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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Introducing Museum Studies is the first introductory textbook for museum studies. Providing a wide-ranging and original overview of museums from a historical and contemporary perspective, it covers key topics such as the history of the museum, the museum as a public space, visitors, and communities.
The book shows how museums, far from being neutral collections, exhibit objects which convey powerful symbolic meanings. This “cultural turn” away from the object as a thing in itself has placed museums at the centre of debates about public culture, citizenship, inclusion and repatriation. Museums are becoming increasingly reflexive given the awareness of the social and political role they serve and their ability to reflect the problems of our time. Gordon Fyfe shows how and why this reflexivity creates a need for historical perspective on current practices: on the one hand museums are enmeshed in a changing world and on the other hand they exhibit change. At their best, museums help us to see that everything is on the move and that change is the natural order of things.
Accessibly written, this is the go-to introduction for scholars and students of museum studies, arts and cultural management, and heritage studies.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
The chapters
Pedagogical features
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Historical perspective
Defining the museum: social power and interdependence
Museums, civilization and the sensorium
What is museum studies?
Summary points
Questions for discussion
Further reading
Note
1 Museums, Disciplines, Museology
Introduction
Expansion
New media and digitization
Markets and states
Globalization
The power of the gift
Training them up
Interdisciplinarity
Best not forgotten!
A symbolic revolution
Summary points
Questions for discussion
Further reading
Notes
2 The Genesis of the Museum: Dynasties, Nations, Empires, Colonization
Introduction
An age of exploration
A calculated world
Dynastic elites and the power to give
Nations of individuals
Empires and colonization
Other spaces/other histories
Summary points
Questions for discussion
Further reading
Note
3 The Making of a Public Space
Introduction
Publicness and power
The public culture
Knowledge and excitement
The dialectics of observation
Bourgeois gifts
A gift in the public interest
Summary points
Questions for discussion
Further reading
Notes
4 Museums and Communities
Introduction
Community, nostalgia, diaspora
Museums and communities
Museums as communities
Symbolic power, memory, museums
Summary points
Questions for discussion
Further reading
5 Visitor Studies in Context
Introduction
Museum practice
Academic research
Social context
The Madonna, gifts and teenage mothers
A reflexive world
Summary points
Questions for discussion
Further reading
Notes
6 Museum Meanings
Introduction
Classification
Decoding the messages
Troublesome objects
Getting real: a means of orientation to reality
Summary points
Questions for discussion
Further reading
Notes
7 Contested Spaces
Introduction
Everything is on the move
Museums and cultural capital
Challenging binarism/visualizing social relations
Restitution and museology
Citizenship and identity politics
Culture wars
Summary points
Questions for discussion
Further reading
Notes
8 Theory, Methodologies, Methods
Introduction
Theory and methodology
Counting, counting, counting
Sites of calculation
Museum-centred data: museums, museum consortia and professional organizations
What are visitors observed to be doing in museums?
What do visitors tell researchers they are doing (when asked)?
Behind the scenes: partial and total immersion
Documentary methods
Zooming in/zooming out
Summary points
Questions for discussion
Further reading
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figures
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
Visitor with touch model at the Berlinische Galerie (reproduced with kind permis…
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
The Carter-Coile Country Doctor’s Museum, Winterville, Georgia (author’s photogr…
Figure 4.2
Medicine Woman installation: the Carter-Coile Country Doctor’s Museum, Wintervil…
Figure 4.3
Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum (Warwick District Council) and the water t…
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
87 Hackford Road (author’s photograph)
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For Christine, Alex and Thomas
Introducing Museum Studies
Gordon Fyfe
polity
Copyright © Gordon Fyfe 2025
The right of Gordon Fyfe to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9481-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2024946003
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Preface
For our house is our corner of the world…. it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.
Gaston Bachelard
The philosopher Gaston Bachelard was thinking of the intimate space of the home when he argued that, in remembering the house in which we grew up, we learn to abide within ourselves. House images are in us as much as we are within them. They are, to use his expression, psychological diagrams: ‘the house we were born in is an inhabited house … the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us’ (Bachelard [1958] 1994: 14). The same may be said of other spaces, the public spaces through which we may pass and learn to navigate. There are, for example, churches, libraries, schools, malls, thoroughfares, public transport systems and, of course, museums. Sometimes the scale and complexity of these spaces is such that we do turn to printed or digitized diagrams so that we can determine how to go on. Urban transport systems provide route maps, city centres post street maps, shopping malls display sitemaps while large libraries and museums offer floor plans. A museum visitor turns to their companion and mutters as they share a floor plan: ‘Here we are in room 84, it must be the nineteenth century.’ Another visitor, arriving in the lobby, has internalized the diagram and heads without hesitation or deviation straight for the restaurant.
Sometimes a building is so deeply internalized that, long after it has changed or vanished, it may occupy our daydreams or even our dreams. The art historian E. H. Gombrich once recalled an old man who, on retiring to bed, would turn his thoughts to the Louvre. On sleepless nights the man would conjure up memories of walking through the museum as it was long ago, so that he ‘could decide in front of which painting he wanted to stop this time’ (Gombrich 1979: 190). As a remedy for insomnia this may beat counting sheep. And it’s probably better than a walk through the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds. The object was, of course, to banish the fears, anxieties and excitements of today and tomorrow, so that consciousness more easily submits to sleep.
We deposit our memories in a room or a building. Examination candidates may slip a mathematic formula, the tenets of a theory or geological eras into the corners of an imagined exam hall ceiling. Sometimes when we leave a building it leaves with us, imprinted on our memory. Perhaps when you left school or college, the classrooms and lecture theatres left with you. I can smell my old school though it was demolished long ago. And I’m sure that today’s Tate Gallery at Millbank has a different smell to the one I knew in the 1970s. Our powers of memory are, as some social scientists argue, properties of heterogeneous networks that include people and objects (Law [1992] 2003). Francis Yates shows just how vital was a ‘trained memory’ in worlds without printing (Yates [1966] 1992: 11). The ancient Greeks had invented a way of remembering in which human powers of memory were governed by a hybrid person-building: ‘a technique of impressing “places” and “images” on memory’ (ibid.: 11).
So, museums, among other buildings and human structures, are a means of orientation; they orientate their visitors to something not visible. A Christian church, in the manner of its architecture, literally orientates its worshippers to ‘the Orient’, to the East (Visser 2000). A museum orientates its visitors to the past, to places they may never visit, to the lives of people they have never met or ever will meet, and even to the future. The point is that the spaces of museums convey meanings: ‘Museum space is … a space with a history of its own, a space active in the making of meaning and, most importantly, a space open to change’ (MacLeod 2005: 1). But it’s a space in a world of other spaces. Studying museum space means attending to the changing social envelopes, for example regions or nations, in which museums are located. What interests me is the museum’s role in mediating between the inner space of the human sensorium and the outer space of society. I’m concerned with the relationship between the outer world of the spaces we inhabit and our cognitive powers and emotions. I believe this relationship to be a profoundly historical one. And it is one of the reasons why museums matter if we are to understand ourselves as human beings.
The idea of a permanent place is seductive. J. D. Salinger’s teenage Holden Caulfield recalls his younger adolescent self who visited a museum where nothing seemed to change: ‘You could go there a hundred thousand times’ and the only thing different ‘would be you’ (Salinger 1958: 127). Holden thinks that the objects stay the same and that he changes. There is something compelling about the permanence of the permanent collection. Gombrich’s old man, a refugee civil servant from Austria caught up in the maelstrom of twentieth-century change, recalls not the Louvre as it is but the Louvre as it was long ago in the last century. Perhaps the order of the place that does not change offers solace against the chaos of world events. For young Holden, perhaps there is the turmoil of adolescence. But museums, like their visitors, do move on, and their permanent collections are augmented and changed along with the physical conditions of display. Nothing stays as it was.
There was some purpose to Gombrich’s anecdote, for he too had his anxieties. They concerned late twentieth-century changes in which permanent museum collections were, it seemed, becoming marginalized by the thrills of blockbuster exhibitions. He was speaking in 1975 to an international conference of museum professionals who were, among other things, seeking to reconcile their understanding of public duty with the expectations of new audiences. The conference was part of a wider debate in Europe, North America and elsewhere about changes in the museum world. Among the changes, one that worried some art historians, was the enthusiasm for temporary exhibitions and especially for blockbuster shows. What was at issue was a loss of permanence. Museums were ceding space to temporary shows with objects borrowed while a museum’s own masterpieces were packed off on loan to other museums. For the art historian Francis Haskell, another kind of museum was coming to the fore: the ‘ephemeral museum’. What a sea change there was, with major museums now ‘associated … as much with ephemeral displays as with a “permanent” collection’ (Haskell 2000: 144). Gombrich, while acknowledging the thrills of blockbuster exhibitions, thought they came with a price. Rooms resembled ‘a railway shunting yard … “temporarily closed” … “in the course of arrangement” … accessible only on application’ (Gombrich 1979: 203–4).
The conference resonated with other late twentieth-century debates about the future of museums and their role in a democratic society. Less than ten years previously, a gathering at the Art Gallery of Ontario had assembled to address the question ‘Are Art Galleries Obsolete?’ John Hightower, the keynote speaker, replied, no: ‘they are just fading away’ (Cameron 1969: 2–3). He went on to describe the future as he saw it: his ‘new temple of the Muses’ might be compared with Ptolemy’s fabled ancient museum at Alexandria. There would still be paintings and sculptures. But they ‘would be integrated and interrelated with the physical and social sciences, with theology and philosophy’ (ibid.: 3). So, no, they were not obsolete, but they were changing. Public money meant that a public service must be provided. Germain Bazin’s The Museum Age, published in the 1960s, provides further insights into the anxieties which were challenging the old order of official collectors and scholar-curators. Bazin was a significant and international figure in post-war museum politics: among other things he was head curator at the Louvre and a member of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). He had first-hand experience of a crisis that had beset many museums. It flowed, he said, from the ‘contest between collections and services’.
By the end of the last century Western museums were just looking different. There were more museums, more different kinds of museum, and new kinds of spaces in which visitors circulated. One correlate of these changes was the emergence of an academic field of study, museum studies. There are books about collections and exhibitions. There are guidebooks that list and describe museums worthy of the tourist’s interest. There are scholarly histories of museums and catalogues of permanent collections. And there have long been professional texts and training manuals which guide acquisition, conservation and exhibition. The first writing about the institution goes back to the early modern period. Sometimes called museology, museum studies has deep historical roots in that it emerged in association with the first museums. In its earliest phase, and into the nineteenth century, it evolved as a descriptive enterprise concerned with practical instruction in museum work, including the principles of display and the history of museums (Meadow and Robertson 2013).
But today museum studies is an altogether different register. It represents a comparatively new and critical interest in studying museums as institutions in their own right. It was really in the decades following the Second World War that something approaching contemporary ideas of a critical study of museum practice in its historical and social context emerged. As a field of study, its development was organically related to the changes I have just sketched and to the problems faced by museums. The proximate origins of museum studies can be traced to a twentieth-century awareness that the museum world had shifted under the feet of the professionals and museum visitors. We had new museums (Donzel 1998; Message 2006), new curators (Hoare et al. 2016; Milliard 2016) and various iterations of a new museology. So much so that the metaphor of the museum as lumber room for dated ideas looked dated.
Today, surviving Victorian glass cases, for example at Dublin’s Museum of Natural History or Oxford’s Pitt Rivers, have new interest for what they are, Victorian. Newness has become the watchword. It is there in the signature buildings of the great cities of the world, in the newsworthiness of museum architecture and its star architects. Museums are increasingly ‘newsworthy’. Museum issues populate print journalism, broadcasting and social media. They figure in debates about social inclusion, education, urban regeneration, legacies of empire, migration, philanthropy and taxation. It’s not that the museums of the past, of the interwar period, or indeed of the nineteenth century, lacked public interest, were uncontentious, innocent and problem free. It is rather that one of modernity’s most successful institutions is more and more woven into the social fabrics of rapidly changing nation states. My thoughts about these matters and their importance are offered in chapters that follow. Each chapter is an attempt to show how museums and museum studies help us to grasp our changing world.
* * *
The chapters
The Introduction is a first approximation to the field of study. It signals the importance of historical perspective, discusses the matter of definition, and explains something of my own approach as a sociologist.
chapter 1 presents an overview of the museum world as it has come to be in a globalized twenty-first century: an increasingly commercialized enterprise has been enabled and managed by the state. Museum studies, it is argued, emerged organically out of this world.
chapter 2 concerns the genesis and development of European museums. The chapter shows (i) how museums emerged out of an ‘age of exploration’ which brought European peoples into contact with indigenous peoples and (ii) how museums connected dominant and subordinate groups within the emerging dynastic and national polities of early modern Europe.
chapter 3 is concerned with museums as public spaces in the nineteenth century. They were places of pleasure, education, excitement and anxiety, places where different groups of people gathered and interacted as strangers.
chapter 4 is about museums and community and about reality and fantasy. Museum research includes working with communities and empowering communities. Museums themselves are their own communities, real working communities that warrant being studied as such.
chapter 5 is an overview of visitor research within the wider context of the museum and society. Visitor studies are at the leading edge of museum studies and what has come to be called the New Museology.
chapter 6 is concerned with museums as aspects of the symbolic order, as representations of reality. The focus is on the generative powers of museums and how the great divisions of modernity (nation, class, race, disability, sexuality) have been staged and encoded in museums and museum practices.
chapter 7 is about conflict. Museums are windows onto the tensions and contradictions of contemporary social change, while their complexity and problems reveal the weight of the world as it bears down on them.
chapter 8 is concerned with how researchers can claim to know what they think they know. The chapter discusses research design, methods and the research process. Examples are provided of how the design of research shapes museum studies.
The Conclusion draws things together with an eye to the future.
Pedagogical features
Appended to each chapter are summary points along with suggestions for further reading and some questions intended to support engagement with the topic and facilitate classroom discussion.
Acknowledgements
I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of people for their help in writing this book. My biggest thanks go to my wife Christine Fyfe for giving me the space to get on with things. To Mary Savigar at Polity Press I say thank you for not giving up on me and believing in the project. And thank you also to Polity’s Stephanie Homer for her care, attention and good advice at the production stage. And thank you also to Caroline Richmond for her eagle eye and professionalism when it came to copy-editing. The late Andrew Linklater, Sharon Macdonald, Eric Gable and Mike Savage read some parts of the book, and I’m enormously grateful to them for their advice, feedback and encouragement. I must also thank Chloe Johnson, Lily Crowther, Sarah Plumb, Paula Rosenboom and Jonathan Scott for sharing with me their experiences of working in the museum world. There are others who may not have realized how helpful they were being, and among them are Amy Levin, Stephen Mennell, Kevin Hetherington, Seph Rodney, Paul Jones, Peter Crawley and Max Ross. My conversations with them about museums, some recent and some way in the past, all went into the hopper. Finally, I want to acknowledge Paul Werner (2010) for his wonderful little book The Red Museum. We have never met. But that book was my lightbulb moment when I realized the importance of the gift for museums and for museum studies. Parts of the book draw on ideas rehearsed by me in previous publications, and these are listed among the references (Fyfe 2006, 2012, 2016; Fyfe and Jones 2016). I don’t claim to have covered everything that is museum studies. But I’ve tried to convey its scope and intrinsic interest. I should add that the book’s focus is on the UK, US, European and other ‘Western’ museums although non-Western examples and global aspects do feature in what I have to say.
Introduction
By the late twentieth century, museums had gone through a major transformation. Nobody had planned it. But there were more and more museums. They had been sprouting up everywhere since the 1960s. As was the case with other professions such as medicine, school teaching, law and accountancy, clients were looking more and more like consumers. The scale and complexity of change was outrunning received definitions, modes of administration and ways of organizing things. Multiple challenges flowed from expansion. And this in a world where Western notions of civilization exhibited in museums were exposed as being just that, Western. Europeans were hatching something they called the New Museology. Beyond Europe there emerged different ideas about what museums might be and what studying them might entail. In a post-colonial world there were indigenous peoples whose material cultures had been appropriated by Western museums, and whose voices could now be better heard. The day of reckoning had arrived.
How to pay for it? There were matters of public subsidy: how to justify direct tax subsidies for cultural goods that were judged by some to be disproportionately of middle- and upper-class interest. Here we might note the competing claims of large state-registered museums against the smaller independent and more entrepreneurial museums whose expansion was reshaping the museum landscape. There were the transformative effects on the museum profession and most notably on the role of the curator in managing and interpreting collections. Somehow, to put it crudely, the museum had to become less object-oriented and more person- or visitor-oriented. In a pattern of change, by no means confined to museums, a marketization of culture had shifted the focus of attention towards the visitor’s experience. And, finally, there was citizenship. There was growing concern that museum visitors were unrepresentative of national populations. There was the matter of class, and other social divisions were coming into view. Feminists, civil rights activists, Black Lives Matter and LGBTQIA+ activists would come calling for new relationships of trust with and within museums. The contrast between a rhetorical universalism and the reality of visitor profiles required an answer to the question ‘What counts as a museum?’ And it was becoming evident that European museums were as ‘cultural’ as the world cultures they exhibited.
The museums of our time register the shifting balances of power associated with change, and it is this that has led to new visions of what a museum might be and should become. In the old industrial societies there emerged community and heritage museums which exhibited memories entangled with the exploitation of landscapes (e.g., mining, canal and railway construction). Elsewhere, new museum buildings would come to signify a different and indigenous relationship to the landscape. New Zealand’s Te Papa Tongarewa evokes the siting of traditional Māori buildings in the natural landscape, which is linked to a Māori stewardship that maintains a ‘balanced and pastoral relationship with their natural environment’ (Hourston 2004: 7). At the Museum of Sydney, the grand narrative of settler nationalism gives way to a more fractured less Europe-centred history of the world (Message 2006: 27–30).
So, to summarize. Over the past fifty years Western museums have been transformed. It has become a commonplace that the so-called universal survey museums of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have run out of steam. Their grand narratives of national progress can’t hack it in a world where there are so many other stories to tell. The museum’s universalism has been called out for what it always was – a particularism that registered patriarchal Western feelings of natural superiority over others. And the fixed co-ordinates of ‘family and faith, race and nation’ have lost salience in a world where identities are constantly under negotiation (Huyssen 1995: 34). These are some of the things that have come to preoccupy museum studies and have given it shape as an intellectual project.
Historical perspective
In the late twentieth century, some people began to wonder about the future of the museum. The challenge came from two directions, from philosophy and the social sciences. One challenge had roots that went back to the early nineteenth century. The charge was that museums are fundamentally alienating institutions because, in historicizing artefacts, in removing them from their original contexts, they cut them off from their true meaning (Maleuvre 1999). The second charge was that museums had betrayed the Enlightenment. Far from spreading knowledge and understanding of the world, art museums were failing to include all citizens within the public culture. However, that in itself was not the real news. What was news was that, in 1960s France, visitor research seemed to show that the function of museums, if not their purpose, was to reconcile subordinate social strata to their social exclusion, to a qualified citizenship. These developments did not take place in a social vacuum. On the one hand, Western museums were changing, commercializing and acquiring business acumen, so that visitors were increasingly addressed as consumers as well as citizens. And, on the other, there were the first intimations that a politics of inclusion might interrupt business as normal.
Critics turned their attention to the museum’s past only to take issue with the story as told. Douglas Crimp’s On the Museum’s Ruins was a critique of the so-called grand narratives of human progress in which the history of the museum was taken to be one of ‘continuous evolution, from ancient times’ (Crimp 1993: 18). The problem was an origin myth which anchored the museum in a universal impulse to collect and preserve humanity’s aesthetic heritage. This, Crimp thought, had the cart before the horse: aesthetics was a modern invention, and collections had ‘differed vastly in their objects and classificatory systems at different historical junctures’ (ibid.). Meanwhile Eilean Hooper-Greenhill was pointing out that the museum’s fixity was an illusion exposed as all the more illusory by the hard questions being asked about funding and maintenance (Hooper-Greenhill 1992: 1). Indeed, what exactly was it that was being funded? Did we know? That museum classifications might not be timeless was, she argued, important when it came to addressing the question ‘What are museums for and where are they going?’ The culture of the museum and what it demands of the spectator required study. In the 1980s and 1990s the history of museums began to attract two kinds of scholarly attention.
First, there were ethnographic descriptions of the collections and collecting practices of early modern Europeans. It was becoming clear that there was a history of objectivity to be addressed and that it began, not with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with the Age of Reason and its museums, but with an earlier phase in collecting. There was an age of curiosity, of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets and Wunderkammer which had something to do with the history of objectivity. Peter Burke’s The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor’s The Origins of Museums, Paula Findlen’s Possessing Nature and Krzysztof Pomian’s Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800 were especially significant. They rendered pre-modern collecting practices less opaque and more ‘readable’ as sites where the ingredients of modern science and the humanities were seen to be emerging. These scholars recovered the story of how collecting antiquities and natural objects was linked to the transformation of a medieval Christian scribal worldview. Here, with the gentlemanly and princely cabinets (the first museums) there was a shift of emphasis away from a scribal culture to an appreciation that collections of objects might be a source of intellectual authority (Findlen 1994).
Second, there was the idea that the history of the museum deserved a new kind of history – a history of its discourse or its way of knowing. Drawing on the work of the social theorist Michel Foucault ([1966] 1970), Tony Bennett, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Kevin Hetherington and others argued that the transparency of museum spaces is an illusion. Foucault had inspired a new perspective which located the museum within a history of cultural spaces and periods. At the heart of the argument was the idea that museums are realizations of cultural codes or epistemes which, in any given period, govern thought across a range of ‘disciplines’, setting the parameters of experience and of what human beings can think and know. Museums, in their manner of displaying objects, not only display order but emerged out of other spaces that displayed different ways of ordering things. It followed that there had been other kinds of museums in the past and perhaps they would be different in the future. Perhaps they were already in the making.
Defining the museum: social power and interdependence
So, what are museums? Definitions normally include some reference to publicness. However, when people say that museums are public institutions, they may have in mind one of several things or several things altogether. They may mean that a collection is publicly owned and managed in the public interest. Or that it is a publicly accessible place that is open to the public. They may have in mind a private collection that contributes to the public good or that museum collections in general are public goods. Perhaps they are wondering if museums meet their public obligations and whether everything that they contain is properly part of the public culture. Or maybe they suspect that, behind the scenes of their publicness, private interests are at work, shaping but compromising the public culture. And how, they may wonder, is it that the public culture of museums is experienced so differently by different categories of people and by some people not at all? These commonplace thoughts and observations may resonate with wider issues concerning the public good and the role of museums in our society both past and present. They may lead to matters of definition.
Recently the definition of museums has been disputed among the members of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). ICOM is an international non-governmental organization of museum professionals. Founded in 1946, it is affiliated with UNESCO. It sets mandatory standards of governance, ethics and professionalism for its members and has a major role in combating the illegal traffic in cultural artefacts. One thing it does is to define museums. From time to time, it revises its definition in the light of changing circumstances – something that can prove contentious. The recent dispute had been brewing for some while, and it concerned the defined purpose of museums. Some members of ICOM sought change that would recognize the social roles increasingly assigned to museums. In 2019 a proposed revision failed to settle matters and divided ICOM along national lines. At the heart of the matter was the question of what a museum must be to be properly public. There were fundamental questions about instrumentalization and national cultural policies where state funding increasingly depends on mission statements about defined outcomes for the benefit of stakeholders. And bubbling up to the surface were other questions about the dubious legacies of old post-imperial museums of Western nation states, the international politics of repatriation, and whether a ‘public interest’ exists beyond national boundaries.
In 2022 ICOM agreed a new definition of museums:
A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.1
The matter of definition takes me to another fundamental issue. Do we begin with an a priori definition of the museum, or do we focus on how a definition is generated and contested among people who have a mutual interest in the business of definition? But, before going further, a note of caution is in order. Sometimes people are led to a lopsided view of the museum–society relationship as being nothing other than social domination. It is true, I think, that museums entail the exercise of power and that they may well entail bids for social domination by the powerful. There has indeed been a growing appreciation of the purposes to which museums were put in the past and an understanding of why they captured the imagination of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century people. Museums were, and are, most certainly put to use in enlightened and instrumental ways.
But domination does not necessarily incorporate subordinate strata into the dominant group’s view of the world. Museums, I want to emphasize, always exhibit a certain indeterminacy; whatever the balance of power may be, they contain the ingredients of a ‘conversation’ about domination. We ought not confuse a particular state of the museum with its wider syncretic properties as a social space in which different worldviews can meet. Thus, museum meanings are not exhausted by dominant ideologies; meanings may flow down to visitors, but they also flow back to the centre as the desires, responses and performances of diversely situated and embodied visitors (Huyssen 1995: 15; Trodd 2003; Fyfe 2016). We require a concept which grasps the museum world as a space of social interdependencies between different life-worlds and different museums. It does not assume incorporation (see, for example, Candlin 2016).
Put simply, there are no museums without contradictions. What is really at stake here is the problem of how museums come about. What matters is not just what people did and do with museums (though that certainly does matter) but the way in which entire social structures generate them, opening up museum opportunities. We need a less reductive way of studying museums. It needs to be one that grasps the ways in which museum meanings may escape the authorship of particular groups or institutions. What is required is an approach to museums that grasps their organic relationship to social structures before particular people ‘take their cuts’.
But behind these matters is the problem – one not peculiar to museums – of how to isolate the essential traits of a human institution when its definition is contested by those who inhabit it and when it is practised in diverse ways. The short answer in the case of museums is perhaps to begin with the indeterminacy and focus on how definitions emerge and crystallize out of the uncertainties of, in this case, cultural politics. My starting point is that museums are a relationship of power which exhibit indeterminacy. It is for that reason that I follow Mary Louise Pratt and James Clifford, with their idea of museums as contact zones. It is a definition that allows us to capture the way that museums are always in process, always in the making.
Considered as contact zones, museums are ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’ (Pratt 2008: 7). A contact zone perspective challenges the notion that museums are, a priori, no more than conduits for the interests of dominant classes over ‘the people’ or of Western colonists over ‘native peoples’. It captures the negotiated character of a collection of objects as an ongoing ‘relationship – a power-charged set of exchanges, of push and pull’ (Clifford 1997: 192).
Thinking about museums in this way affords sight of the latent social changes that generate museums, of which two are important. One concerns the way in which the first museums were connected with exploration: those first encounters between Christian Europeans and indigenous peoples in the New World, Africa and Oceania. A second, deeply connected to this, concerns the transformation of Europe into a configuration of powerful dynastic and eventually nation states where symbolic power was expressed in the formation of great collections. There is then a duality to European museums in that they express these two interconnected spaces of interdependence. One is the relationship between colonizer and colonized and the other is the relationship between dominant and dominated groups within nation states. My overall point is that how people instrumentalize the museum is not where we should begin. Where we must start is with museums as relationships of interdependence which generate knowledge of the Other.
Museums, civilization and the sensorium
Let me say something about my general approach to museum studies. In the first place, cultivating a historical perspective is not a matter of ‘historical background’, as though the history is merely the scenery through which museums, their curators and their visitors pass. It is a matter (as I have just indicated) of getting to grips with the social regularities that generate museums and their problems. I need to say a little about the academic background to the historical perspective I adopt. Much of what I say in this book flows from years of conversation with my friends, teachers, students and colleagues. My apprenticeship as a sociologist was served in the 1960s at the University of Leicester, and that has left its mark. In the 1950s and 1960s, under the leadership of Ilya Neustadt and Norbert Elias, Leicester’s department of sociology had developed an emphasis on historical sociology understood as the study of social processes. Elias and Neustadt were both Jewish refugees from the Nazis. In 1939 (of all years) Elias had published his magnum opus, The Civilizing Process. Written in German and published in Switzerland, it would for decades remain largely unknown among anglophone sociologists. And yet, long before ‘the cultural turn’ in sociology, Elias was showing what might be done. His book turns on and begins with the concept of civilization. He asks not ‘What is civilization?’ but ‘What are civilizing processes?’
That there might be a connection between museums and civilization is often made as a matter of pride and belief in the superiority of a particular nation. For Elias, writing in the 1930s, the word encapsulated twentieth-century Europe’s misunderstanding of itself as superior in nature to the ‘primitive’ people they had colonized. Elias’s point of departure was that there was a history of ideas to be considered and that it concerned the shifting semantics of civilization. Human groups vary of course in their ideas about what constitutes civilized behaviour. But, as he showed, it wasn’t just that people differed in their conceptions of civilization. It was that their different conceptions of civilization, their different conceptions of the civilized body, expressed relationships of competition and rivalry that had given civilization different colourings according to their national settings (e.g., Germany, France, Britain). Elias’s key move, a typically Eliasian one, was to emancipate the shibboleth, civilization, from the game itself. We might, he argued, think in terms of a concept, civilizing processes, which captures the historical relationship between social structures, bodies and personality structures. What interested him was that past debates about the definition of civilization were clues to the possibility that human psychology was itself historical, in motion. The study of civilization might lead to a new kind of sociology, one premised on a historical social psychology.
His lightbulb moment had come in the Reading Room of the British Museum when he stumbled on manner books that had served the upper classes of the early modern period. It was partly that they offered a long view into the history of manners as they governed bodily functions and the way in which standards of interpersonal behaviour had changed since medieval times. And it was also that the history of manners offered insights into the catastrophic events in his Germany. It seemed possible that manners might be a prism which revealed civilization in a new light. On the one hand, there might be a history of the restrained body, a history of bodily functions that had come to be judged by the upper classes as animalic, coarse and shameful, if not ‘back staged’. And, on the other, there was a psychological dimension to this that concerned changing thresholds of embarrassment that went with new taboos. But it was never a purely psychological matter because the manner books were evidence, documentary evidence, of the regularities of social change in which there was a direction of travel – viz. a civilizing process.
What interested him was, as he put it, ‘the social constraint towards self-constraint’ that had, he argued, occurred in connection with the long-term development of European nation states. He was concerned especially with the psychological correlates of nation-state formation. He argued that the growing interdependencies of modern societies had placed a premium on self-control. The social constraints that came with modern living were converted by people themselves into self-restraint. It can’t be emphasized too strongly that Elias was offering us more, much more than a history of manners. Manners were the mark of the civilized. But there was a civilizing process in the sense that the compulsions of nation-state formation had transformed violence and sensitized people to the dispositions of others. The civilizing process, as theorized and researched by Elias, had three dimensions which are to my thinking museum relevant.
First, there is the state and its monopolies of power. This concerns the monopolies of power over violence and taxation that went with the development of dynastic states and, later, nation states. This was the story of how a medley of warring medieval territories had been reconfigured as early modern dynastic states and a warrior upper class that had lived off violence became courtiers. Here Elias shows how the competition, rhythms and dangers of court life under the gaze of a monarch turned self-constraint into an asset in the struggle for royal favour. The competitive pressures of court life intensified the need for self-awareness, observation and vigilance about the behaviour of others (Elias [1983] 2006). Second, there was the way in which the interdependencies associated with the divided labours of commercializing modern societies placed a premium on interpersonal constraint, on self-restraint. A world of commerce invites its own forms of self-regulation, calculation and control that go with the practical needs of co-ordinating economic life. And, finally, there is the way that social conflict was sublimated as the inner tensions of instincts, of drives that were denied overt expression.
Elias had historicized Sigmund Freud; human psychology, our cognitive powers and our emotional economies were historical. In concluding The Civilizing Process, he argued that twentieth-century bourgeois Europeans had inherited personality traits from a courtly past. Their tastes, rationality and intelligence appeared to be natural attributes of civilized individuals whose way of life was superior to the dynastic elites that they were displacing and the subordinate groups that they encountered as citizens, workers, consumers and colonial subjects. Bourgeois Europeans had forgotten that their ‘superior standards’ had been developed, shaded and nuanced in the course of historical change. Their ethos was of course one that gave priority to the economic rationality of professional work. However, buried in their psyches were tastes, reflexes, bodily inhibitions and psychological restraints that they had taken over from declining aristocracies, internalized and melded with the habitus of a commercial way of life. The museum, I want to argue, played a part in this historical amnesia, and here I make three further points.
First, there is the state as a monopoly of power. As we have just seen, the process of state formation entailed the state’s monopoly of violence. There is too the matter of tax, the power of the state to take our money away and to allocate revenues to say, defence, policing, social welfare, education, and so on. There is also the matter of symbolic power, its costs and its regulation. Here there are the rituals and appendages of state power: coronations, the swearing in of elected leaders, public statues, palaces, parliamentary buildings, White Houses and Kremlins. There are also museums, whose eighteenth- and nineteenth-century development as national institutions went hand in hand with the formation of nation states and their imagined communities of people. There is the state’s monopoly, directly or indirectly, over symbolic power.
Second, museums are among the public spaces in which we might look to recover the history of the European habitus. Indeed, Elias’s study of manners has not gone unnoticed in museum studies. Constance Classen’s influential study of museum manners at Oxford’s Ashmolean (2007) draws its inspiration from Elias. In the 1840s, it seems, people could recall a time when visitors were permitted to touch and handle exhibits and perhaps to smell them. But by the mid-nineteenth century the visit had become normalized as a purely visual experience. The museum visit would come to presuppose a reorganization of sensibilities and an inner control over people’s spontaneous expressions of interest in things (do not touch!). The history of the museum has, as Classen (2007), Crane (2000), Greenblatt (1991) and others have shown, something to do with the history of the Western sensorium. The outer world of collecting and display is connected with the formation of the inner world that is people’s psychology.
Third, there is violence. In his critical extension of Elias’s work, Jonathan Fletcher (1997) points out that Elias said little about the violence visited by Europeans on colonized peoples. But today we are remembering the links between, for example, European museums, colonization and the North Atlantic slave trade. The birth of the museum we now know was not a matter of providential change. Barbarism, savagery, violent revolution, the guillotine, colonial adventurism and enslavement figure in the history of museums. More generally, the origins of the institution of the museum connect with the violence of both dynastic and nation-state building and colonization. Today, many museums we may visit bear the scars of revolution, warfare and colonial expansion. Indeed, one of the key issues for museum studies is precisely that legacy.
What is museum studies?
People who come to work in museums must learn the ways of museums. They may have been trained in the ways of the art historian, the archaeologist, the palaeontologist or some other specialist, and once that was enough. In the past half century formal training in museum work has become, if not a requirement, at least a consideration in securing entry to the profession. A defining feature of twentieth-century industrial societies was the ‘tightening bond’ between formal education and the world of occupations. Twentieth-century expansion of higher education went along with the transformation of college and university curricula which incorporated new areas of study. Things never previously considered to be worthy of a university became ‘subjects’, while universities had long expanded into areas of training that were once managed on the job. That academia might capture training from the practice of a craft is hardly a new thing. It is the story of the ‘rise of the artist’ and the formation of art academies in the early modern period. Today, sport, tourism, popular culture, cinema, electronic gaming and of course museums have become the subjects of programmes of further and higher education. Museums are an interesting case, with something in common with other older professions which have recomposed themselves in the modern world. With expansion come heterogeneity and latent tensions which reflect the complexity of museums as cultural organizations. There are several points to be made here.
First, the kinds of changes just indicated have transformed the occupational world of museums. Museum professionals increasingly have need of techniques, skills and expertise that are parcelled out within different disciplines: e.g., there are the problems of employment law, marketing, finance, visitor research, international cultural diplomacy, and so on. Museum studies is, among other things, about training disciplinarians in workplace skills, including those of collaboration with other experts: administrators, market researchers, lawyers, personnel managers, book publishers, caterers. But it is also a matter of preparing disciplinary specialists for working lives, which may require critical appreciation of areas of other people’s expertise: perhaps accountancy, the law, survey work, digital technologies, and so on.
Second, there has been a growing interest in museum research within the wider academy. Museum studies has acquired a salience beyond the museum and museum practice. In the past few decades there has been an explosion of textbooks, academic journals and research monographs dealing with museums or with museum-relevant aspects. Thus, for example, psychologists may arrive at the museum with an interest in learning, economists in cultural economics and positional goods, sociologists in social inequality, historians in the history of sciences. Social scientists, anthropologists and sociologists are to be found conducting ethnographic fieldwork at museums.
Third, there is a historical relationship between the academy and museums. In the past, just as today, disciplinary change and development were organically linked to exhibitionary work that mediates between scholars and their publics. There are several aspects to this, and not least the museum’s function in making public what counts as disciplinary knowledge. In exhibiting objects, museums convey both the expertise that a disciplinary community claims for itself and the orthodoxies that populate its field of knowledge. Thus, science museums may show objects which demonstrate a theory by translating the findings of laboratory research or fieldwork into exhibitions and by performing and re-enacting the classical experiments which generated discovery and new knowledge. For the moment, it is enough to say that, in the nineteenth century, controlled and managed by official collectors and scholar curators, museums were one of the ways in which academics enlisted publics and established their public authority.
So, museums and academia have tangled histories. Some universities have their own discipline-focused museums while granting a place for museum studies alongside other university curricula. These are separate yet permeable domains, where people may migrate across borders and talk across the divide of theory and practice. Much of the museum studies literature emanates from university academics with an interest in museums. For students of cultural studies and anthropology, museums are cultural spaces that lend themselves to ethnographic research. Students of Victorian studies may have something to say about nineteenth-century novelists who put the museum to work as a literary device (Black 2000). But some of the most interesting and original contributors to museum studies have a foot in both camps, in both practice and theory, in both museums and academia. There are the ways in which museum curators and directors show how the practical problems of running museums, properly considered, may lead us to consider philosophies of display (Smith 1986), to the cultural history of the eye of the visitor (O’Neill 1994) or to the economics of philanthropy (Weil 1995).
Summary points
Museum studies is today an interdisciplinary field that has crystallized out of twentieth-century changes in the museum world.
An important strand is the long view with an eye to how historical and social change have shaped museums and the museum problems of today.
In coming to study museums, we must address the problem of definition.
Questions for discussion
What is a museum and why might its definition be up for debate?
What do museums have to do with civilization?
Further reading
M. Balshaw (2024) Gatherings of Strangers: Why Museums Matter. London: Tate.
J. Marstine (ed.) (2007) New Museum Theory and Practice. Oxford: Blackwell.
D. H. Weiss (2022) Why the Museum Matters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Note
1.
ICOM, ‘Museum Definition’,
https://icom.museum/en/resources/standards-guidelines/museum-definition/
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1Museums, Disciplines, Museology
INTRODUCTION
In this chapter I begin with a bird’s-eye view of the museum world as it has come to be in the twenty-first century. I go on to introduce museum studies as a field of study that has several dimensions: (i) museum practice and training for work in the profession, (ii) museum studies understood as critical reflection on the museum, and (iii) the museum dimensions and interests of other academic subjects. Capturing the shape of things means appreciating that in our time there has been an unprecedented global expansion of the museum world. It is also a matter of institutional changes which enable expansion: those of government regulation, of organizational changes, of commercialization and of professionalization.
Expansion
Both the absolute numbers and the rate of expansion give pause for thought. In the closing years of the century, it was said that 90 per cent of the world’s museums were established after the Second World War (Boylan 2006: 415). In the West we live with the legacy of a late twentieth-century pulse in museum building that has helped to transform our cityscapes. However, expansion is far from being a singularly Western phenomenon. In China, India and the Middle East there is today prodigious expenditure on museum buildings and development. The phenomenal export-led expansion of Chinese and Indian economies, spawning their new middle classes, has had its museum effect. One report has India’s Ministry of Culture planning 100 ‘Acropolis-type “experiential museums”’.1 Another has news that plans for a 100,000 square-metre site for the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi have been unveiled at the Venice Biennale.2 With expansion there has come a new official discourse of cultural provision. Experience is what is on offer for visitors (Garnham 2001: 455; McLuskie and Rumbold 2014: 144–57). In Dublin, at Trinity College, a makeover for The Book of Kells exhibition has a new visitor centre opening in 2024: an ‘ongoing project that will attempt to improve the overall visitor experience in Trinity’, with the college diversifying ‘its income streams away from state sources’.3 Meanwhile, ‘The Book of Kells Experience’, emblazoned on a new but temporary bright red warehousy box of a building, signals the immersive and digital experience that awaits the book’s visitors.
Two sets of data tell the story of the past fifty years in broad outline: the number of museums and the number of visitors. Most English museums were established after 1970, and these new museums were predominantly independent ventures (Davies and Selwood 1998: 71–2; Candlin 2012, 2016). In the USA by the 1990s there were reported to be 8,200 museums spread over 15,600 sites (American Association of Museums 1994: 27). More recent figures for 2014 give 35,000 museums in the USA.4 American museum numbers dwarf those of other countries. The visitor figures for UK national museums demonstrate significant change. In the years 2008 to 2015, numbers for fifteen central government funded museums grew year on year: from 39.7 million to 50.8 million.5 In 2019, worldwide, the top 100 had 230 million visitors. Today, with some exceptions including the UK, numbers are returning to pre-pandemic levels. A 2023 report in The Art Newspaper has the visitors back, but not everywhere.6 In 2022, 141 million people visited the ‘top 100 art museums’ surveyed by the newspaper. While the data for the world players show recovery, there is some unevenness, with the UK still seemingly slow to recover. In Russia, with the Ukraine war raging, post-Covid recovery has depended on a booming domestic tourism. And in Ukraine there is the problem, by no means confined to Ukraine, of how a country’s museums can respond to the existential crisis of invasion by a foreign power. How are the effects and experiences of this war entering the life of the museum (Levin 2023)?
There was a time when a museum’s staff consisted of little more than a few scholar-curators plus the manual workers and the secretaries who dealt with maintenance and correspondence (Boylan 2006: 418). Today, both the size and composition of museum labour forces
