Abstract
Research on folk culture in twentieth-century Britain has focused on elite and transgressive political episodes, but these were not its mainstream manifestations. This article re-evaluates the place of folk culture in twentieth-century Britain in the context of museums. It argues that in the modern heritage landscape folk culture was in an active dialogue with the modern democracy. This story begins with the vexed, and ultimately failed, campaign for a national English folk museum and is traced through the concurrent successes of local, regional, and Celtic 'first wave' folk museums across Britain from the 1920s to the 1960s. The educational activities of these museums are explored as emblematic of a 'conservative modernity', which gave opportunities to women but also restricted their capacity to do intellectual work. By the 1970s, a 'second wave' folk museology is identified, revealing how forms of folk culture successfully accommodated the rapid social change of the later twentieth century, particularly in deindustrializing regions. From this new, museums' perspective, folk culture appears far less marginal to twentieth-century British society. In museums folk culture interacted with mainstream concerns about education, regionalism, and commercialization.
Highlights
In November 1968 the Welsh curator John Geraint Jenkins described the purpose of a folk museum:. . . to illustrate the life and culture of a nation, a region or even a village or locality in miniature
The Highland Folk Museum at Kingussie was on sure footing, managed by a watchful committee of the four major Scottish universities, and a Folk Museum for Ulster had been established by the government of Northern Ireland in an Act of Parliament in 1958.2 In England, attempts to establish a national folk museum had failed
Gaynor Kavanagh finds many of the early English folk museums wanting in this regard, arguing that the persistence of haphazard antiquarian collecting hampered the realization of the modern professional social history museum.[7]
Summary
In November 1968 the Welsh curator John Geraint Jenkins described the purpose of a folk museum:. Gaynor Kavanagh finds many of the early English folk museums wanting in this regard, arguing that the persistence of haphazard antiquarian collecting hampered the realization of the modern professional social history museum.[7] Secondly, anthropological scholars have stretched the focus back to the final third of the nineteenth century, when domestic ethnographic collecting had to accommodate a narrative of white imperial ‘civilization’ In this imperial mode, English folk objects and customs were explained as ‘survivals’ of earlier, less civilized cultures, a model advanced by the Victorian cultural anthropologist E. Tylor.[8] Chris Wingfield has argued that as the confidence of Empire fell away, and as anthropology professionalized, folk museums became an expression of an insular national mood that relied on the ‘salvage paradigm’ to shelter itself from modernity.[9] Both of these interpretations treat English folk museology as amateur and reactionary because it never amounted to a highly professionalized, nation-building project They do not register its connection to mainstream education and leisure in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Enabled museums to meet the new physic and emotional needs of their communities, but it significantly recoded how social–historical knowledge was gendered in post-war Britain
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