• Community Museums Past & Present
  • Composition of the research team
  • Summary
  • Brief description of the research project
  • Study 1 (post-doc): Communities and their Museums
  • Study 2 (PhD student): Exhibiting Community Cultures inside and outside the Museum
  • Literature

Community Museums Past & Present

Brief description of the research project

In a sense, almost all museums could be described as community museums: places where the heritage of a collectively experienced past is conserved by and for a group of people who identify with that past, from which they derive inspiration and identity. In today’s parlance, this type of museum could be defined as an institution which operates on the basis of the needs and preferences of people who live in the vicinity, and which is closely involved with the community (De Varine, 1993). Regional museums (Fries Museum, founded in 1871) and local historical museums such as the Amsterdams Historisch Museum and the Historisch Museum Rotterdam were founded as community museums. And then there are the institutions which preserve the cultural heritage of religious and ethnic groups, such as Museum Het Catharijneconvent, which evolved from the Aartsbischoppelijk Museum (1868), and the JoodsHistorisch Museum (1932).

Emancipation

Up until the Second World War, the foundation of a museum by the community was part of a process of emancipation: the museum made it possible for members of that community to participate in cultural and social events under their own steam, so to speake. The institute ‘museum’ literally put the community ‘on the map’, regardless of whether that map was local, regional or national. After the Second World War, however, this process almost came to a halt. One of the questions to be addressed in the present research focuses on the possible causes of this phenomenon, and the degree to which the present situation in the museum world can be adequately explained by the proposition formulated by Bevers (1993) and based on the views of De Swaan (1988). Citizens transfer to the authorities those cultural institutions which they founded by private initiative, and that this is part of a general process of politicization and professionalization of society in areas such as education, culture and social services.
Another explanation – likewise testable – could be that communities do not begin to found museums until the final phase of their emancipation and integration. Thus it is only in the long term that the arrival of new groups, as part of the globalization which took place in previous decades, results in community museums. The question which then presents itself is the degree to which the politicization of the cultural field steers newcomers to existing museums or invites them to apply to government for subsidies before taking action themselves.

Integration

Today integration has a high priority, in the Netherlands and in many countries worldwide, as witness the recent report entitled ‘Identification with Holland’, published by the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy (September 2007). Heritage bodies play an important role in this process, and the local historical museums, in particular, feel obliged to cater to the ever more culturally diverse urban community by providing collections and presentations tailored to that community. This makes considerable demands on the city museums, especially now that urban society is becoming increasingly delineated along ethnic and religious lines: it is neither practicable nor desirable to serve each and every group, since that would not serve to promote urban solidarity. The aim is, where possible, to participate in one another’s cultural heritage by referring to a shared past, as in the exhibitions ‘Indonesia. The Discovery of the Past’ and ‘Istanbul. De Stad en de Sultan’ in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam in 2006. On a national scale this task is carried out by the Nederlands Openluchtmuseum, the KIT Tropenmuseum, and the future Nationaal Historisch Museum.
In addition, while the museum as an institute has gradually become globalized, this does not mean that museums have the same significance and function the world over (Young 2002, 205). Moroever, there are transnational communities with a pan-ethnic identity who do not easily fit into a national or urban framework (Van de Laar 2007).

Two canons

The practice of collecting and displaying the culture of various communities which do not (yet) belong to the ‘Leitkultur’ of the national society in question is part of a long tradition. In the nineteenth century, the ‘classic canon’, which from the Renaissance on has produced collections consisting exclusively of art of a high calibre, acquired a counterpart in the form of the ‘romantic canon’, which was intended to place in a museum context those artefacts which embodied the identity of the groups and peoples who had used them in their daily life, rituals and customs (Halbertsma 2007a and b). And in the case of nineteenth-century collections of folk art, the process that had led to the product was considered as valuable as the product itself. The open-air museums represented a revolution not only in collection policy, but also in the manner of presentation, whereby a prime role was reserved for the interaction with visitors (De Jong 2001).

Intangible heritage

In recent decades, the ‘romanticizing’ of collection practice has reached such heights that the condition that an artefact must be tangible to warrant preserving it has been dropped. Since 2003 UNESCO has maintained two world heritage lists: one for tangible and one for intangible heritage. That decision was based in part on the fact that the heritage of many non-Western cultural communities is not tangible. The notion of intangible heritage is one of the most important shifts in accent to have taken place in our thinking on heritage in recent decades, one which has had major repercussions for the way we deal with our cultural heritage. As regards intangible cultural heritage, one must either choose to define that heritage – i.e., to draw up new canons – or to place the emphasis on the conservation and safeguarding of that heritage, in which case the definition, as well as the mode and degree of conservation, is left to the groups in question (Jacobs 2005). The interventions of the Council of Europe and UNESCO related to the conservation of intangible cultural heritage are based on a desire to retain the heritage of the many communities throughout Europe and the world. However, the bureaucratic procedure and the implementation of the lists to be drawn up tend to work in favour of national canons, rather than encouraging communities to take measures to safeguard their heritage (see also Van der Aa 2004).

Setting the agenda

The authorities tend to link heritage to subsidy conditions which are in keeping with political aims. Thus the national museum agenda is determined largely by the political agenda, parallel to developments on the European (Council of Europe) and international (UNESCO) level.
Those responsible for drawing up this agenda are the ‘new class professionals’ in the cultural sector, who operate within the subsidizing authority and also in the museums themselves. They formulate the museological objectives within the government’s general policy framework of integration, participation, and national identity. One of the aims of the present research is to study these isomorphic agendas on an international, national and local level, together with the degree to which these levels influence and reinforce one another, and the influence of the continuing socialization of the museum, notably the community museum, on the traditional tasks of the museum.

Internet

Within the museum world, however, there are other developments taking place which make the issue of the form and function of the community museum in the twenty-first century even more pressing. In the first place, museums are becoming increasingly active in virtual space. They develop their own websites and participate in such sites as YouTube and Second Life, where people become ‘lay curators’, creating their own presentations. This is a new example of the democratization of heritage, quite different from the lowering of museum barriers by searching out new categories of visitors (Dicks 2003, De Haan 2006, Halbertsma 2005, 165-166, Henning 2006, 82-90, McTavish 2006). Here, it is not the museum but the user who is in charge (see also Keen 2006).

Narrative exhibitions

In the second place, the past two decades have seen something of a revolution in the exhibition world, with the arrival of the ‘narrative exhibition’ (a term coined by exhibition designer Herman Kossmann). This type of exhibition is posited on the equivalence of knowledge and experience, whereby the objects play a role in the story and not the other way around (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, Dicks 2003).
These exhibitions involve the use of far more resources than showcases and text boards: film, video, sound, projection, scent, touch screen and pda. They may be inside or outside the museum. Indeed, in many cases these presentations take place at temporary or permanent non-museum locations, and are produced by teams of experts rather than by the permanent staff of a single museum. The 2001 exhibition ‘Interbellum Rotterdam 1918-1940’, held in the empty warehouse Las Palmas in Rotterdam, is a good example. It was mounted by a team of experts who had no affiliation with the Rotterdam museums: the latter provided the objects and the information, but the ‘story’ was an independent creation.
These developments are of particular importance for the community museums, since their collections – unlike those of art museums, which consist of high-quality art works – are ideally suited for presentations in which story and experience are of prime importance, rather than the object itself. This transition from object to story is reflected in the plans for a NationaalHistorisch Museum in Arnhem, which will centre on the stories of the national historical canon, and for which not a single object has yet been acquired.
The question now is what this development will mean for community museums in the long term, if there is a loosening of the ties between institution, staff and collection on the one hand, and presentation and target groups on the other hand.

Two lines of research

The research will be set up along two lines. One historically and sociologically orientated study (post-doc), with a comparative international perspective, will focus on the development of the community museum since the middle of the nineteenth century, on the parties involved and their respective agendas. The fact that these issues are now being addressed has created a new dynamics, thanks to the conventions of UNESCO (2003) and the Council of Europe (2005), and the subsequent debates focusing on the national and European canon.
The other line, a study by the PhD student, is based on visual studies and cultural studies, and focuses on the manner in which today’s community museums address their task: shaping their collection and presentation policy in such a way that it does justice to cultural and social diversity. The PhD student will explore the possibilities offered by the internet and new presentation techniques to inform communities about their heritage both inside and outside the museum setting, and the consequences of these techniques for the functioning of the community museum as we know it today.

Three developments

The research of the post-doc and the PhD student links three developments. The founding of community museums by private citizens confirms their own integration and their participation in the present activities of community museums, which are intended to support those communities within society. In the latter case, the professional staff and the museum function as a social, politically engaged instrument of integration by presenting the cultural traditions of others as a form of empowerment.
Throughout this process we see the crumbling of the bastion of the classical canon in favour of the romantic canon, which is more democratic, more individual, and increasingly focused on intangible cultural heritage.
And finally, new presentation techniques and ICT applications make it possible to present cultural heritage for and by specific groups and individuals, outside of the traditional museum setting in which this has traditionally taken place.

Related research

The research is in keeping with the aims of the NWO project ‘Globalization and cultural heritage’ initiated in 2005 at the Faculty of Historical and Art Sciences (part of the programme ‘Transformations of Art and Culture’, project leader Prof. Dr. M.E. Halbertsma) and the PhD student project starting in 2007 (supervisors Prof. Dr. M.E. Halbertsma and Prof. Dr. P.Th. van de Laar), which will focus on the genesis and past history of the Nationaal Historisch Museum in Arnhem within an international, comparative perspective.