Sharon Macdonald

Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World

Introduction: Sharon Macdonald (Sheffield University). Part I: Contexts: Spaces and Times:. 1. Museums and Globalization: Martin Prosler (Tubingen, Germany). 2. How Societies Remember the Past: John Urry (Lancaster University). Part II: Contests: Differences and Identities:. 3. Museums as Contested Sites of Remembrance: The Enola Gay Affair: Vera Zolberg (New School of Social Research, New York). 4. Into the Heart of Irony: Ethnographic Exhibitions and the Politics of Difference: Henrietta Riegel (York University, Canada). 5. Seeing through Solidity: Feminist Perspectives on Museums: Gaby Porter (Manchester Museum of Science and Industry). 6. Decoding the Visitorsa Gaze: Rethinking Museum Visiting: Gordon Fyfe and Max Ross (Keele University). Part III: Contents: Classifications and Practice: . 7. The Utopics of Social Ordering: Stonehenge as a Museum without Walls: Kevin Hetherington (Keele University). 8. Maintaining Boundaries, or a Mainstreaminga Black History in a White Museum: Eric Gable (Yale University). 9. A Trojan Horse at the Tate: Theorizing the Museum as Agency and Structure: Gordon Fyfe (Keele University).

Undesirable Heritage: Fascist Material Culture and Historical Consciousness in Nuremberg

This article seeks to explore the relationships between heritage and identity by drawing on analytical discussions of material culture and historical consciousness and focusing on an empirical case of ‘undesirable heritage’, that is, a heritage that the majority of the population would prefer not to have. The case is that of the Nazi or fascist past in Germany, with specific reference to the former Nazi Party rally grounds in Nuremberg. By looking at some aspects of the ways in which this vast site of Nazi marching grounds and fascist buildings has been dealt with post‐war, the article seeks to show both the struggle with the materiality of the site and changing forms of historical consciousness. It focuses in particular on some of the post‐war dilemmas associated with the perceived agency of architecture, the sacralising and trivialising of space, the role and implications of musealisation, and the growth of a more reflective identity‐health form of historical consciousness.

Interconnecting: museum visiting and exhibition design

This article seeks to provide a review of research on museum visiting which has particular relevance for exhibition design. It focuses on empirical studies carried out in a range of social and cultural disciplines. The article begins with an overview of some of the main directions that have been reported in museum visitor study, in particular a shift towards considering visitors as ‘active’ and to looking at affective and embodied dimensions of the visitor experience as well as at the cognitive and ideational. It then looks in more detail at findings and attempts to build a conceptual vocabulary in three related areas of museum visitor research: media, sociality and space. In addition to assessing the state-of-play so far, the article seeks to outline areas for future research.

Science on display: the representation of scientific controversy in museum exhibitions

This article raises issues concerning popular representations of science, and in particular of scientific controversy, through a case-study of the treatment of food poisoning controversy in a museum exhibition. It is argued that the science that is created for the public is shaped not only by the overt intentions of the exhibition makers but also by constraints inherent in structural aspects of the exhibition-making process and exhibition philosophies. More specifically, we argue that some of the strategies intended to foster public understanding of science create problems for the representation of scientific controversy, and, more generally, for certain types of science. The article also gives attention to scientific sources and the politics of the museums relationship with the scientific community and the food industry. The contrast with other media is made throughout the article as a means of highlighting the different strategies employed, and constraints experienced, by the various institutions involved in putting science on display for the public.

Words in Stone?: Agency and Identity in a Nazi Landscape

This article considers questions of agency, materiality and identity through a focus on a landscape largely shaped by the German National Socialists in the 1930s: the former Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg. It looks at Nazi ideas about architecture and the agency of buildings as ‘words in stone’ and the Nazi intention that the built heritage would endure and continue to ‘speak’ over time. It then goes on to discuss some of the post-war struggle with the Nazi heritage (and more specifically the Zeppelin Building) and the ways in which agency has been variously attributed. This highlights contests and changes in the attribution of agency, and shows how such attributions are embedded in wider understandings and politics of identity (including processes of ‘de-Nazification’ and ‘facing the past’), as well as being coshaped by the connotations and ‘suggestiveness’ of material forms.

Rewriting the museums' fictions: Taxonomies, stories and readers

The set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe…. Should the fiction disappear, there is nothing left of the Museum but (‘bric-a-brac’), a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects which are incapable of substituting themselves either metonymically for the original objects or metaphorically for their representations. (Donato 1979: 223)

Unsettling memories: Intervention and controversy over difficult public heritage

Through heritage, selected memories are inscribed into public space. Heritage indexes places with histories that are, in part at least, their own, drawing on and further supporting a particular complex of ways of conceiving culture as ‘prop erty’ and as a manifestation of ‘identity’. Usually, the memories that heritage inscribes and the histories that it indexes are integral parts of what is presented as a shared public narrative, bolstering senses of identity and legitimacy. Increasingly, however, these have come to be accompanied in many, though by no means all, countries by unsettling, competing or contested, memories, narra tives and heritage. Part of a wider ‘heritage epidemic’ (Bodeman 2002: 24) or ‘heritage inflation’ (Hoelscher 2006: 201), this is, in part, a consequence of an identity politics or politics of recognition in which diverse groups seek public recognition, crafting self-narratives and claiming legitimacy through memory inscribed as heritage. In addition, however, if more sporadically, it may be a result of majorities or state agencies not simply allowing minorities to create their own heritage niches as part of a more multivocal public sphere but also incorporating at least some such voices into the mainstream. Moreover, this may even extend to majorities themselves engaging in critical self-reflection about the past and seeking to incorporate accounts, and even ‘dirty washing’, that have previously been excluded from ‘official’ heritage. The incorporation of previously excluded memories into the public sphere does not, however, simply expand the remit of what is included and increase the num ber of ‘voices’ represented, but it may also unsettle and disrupt existing accounts of the past. New memories do not necessarily just jostle alongside existing ones, like new products on a supermarket shelf, but may expose previous silences, raising questions about their motives or the power dynamics of which they were part. Or they may threaten to eclipse other memories, edging them out of public space or undermining their own achieved settlement as accepted heritage. For, usually, her itage is perceived as settled ‐ as a sedimented, publicly established and valued dis tillation of history. Memory inflation, then, may not only challenge specific existing memories but may also unsettle the traditional view of heritage itself, making it more likely to be regarded as contestable and contingent. This in turn can prompt further questioning, making heritage increasingly the object of critical interrogation rather than acceptance. The expansion of heritage studies ‐ and the production of volumes such as this one ‐ is in part a consequence of this unsettlement. So too is

Is ‘Difficult Heritage’ Still ‘Difficult’?

Abstract This article discusses ‘difficult heritage’ as the phenomenon of nations or other collectives publicly signaling and commemorating past atrocities that they committed and for which they are ashamed. Through a focus on public commemoration and heritage of World War II in Europe, it shows that there has long been reluctance to acknowledge such potentially identity-disrupting pasts. This, however, is changing, with Germany at the forefront of a turn towards more frequent public addressing of unsettling pasts in museums and heritage sites. The article argues that this turn entailed some fundamental conceptual shifts, including changes in understandings of the agency of the past, of how best to tackle trauma and of the purpose of public remembering. The consequence of this, it maintains, is that addressing difficult heritage is no longer necessarily identity-disrupting in the way that it was formerly. Indeed, on the contrary, rather than being ‘difficult’ in this sense, it can be – and increasingly is – regarded as having positive identity effects.

The International Handbooks of Museum Studies

An edited collection of nearly 30 essays by international scholars, curators and designers on the role of media in museums and the relationship between museums and different kinds of media.

Introduction: Engaging Anthropological Legacies toward Cosmo-optimistic Futures?

n ABSTRACT: How to deal with the legacies of colonial and other problematic pasts is a challenge shared by most museums of ethnography and ethnology. In this introduction to the following special section on the same topic, the section editors provide an overview and analysis of the burdens and potentials of the past in such museums. They set out different strategies that have been devised by ethnographic museums, identifying and assessing the most promising approaches. In doing so, they are especially concerned to consider the cosmopolitan potential of ethnographic museums and how this might be best realized. This entails explaining how the articles that they have brought together can collectively go beyond state-of-the-art approaches to provide new insight not only into the difficulties but also into the possibilities for redeploying ethnographic collections and formats toward more convivial and cosmo-optimistic futures.