Chapter 9 - The Legerdemain in the Rhetoric of Battlefield Museums: Historical Pluralism and Cryptic Parti Pris

Abstract

This chapter considers the causal relationship between dominant Western societal discourses and western ‘war museums’ by juxtaposing Lithuanian ‘Genocide’ museum rhetoric with United Kingdom ‘Imperial War’ rhetoric as speculative ontological concepts. It is suggested that although similar motivations and interpretations direct visitation (and non-visitation) to these war-themed museums (and although tragedy is showcased in each instance) visitor perceptions of the past are most strongly influenced by dominant societal discourses of the present about each nation’s tragic past. The legerdemain in the battlefield tourism museum experience begins to manifest with the cultural rhetoric of war-museums (e.g., the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius juxtaposed with the Imperial War Museum, London and Manchester). It is perpetuated in more complex political and societal discursive formations of the past and present that shape visitors’ understandings of war-related national tragedy. Each place and period creates its own ‘myth’ of tragedy using the memory of historical events as the means, rather than the end. The end result of this dialectic between production and consumption of the battlefield tourism ‘experience’ is often the safest, most select and sanitised history being sold to visitors. Such historical and cultural pluralism is accelerated in Western war museum environments through various interpretation techniques that recreate a perceived ‘authenticity’ and thereby constantly reinterpret the past.