Heritage Museum Research Articles

Displaying Origins: Heritage Museums, Cultural Festivals, and National Imageries in the UAE

During the last decade discourses and practices relating to heritage ( turāth ) have increasingly gained prominence in the UAE, manifesting themselves not only in the continuing construction and proliferation of national heritage museums, but also through the establishment of heritage villages and cultural festivals. The present article aims at undertaking a comparison of four national museums, identifying in each case the images, which are promoted in the exhibitions to frame a specific national identity. By applying a ‘museum-as-text-approach’ it will become evident that the individual emirates through the museum exhibitions express their own national identities by forging grand narratives which in turn are associated with different origins, the latter forming the discursive basis for mutual differentiation. The comparison will also take into account the heritage villages and popular cultural festivals. In this context the difference between two essential modes of display will be scrutinized, the ‘static’ form of representation and the ‘living museum’, as well as the question as to what extent these different modes of display allow for the expression of individual, regional, or tribal identities within the national discourses. Finally, the various forms of display will be contextualized within a more encompassing trend of heritage production in the UAE. Keywords: Heritage, National Museums, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Heritage Villages, Festivals, Qasr al Hosn, Sites of memory, Bedouin revival

Fashioning the Curator: The Chinese at the Lambing Flat Folk Museum

Fashioning the Curator: The Chinese at the Lambing Flat Folk Museum

Interaction Between Internal Structure and Adaptive Use of Traditional Buildings: Analyzing the Heritage Museum of Abu-Jaber, Jordan

This paper analysis the three floors gallery plans of the Abu-Jaber Museum that correspond to the two stages in the evolution of the Abu-Jaber House: 1880, as were originally constructed to house the families of three affluent brothers; and 2007, as rehabilitated into a local heritage museum. Using a multi-method approach of ethnographic observations, space syntax analysis, and interviews, we find that the 2009 spatial and morphological conversion constitutes a certain phenomenological departure from the spatial principles embedded in the original plans. We suggest that this is linked to a predominant approach in the process of adaptive use where the essence of the original spatial configuration is overlooked. We discuss the three way interaction between spatial structure and its architectural language, interpretations of conservation priorities and curatorial principles.

Jewish Heritage and the New Belarusian National Identity Project

Focusing on three contemporary grassroots initiatives of preserving Jewish heritage and commemorating Jews in Belarus, namely, the Jewish Museum in Minsk, Ada Raǐchonak’s private museum of regional heritage in Hermanovichi, and the initiative of erecting the monument of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in Hlybokae, the present article discusses how local efforts to commemorate Jews and preserve Jewish heritage tap into the culture of political dissent, Belarus’s international relations, and the larger project of redefining the Belarusian national identity. Looking at the way these memorial interventions frame Jewish legacy within a Belarusian national narrative, the article concentrates in particular on the institution of the public historian and the small, informal social networks used to operate under a repressive regime. Incorporating the multicultural legacy of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth into the canon of Belarusian national heritage and recognizing the contribution of ethnic minorities to the cultural landscape of Belarus, new memory projects devoted to Jewish history in Belarus mark a caesura in the country’s engagement with its ethnic Others and are also highly political. While the effort of filling in the gaps in national historiography and celebrating the cultural diversity of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania overlaps in significant ways with the agenda of the anti-Lukashenka opposition, Jewish heritage in Belarus also resonates with the state authorities, who seek to instrumentalize it for their own vision of national unity.

Writing in Museums

The study takes a situated and material approach to texts and writing practices and examines writing ethnographically as it transpires and displayed in museums. The ethnography highlights the richness and sociality embodied in writing practices as well as the ideological, communal, and ritualistic functions that writing and texts serve in cultural institutions. Specifically, I offer a comparative study of visitor books and similar writing platforms in two Jewish heritage museums in the United States. Extended ethnographic observations of visitors’ writing activities are augmented by analysis of visitors’ texts, which, following Bakhtin, are understood in terms of their addressivity structures or whom they are addressed to. The study shows how visitors’ texts amount to collective contributions that are part of museums’ heritage display, and that visitors become rhetors when their mode of heritage consumption is the production of texts.

An Examination Of The Museum Experience Based On Pine And Gilmore's Experience Economy Realms

This study determined whether Pine and Gilmores four experience economy realms (education, entertainment, escapism and esthetics) were represented by visitors experiences of three South African heritage museums, evaluated whether their experience expectations associated with the experience realms had been met, and examined the relationship between the latter, satisfaction and behavioral intentions. In addition, the relationship between personal and trip-related factors and the experience realms was investigated. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses identified three experience realms - edutainment, escapism and esthetics. While visitors had positive on-site experiences within all three experience realms, edutainment made the strongest contribution to the prediction of overall satisfaction and behavioral intentions. Age had a significant effect on respondents judgment about all three realms. Place of residence (local, national or international) had a significant effect on edutainment and esthetics.

Bringing installation art to reconnaissance to share values and generate action

The English education system has recently seen something of a revival of enthusiasm for the use of research both to develop educational practices and to gather evidence about their effectiveness. These initiatives often present action research as a model of individual problem-solving, which, we argue, communicates a limited conception of action research. In this paper we propose an alternative to this ‘problem-solving’ conception of action research that acknowledges the complex, messy nature of action research through the use of arts installations. Specifically, we present the reconnaissance phase of a project which brought together a partnership comprising a water heritage museum, university staff, teachers and artists. A pedagogical adaptation of contemporary installation art theory and practice fostered the exploration of individual and collective understandings of water, and also established a shared approach to curriculum development and ownership of the project among all participants. We propose that this creative practice enhanced and changed the process of reconnaissance; it allowed the group to establish and share commitments to the value of water conservation and generated a wide range of options for our action research.

<em>Journeys of Peace:</em> Exhibitions, Objects, and Creative Dialogue

This briefing paper reviews a twelve-month traveling exhibition on African peace cultures in Kenya developed by the Kenyan organization Community Peace Museums Heritage Foundation and the Swedish NGO Cultural Heritage without Borders. The exhibition, Journeys of Peace, traveled to several rural venues and created spaces for dialogue and encounter between peoples and communities. This briefing paper outlines the background to and the creation of the exhibition and examines the main features that contributed to the success of the project. The paper describes the approaches used and assesses the impact of Journeys of Peace. An important question in the paper is how the approach of Journeys of Peace could be refined and developed. The lessons of Journeys of Peace could be useful for other organizations seeking to use a creative peacebuilding approach.

Visitor Emotion, Affect and Registers of Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites

Heritage sites and museums displaying history and culture are used in many different ways by visitors. Understanding the ways in which people use and engage with sites of heritage allows a greater understanding not only of the ways in which history and the past are understood, but more importantly how the past is actively used in the present by individuals. This use may range from the negotiation of contemporary social and political issues, aspects of personal, ethnic or national identity, and most importantly, the mediation of past and contemporary experiences that under pin ideas of identity.

On Resonance in Contemporary Site-Specific Projection Art

While rupture has been a generative form of political intervention within art, ‘On Resonance in Contemporary Site-Specific Projection Art’ proposes that an equally necessary element connecting aesthetics and politics is art's desire to forge connections with the provisional community of the audience. Through a consideration of the recent large-scale exhibit ‘Land|Slide: Possible Futures,’ author Shana MacDonald explores examples of contemporary site-specific projection art that formally seek a sense resonance within the viewer. The author specifically considers how the politics of suburbanization, colonization and the loss of cultural histories are negotiated in the work of Phil Hoffman, Julie Nagam, Dave Colangelo and Patricio Davila. The article argues these works encourage a productive unfixing of the borders between media and spaces, effectively encouraging embodied, intersubjective engagements between art and audience. The article considers how each of the pieces develops complex visual structures related intimately to the site of the exhibition, an open air heritage museum situated within a rapidly developing suburban environment. The author examines the performative structures of the architectural screens in each artist's work, and the specific relationship each holds to the heritage museum and to the concept of ‘the line’. The article claims that these small gestures of connection and collaboration between object, screen, site, and viewer pose an important counterpoint to threats of aesthetic co-optation under neoliberalism.

Cultivating Connectivity: Folklife and Inclusive Excellence in Museums

AbstractToday there is a growing global awareness of the need to address issues related to the safeguarding and use of both tangible and intangible heritage. By engaging with communities in the documentation of local cultures—especially their folklife, or in other words, their traditional intangible cultural heritage—museums can create collections that will serve as foundations for museum research, exhibitions, and programs that have more resonance with and relevance for those communities. Interactions of these kinds—in particular those of the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and the Michigan State University Museum, home of the Michigan Traditional Arts Program, as well as collaborations between the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the Great Lakes Folk Festival, and other programs around the world—have served as important platforms for public discourse about a variety of issues and have produced programs and exhibitions both at home and around the world.

The Integration of Interactive Display Method and Heritage Exhibition at Museum

The paper is to meditate on the integration of an interactive display methods and heritage exhibitions at the museums towards the innovation of museum's display. In defining museum in a changing world, the issues of the heritage museum's display use only the ordinary display methods without interaction of the spaces, peoples and exhibitions. Usually, the displays only emphasizes on texts, pictures and passive modelling. Finally the finding of the integration of the technology and heritage may create the space which give a good response to visitors and provide the best knowledge and understanding to educate peoples in an interactive ways.

Understanding children's engagement with interpretation at a cultural heritage museum

This study aims to investigate how, and the extent to which, different interpretation techniques (e.g. visual, verbal and interactive) at a cultural heritage museum affect children's behaviour, associated with their engagement with interpretive materials and their understanding of the content and its key ideas and messages presented as cultural lessons. An exploratory study with classes of primary-school-aged children, adopting a qualitative method including observation and post-visit in-depth interviews, was carried out. The results did not indicate any discernible difference between the types of interpretation technique used, with regard to their interaction with the site, or their understanding of the museum's content. Rather, it is the circumstances under which the interpretation techniques were used by the children. Two main variations in the way that the children interacted with their peers and the interpretation were found to affect the level of understanding of different stories, and female and male children showed generalised preferences for different forms of behaviour. How these behavioural patterns impacted on their understanding of the interpretation and meanings of the displayed objects at the museum is discussed.

The Aldrovandi's seven paintings from Collezioni Comunali d'Arte of Bologna - A project about the Bologna museum's heritage by the Museology class 2011-2012.

The Aldrovandi's seven paintings from Collezioni Comunali d'Arte of Bologna - A project about the Bologna museum's heritage by the Museology class 2011-2012.

Re-telling, Re-cognition, Re-stitution: Sikh Heritagization in Canada

In Canada, the language and techniques of museums and heritage sites have been adopted and adapted by some immigrant communities to make sense of their place within their new country. For some groups, “heritagization” is a new value, mobilized for diverse purposes. New museums and heritage sites serve as a form of ethnic media, becoming community gathering points, taking on pedagogical roles, enacting citizenship, and enabling strategic assertion of identity in the public sphere. This article explores this enactment of heritage and citizen-membership through a case study, the Sikh Heritage Museum, developed in Abbotsford by Indo-Canadians. Established in 2011 in an historic and still-functioning gurdwara, the museum is an example of a community’s desire to balance inward-looking historical consciousness and community belonging, with outward-looking voice, recognition and acceptance by mainstream Canadian society. The museum has also become a site of tension between top-down and bottom-up initiatives, where amateur and local expressions butt up against professionalized government activities such as the Canadian Historical Recognition Program that seek to insert formal recognition and social inclusion policies. The article considers the effects of this resource and power differential on the museum’s development, and on the sensibilities and practices of immigrant “heritage” and “citizenship” in Canada.

Mirror or Masquerade? On Representational Ethics in Cultural Heritage Museology And Tourism

Icelandic cultural heritage museology is embedded in a complex of social, political, and economic matters, at both the national and continental levels, that look to tourism as an opportunity for development in rural regions. The present paper draws on master’s research that examined the relationships of Westfjords communities with two maritime heritage museums in the region. Two qualitative case studies based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with heritage producers connected to each site were supplemented with additional qualitative data from a focus group comprised of five Westfjords residents. Open and closed coding schemes based on the condensation of transcripts into thematic units were used to analyze the data, thus producing descriptions of the representational ethos of each museum, and findings were subjected to ethical analysis. Both museums were found to reflect contemporary issues that are subject to debates about cultural identity, heritage, and representational style and ideology, while analysis revealed that there is a persistent danger of oversimplifying or distorting cultural representations, particularly where each museum has stakes in tourism. This was judged a potential disservice to the nuanced identities of local communities, and a recommendation was put forth for museums to engage conscientiously with questions of identity and cultural representation.

Exhibiting the Holocaust, Exhibiting the Self: Museum Tour Narratives and Post-Holocaust American Identity

This article summarizes research from the author's master's thesis, “Exhibiting the Holocaust: Museum Tour Narratives as Presentations of Institutional Post-Holocaust American Identity” (MA Thesis, Brandeis University, 2012). The work was conducted to position American Holocaust memorialization within the context of key American Holocaust museum narratives and exhibition displays. The two museums central to this study—the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) and the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust (MJH)—shed light on the American, Jewish, and Jewish-American understandings of the European Holocaust. Both institutions consciously attempt to intersect and merge American and Jewish ideals, interests, and values, often with one perspective dominating another for specific purposes to be discussed.

Perceived Quality, Visitor Satisfaction And Conative Loyalty In South African Heritage Museums

Museums are increasingly forced to pay attention to marketing-related aspects such as perceived service quality, satisfaction and loyalty. Using data from three South African heritage museums, this article first delineates the construct of perceived quality and then investigates the relationships between perceived quality, satisfaction and conative loyalty. The resulting perceived quality model comprises two service-based dimensions (service interaction and service evidence) and two product-based dimensions (product functionality and product enrichment). In addition, the results indicate that visitors perceived quality has both an indirect effect (through satisfaction) and a direct effect on their behavioral intentions, with the former effect being greater than the latter.

Analysis of Living Character of Ranzhuang Historical and Cultural Village

The key to the protection of living character of historical and cultural villages is maintaining their vitality, which means the culture field of the residents and substantial cultural heritage needing to continue developing. Historical and cultural village supports the production and living of its residents. It develops continuously during the preservation. It is not a static heritage museum but an organism including all systems working continually. Elements of the organism affect the metabolic process of historical and cultural villages and also affect the living character of them. At last, analyzing the interaction of these elements and proposing methods to protect the living character of historical and cultural villages.

Heritage Meets Social Media: Designing a Virtual Museum Space for Young People

This research was conducted as part of a project designed to offer guidance on the development of a youth oriented online space for a popular Canadian museum of heritage and immigration. This space would allow young people to learn about heritage, ethnicity, and cultural identity, and, ideally, aid in the development of a positive ethnic identity. This current paper reports on literature-based research exploring three key areas: how young people currently use and engage with technology and digital media, practices for pursuing informal learning online, and the influence on and use of virtual spaces for identity formation. We explored both theoretical and empirical literature, and concluded that to engage youth such a site must both allow for and encourage participation, communication, and collaboration. Social media sites are popular with youth and if they support socio-cultural understandings of learning and identity formation, these sites also have the potential to serve as an excellent model for the de...