Museum Encounters and Narrative Engagements

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter engages with examples from the museum visitor studies literature that epitomize “the turn to understanding” by investigating the meaning‐making processes of museum visitors through an analytical focus on encounters and engagements. The concept of narrative is introduced as a human meaning‐making tool through which museum encounters can be understoodasinterpretive engagements. Drawing on a long‐term study of global visitors to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), which followed a narrative‐hermeneutic approach to meaning in both theoretical and methodological terms, the chapter offers empirical insights into the multiple layers of interpretive engagements and revealshowvisitors narrate their biographies into the museum experience, and the museum experience into their biographies. Both sides, then, become entangled through narrative engagements across cultural differences and thus make sense only in their dialectic relation throughout the museum experience's gestalt. The chapter concludes by pointing to the limitations of a narrative‐hermeneutic approach and how these might be overcome.