Posing Questions about the Purposes of MuseumsThe New Museology.Peter Vergo

Abstract

Britain is in the midst of a heritage boom: new museums and heritage sites are opening at a rate of one a fortnight, and more people than ever before are now picking their way along the heritage trail. Conjuring up images of the past has become one of the nation's most marketable skills: museums are now a major industry. Yet somehow this major social phenomenon (which is not, of course, confined to Britain-the United States, parts of Europe, and Australia are experiencing a similar enthusiasm) has until recently been invisible, or nearly so, to academic research. Indeed, the study of museums at all has tended to be regarded as a rather specialised and even esoteric pursuit. Yet their capacity to cast objects as messengers from other times, locations, and cultures makes museums very rich sites in which to explore the meanings generated by the cultures of which they are part. Through their very act of collecting and classifying material artefacts-saving them for posterity and perhaps searching for immutable laws within their variety-museums express culturally defined notions about time, about knowledge, and about the nature and value of things. They are very much about the here and now even if their subject matter is the past or the unfamiliar, and, indeed, it is in their authorial role vis-a-vis other times and locations that they articulate contemporary identities. What, then, are museums saying about the communities or society that generated them? What is being expressed by the recent surge in the numbers of museums, and why is it being expressed as it is? Any adequate understanding of the phenomenon will come only from a combination of detailed analysis of the meanings that museums construct and of the ways in which these in turn relate to the specificities of the that is producing museums in such numbers. At one level, a museum is itself a world or with its own systems of classification, its own underlying philosophies, and its own consciously stated ideologies. At another level, of course, it is embedded within a wider culture, and the it summons up is distilled from a wider set of meanings and values. Research must, then, both read in detail the displays and colle&tions made by a museum and go beyond the confines that the museum establishes. It may be the case that the category ''museum~ will turn out not to be the key one-and, of course, any study will have to make some initial arbitrary decision over whether to include heritage sites, theme parks, and stately homes-but it is as good a place as any to start provided that museums' own interests are not allowed to circumscribe the analy-