Curating convergence: interpreting museum objects in integrated collecting institutions

This article is concerned with the phenomenon of convergence (institutional integration) of museums, libraries, archives and other cultural facilities. It investigates how such amalgamations impact the capacity of curatorial and collections staff to carry out interpretive practices, including object research, documentation and exhibition development. Through thematic content analysis of staff interviews conducted at five case studies of local government-run converged collecting institutions in Australia and New Zealand, the paper suggests that administrative restructuring – often predicated on the dual imperatives of financial efficiency and improved cultural provision – produces institutional frameworks that undermine the capacity of collections staff to interrogate the meanings of objects. In turn, impediments to interpretive practice limit the extent to which collections are rendered intellectually accessible to visitors.     

Place,space and odyssey: Exploring the future of early medieval sculpture,Rosemarkie, Inverness-shire

Abstract

The world today is often described as ‘postmodern’ - or, recently, post-postmodern. The question is, can postmodern ideas help to explain the many inconsistencies and logical binds in which museums find themselves entangled at the start of the 21st century? The postmodern is set in contrast with the Modern project, with which museums are closely associated. Superstition and disorder were swept aside, in theory at least, by scientific evidence and orderly arrangement, promoting a stable social hierarchy. In the West, the rational, scientific mindset became the dominant way of explaining the world. Museums are deeply implicated in the Modern, as instruments for cataloguing and characterizing first the natural world and, later, the world of invention, design and technology. Can museums, as ‘modern’ institutions, survive in the postmodern age? The museum's salvation could, it is argued, lie in its collections. Museums could shrug off their insistence on exhibitions as their major function: their ‘modern’ face. Instead they could move towards being providers of a service to open up the collections themselves and the knowledge and information about them, rather than guarding them as a private treasure.     

Sustaining popular music’s material culture in community archives and museums

This article examines the challenges of sustainability faced by community archives and museums that are concerned with the preservation and display of the material culture of popular music’s recent past. The sustainability of grassroots sites of popular music heritage is of great concern due to their role in making accessible cultural artefacts that have limited representation in the collections of more prestigious institutions. Drawing on three sites that have ceased operation – Jazz Museum Bix Eiben Hamburg, Mutant Sounds and Holy Warbles – the article highlights difficulties faced by the founders and volunteers of physical and online archives in sustaining their ‘do-it-yourself’ heritage practices in the medium- to long-term.     

Look the Other Way: Dealing with Child Sexual Abuse Outside of Institutions in 1980s Australia

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has provided a depth of knowledge about sexual assault within institutions, highlighting the multiple ways that adults failed to protect victims. This article will show that this elision of responsibility towards children also occurred outside of institutions. It argues that many key players – including doctors and other professionals – did not step up to protect victims, and that the Australian community continued to ignore, overlook or discount evidence of abuse. Outside of institutions, it was easier to look away than to deal with the horrors of sexual violence against children.     

李济与西方博物馆知识在中国的传播

民国时期西方博物馆知识在中国得到进一步传播,留学出身的考古学者李济参与早期博物馆知识传播的同时,积极从事中国早期博物馆的创建活动,打破了本土古物私家收藏的传统,积极宣扬古物公有公藏的博物馆思想,对其后中国博物馆的发展产生了重要影响.     

Afghanistan's energy sociotechnical imaginaries: Alternative visions in a conflict zone

Imaginaries are understood to be both discursive and cognitive constructs that shape behaviour, policies, and institutions – but how do longstanding imaginaries evolve in new circumstances, and how do they interact with existing power structures in changed circumstances? Drawing on conceptions of discursive power, this paper investigates the interplay of power with both new and old imaginaries in the case of Afghanistan, specifically regarding alternative energy futures. Employing an interpretive approach, we draw on document analysis and semi-structured interviews with elite stakeholders and policy observers, to provide an account of the relations between alternative energy futures imaginaries and political power. We demonstrate, how certain discursive practices are made possible, authorised and articulated through imaginative geographies. Critically, the government-advocated imaginary of Afghanistan as an energy corridor and hence an energy importer both represents the views of several powerful interests and concurs with the long-held idea of Afghanistan as a buffer state. In this way, political path dependencies are reinforced through a supportive imaginary, just as the dominant imaginary is itself reinforced by the main stakeholders. While in line with our interpretive epistemology we do not make claims for the specific configuration of imaginaries being generalisable elsewhere, we do find the general theoretical approach useful for understanding discursive aspects of conflict zone politics, particularly vis-à-vis energy system trajectories.     

Public archaeology and political dynamics in Portugal: A reply to Bednarik

Abstract

This article is concerned with five museums created by indigenous sámi people in northern Fenno- Scandinavia. In comparison to most Western nations' museums, Sámi-created institutions are a relatively recent phenomenon. Against the background of changing ideas about museums in the academic world, this article examines what kind of representation of the Sámi past has been created in their museums and, importantly, the reasons why these representations have been created in the ways that they have. What kind of knowledge does this create? How has the medium been adapted? How do these representations, in turn, change Sámi culture?

It is argued that Sámi museums have been influential in creating a sense of ‘Sámi-ness’ through their particular representations. Certain artefacts are presented as particularly active, and although their actions can cause conflicts, they are now being used to forge a deeper past for the Sámi people.     

Reform in Turkey: Liberalization as government and critique (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Turkey is in the midst of a wide‐ranging reform of historic proportions, the most profound reorganization and restructuring of institutions and practices since the foundation of the Republic in 1923. These reforms, inspired and guided by the country's EU integration, are multifaceted but can be summarized as liberalization of economy, politics and society. While capitalist penetration and privatization are obvious features of the reform, its techniques, kinds of knowledge and objects, as well as its reflexive aspects – the ways in which it studies itself unfolding – have not been sufficiently conceptualized.     

The sound of music heritage: curating popular music in music museums and exhibitions

A significant amount of previous academic research into popular music museums centres on critiques of the content, design and layout of predominantly authorised institutions. Throughout much of this research, authors consistently criticise the use, or rather, the perceived misuse, of music played within music museums, arguing that the music itself, rather than artefacts, constitutes the most significant part of popular music exhibition. This article seeks to counter this trend by exploring the challenges of incorporating recorded sound into popular music exhibits as understood by curators and exhibit designers. Utilising interviews conducted within 14 authorised and DIY museums devoted to popular music, the researchers demonstrate a distinct contrast between current academic critiques of music use in these museums and the attitudes of the people who create them. The result is a varied discussion surrounding sound in the museal space, including issues of sound bleed, technology and the creation of balance between artefacts and sound. This account draws attention to curators’ intentions of telling the story of popular music history by engaging with both the visual and aural memories of museum patrons, and suggests a new understanding of the purpose underpinning popular music museums in modern contexts.     

Books as museum objects

This paper considers the problems raised by the holding of books in museums, as opposed to libraries, when they have been collected and donated to such institutions, not primarily as works of reference or as literature, but rather as art objects in themselves. Books in such a context present difficulties for curators and public alike, and these issues range from the organisational to the philosophical. Matters of conservation, presentation and Interpretation are all touched upon in order to stimulate discussion of the very nature of books themselves.     

Museums and the ‘Death of Experience’: singularity,interiority and the outside

This paper discusses a number of well-known critiques of the museum that seek to identify it as a problematic space for experience. The key argument put forward is that we can find within that analysis a critical geography around the museum that help us to understand the work that it does in relation to experience. Three spatial motifs are drawn from this analysis and discussed: the singular, the interior and the outside. The paper argues that museums since the nineteenth century have established a topos for experience based on a mimetic realism around the experience of both culture and history through the first two of these spatial expressions. Through them museums produces a fabulation of culture and history that supplements for the lack of topos for experience found within modern society as a whole. The latter spatiality – that of the outside – is found in the form of the absent–presence of the event in relation to the archiving principle of the museum, thereby continually unsettling the first two expressions and calling them into question. This dynamic reveals the museum as a space to critically think about what it does with experience and the importance of spatial analysis for that.     

New perspectives on instrumentalism: an empirical study of cultural diplomacy

Museums are increasingly recognised as having a role to play within international relations, to facilitate cultural exchange, assert national identity and foster mutual understanding. Whilst international work is perceived to be politically motivated and diplomatically advantageous, it can be highly beneficial to cultural institutions. In this paper, ‘cultural diplomacy' is shown to be a strategy used by museums to enable organisational development and economic growth. This paper demonstrates how national museums adopted a political rhetoric and used strategic lobbying to formulate a new cultural policy, which expanded the scale and scope of their international work. By defining the parameters and principles of this policy, the institutions wield power, thus challenging the conventional perceptions of policy-making and contradicting commentators who accuse museums of political subservience. Throwing the notion of instrumentalism into disarray, this paper calls for a theoretical and conceptual rethinking, to revamp understanding and bring it in line with practice.     

欧美博物馆藏品注销制度与规则

注销是指将藏品从博物馆藏品清单及库房中移除的行为。欧美博物馆在注销方面已有比较成熟的经验,为保证注销过程的规范化,博物馆专业组织及诸多博物馆都订立注销标准,以"符合博物馆宗旨""不能因营利目的注销"为基本原则,并辅以藏品保存状况、独特性、可用性等方面的考量。在处置已注销物品时,博物馆会优先采用非出售的方式,并且尽量将藏品保留在"公共领域",以保护公众利益。虽然藏品注销极易引起争议,但也有正面意义。藏品"只入不出"的做法在某种程度上并不利于博物馆可持续发展,注销有助于优化馆藏、节约资源,对于藏品管理颇具正面意义。     

The future of the enthnographic museum (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This essay discusses the recent past of ethnographic museums and raises questions about their future. In the last thirty years or so, ethnographic museums have faced many challenges arising both from within and beyond anthropology to the extent that in the post‐colonial and post‐modern era they could be said to have suffered an identity crisis. Many have been renamed, remodelled or rehoused in spectacular new premises (such as the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris). Only a few have remained largely unaltered, as at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford where the authors of this essay are employed. Drawing on the theoretical literature in museum anthropology and material culture, many years of ‘hands on’ curatorial experience and the insights gained from a five year collaborative research project involving ten major ethnographic museums in Europe, the authors investigate how ethnographic museums might engage with new audiences and new intellectual regimes in the future.     

Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum

Museums are conventionally viewed as institutions dedicated to the conservation of valued objects and the education of the public. Recently, controversies have arisen regarding the representation of history in museums. National museums in America and Germany considered here, such as the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the German Historical Museum, have become sites of contention where national histories and personal memories are often at odds. Contemporary art installations in museums which take historical consciousness as their theme similarly raise contentious issues about public knowledge of and personal interest in the past. When members of publics find that their memories of the past or their expectations for museum experiences are not being met, a kind of "distortion" occurs. The "distortion" related to memory and history in the museum is not so much of facts or interpretations, but rather a distortion from the lack of congruity between personal experience and expectation, on the one hand, and the institutional representation of the past on the other. This essay explores the possibilities for a redefined relationship between personal memory and history that is experienced in contemporary museums.     

关于博物馆的社会职能

今天,人类生活在一个非同寻常的快速变革的时代,变革影响到每个国家、每一个城市、每一个社区的方方面面。全球化也带来了新的挑战,由于变革速度加快,知识、财富和权力在快速转移,思潮、理念和观点也在快速变更。在这一背景下,     

Managing performance in publicly funded museums in England: effects,resistances and revisions

Based on accounts gathered from nine museums and four professional/policy-making bodies, as well as policy analysis, this article maps out and assesses the effects of and ways of experiencing the new managerialist mode of governance within the publicly funded museums in England, focusing specifically on performance management in museums. It will be argued that the performance management regime has impacted local authority museums and national museums in distinct ways, creating different professional/organisational cultures as a result. These impacts pertain specifically to the professional and organisational autonomy of museums, with significant differences between small local authority museums and large national museums. This has serious implications for the way different types of museum relate to new managerialism and their mode of functioning. Some of the negative and unintended impacts of the performance management regime have induced a reappraisal – initially championed by the art world – and a move towards lightening up the new managerialist overload and pressure by introducing some elements of a peer-review model and accommodating in some form the qualitative singularity of museum experience. I will conclude by reflecting on the underpinning assumptions of new managerialism in museums against the backdrop of the project of museum professionalism and the singularity of its creative work.     

Humans,Birds and Burial Practices at Ipiutak,Alaska: Perspectivism in the Western Arctic

ABSTRACT

Archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence from the coast of western Alaska and St. Lawrence Island indicate that human inhabitants over the past 1500–2000 years incorporated birds into their diets, cosmologies, material culture, and daily activities. Following a brief discussion of the archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence for human–bird relations, this article explores the evidence for birds as both an economic and cosmological resource at the Ipiutak site on the northwest coast of Alaska. Several lines of evidence indicate that hunters and shamans have consistently attempted to mimic or acquire the abilities and physical attributes of select bird taxa, reflecting a sophisticated knowledge of bird behaviours and life histories. A specific concern with vision – shamanic, predatory, and post-mortem – is inferred from an unusual Ipiutak burial assemblage that contained a loon skull with ivory eyes. Considered in light of the broader cemetery assemblage, which includes artefacts with bird imagery, the Ipiutak material is interpreted as evidence of perspectivism in western arctic prehistory.     

Transcendent myths,mundane objects: setting the material scene in rock,soul, and country museums

The many varied myths of origins, aesthetic transcendence, and greatness that surround popular music continue to proliferate in a variety of forms. One comparatively recent type of institution producing such forms of mythology is the popular music museum. This article uses the familiar idea of the ‘experience economy’’ to examine how three popular music museums produce experiences through objects that, while they are deliberately cast as mundane and everyday, work to support widely-shared narratives of the musical traditions of which they are a part. I argue that they do so in the service of larger myths of popular music. In each case I examine, I show that the myths on display are specific to the music that forms that content of the exhibitions. I argue that the specific kinds of spectator experiences these museums seek to produce are designed to enhance the value of these museums and their collections through claims made on specific types of musical patrimony made material through carefully contextualized objects of display. As such, traditionalist myths of musical greatness and aesthetic transcendence are well-served by the forms of exhibition and display produced by these institutions.     

Eine gelernte Lebensweise: Figurationen des Gelehrtenlebens zwischen Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit

A Learned Way of Life: Figurations of Scholarly Life between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. – With the erosion of professors' obligatory celibacy in northwestern European universities of the high Middle Ages, scholars found themselves facing the task of redefining their mode of life and establishing a new type of families, combining social reproduction and the transmission of academic knowledge, and adopting daily habits and dispositions which would allow them to lead the life of the mind within crowded family households without the collective discipline and material infrastructure provided by communal institutions, such as colleges. Building on the author's earlier work, the paper sketches a synthetic view of the major elements of the scholars' emerging way of life, arguing that this transformation provides a unique opportunity for studying how a way of life takes shape, being explicitly discussed and experimented with. Shaping a rational, or rather systematically rationalized way of life, it is argued, is a major contribution of the scientific tradition to making modern cultures.