have attracted large numbers of visitors worldwide.

Most contemporary definitions revolve around the collecting, conserving, researching and displaying of objects or specimens. It is probable that some, if not all, of these functions can be found in other contexts, such as the care a ritual specialist might extend to the objects associated with an ancestral altar. There is no agreement if such activity should be described as museological.

Museums dedicated to *ethnography have often been based on collections stimulated by cross-cultural encounters, sometimes within a *colonial framework. While this may have seemed unremarkable to collectors and keepers at the time, the exploration of the history of particular collections as an exhibition theme has been a noticeable, if sometimes controversial, development in ‘decolonizing’ anthropological practice.

Indeed the anthropology of museums, that is, the treatment of the museum itself as a social artefact, has increasingly attracted scholarly attention. From this grows the examination of a collection to reveal the underlying cultural or ideological assumptions which have informed its creation, selection, and interpretation while on display. Within such a collection, objects act as an expression not only of the †worldview of those who choose to make and use them, but also of those who chose to collect and exhibit them.

As both anthropologists and art historians use galleries and museums to exhibit and analyse objects, it is perhaps not surprising that disciplinary approaches have sometimes overlapped and at others collided in the exhibition hall. The issue is occasionally oversimplified and presented as a dilemma over whether to present, and hence guide the viewer’s response to, an object as an artefact or as an *art form. Should it be interpreted within an ethnographic context or be described in such a way as to bring to the fore its aesthetic attributes? To make explicit the undoubted artistic equality between, for example, African and Pacific objects with those from European traditions, it has been argued, it is necessary to jettison labels on the function and meaning of an object in its originating culture. Counter-charges that this is a distortion and merely imposes a European sensibility and set of categories are sometimes heard. There is, of course, no need for the anthropological and art historical approaches to be seen as antithetical and the debate itself has been on display as an exhibition.

Demands for the repatriation of cultural material and human remains (primarily skeletal) from museum storerooms to their owners or descendants have occasionally soured diplomatic relations between states (for example between Greece and the United Kingdom over the so called Elgin marbles), but more often raised legal and moral issues between states and indigenous or †aboriginal populations. The museological response has ranged from a non-negotiable refusal to return any material, to innovative reformulations of the relationship itself. There are a growing number of museums, run by and for indigenous communities, based on repatriated collections which had been housed in national or regional institutions.

This is part of a wider concern with ‘appropriation’, what has been called ‘the politics of representation’, which deals most broadly with the ability to exercise control over the content and context of images and interpretations (Karp and Lavine 1992). As such, this debate affects not only museum and gallery exhibitions, but literary works, films and television series, and advertising campaigns in reference to many things including *gender, *ethnicity and *class.

It has been suggested that the golden age of the great museums in the nineteenth century was the product of historical processes which met specific social and political needs through the display of material culture (Horne 1984). Inevitably, as new modes of communication have been invented and ideas of educational instruction changed, the success of museums in fulfilling their original missions has been questioned within and without the museological profession. Fears that the museum is being eclipsed by a wide variety of leisure activities have generated efforts to increase accessibility, reduce the primacy of the object for carrying the curatorial message, and provide a high level of visitor services. The introduction of admission fees for institutions which receive public money remains a contentious issue as does the balance between, to simplify, education and entertainment.

JEANNE CANNIZZO

See also: art, aesthetics, technology

Museums

museums

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