How do museums mean?
Historically, museums have been seen to serve primarily as repositories and caregivers, with resources dedicated to collection and preservation of material culture. Exhibition strategies emphasized the primacy of the object and the authoritative curatorial voice, with visitors filling a largely contemplative and passive role. In recent decades, however, this paradigm has begun to shift, with museum professionals and scholars alike paying closer attention to the complex dynamics occurring in the museum environment. Issues of presentation emerged to rival matters of content, the notion of “authority” was problematized, and the curatorial voice became just one of many voices demanding to be recognized as stakeholders in the production of meaning. Just as anthropologists, folklorists, and other ethnographers have begun to recognize and address the fact that no representation is untainted by positioning, polysemy, and partiality, so have museums begun to look beyond objects and focus on the larger issue of interpretation: “the stories museums tell and the way they tell them.” [1]
Three recent offerings from Routledge Press in the fields of museum studies and heritage interpretation tackle some of these questions about interpretation and meaning—Museum Texts: Communication Frameworks, by Louise J. Ravelli; Heritage Interpretation, edited by Alison Hems and Marion Blockley; and Civilizing the Museum: The Collected Writings of Elaine Heumann Gurian. Although these volumes vary significantly in their approaches and intents, they all share a theoretical stance that positions museums as interactive sites of meaning-making and recognize the equal participation of institutions, audiences, and communities in that process. All three works focus on issues of communication and suggest that museums need to depart from “business as usual” and truly confront their communicative strategies and understand how these strategies explicitly or implicitly position them in relationship to their stakeholders. The authors engage the central premise that institutions have a choice about what stories to tell and how to tell them, challenging readers to consider not only the fluid and partial nature of meaning in the museum context, but also how interpretive decisions impact such practical issues as exhibition design, attendance, funding, relevance, mission, and institutional survival.
Utilizing a linguistic perspective, Museum Texts engages the most micro-level analysis of communicative practice in museums by focusing on written language and how meaning is experienced via exhibit labels and other types of exhibition text. Ravelli positions herself within the realm of social semiotics, establishing “text” as a social process within a model of communication that mutually implicates sender, receiver, and context in a social interaction that is constitutive of perceived reality, rather than a linear transmission that reflects pre-existing meaning. She then proceeds to unpack language in the museum context, using examples of actual exhibit labels to illustrate how written language is used by both “senders” (designers) and “receivers” (visitors) as a resource for “constructing, sharing and interpreting a range of content, attitudes and values” [2]—in other words, meaning. The book is arranged according to three different frameworks for understanding how discrete linguistic elements explicitly function in communication: representational meaning (what something is “about”), interactional meaning (the construction of roles and relationships and the conveyance of attitudes or values), and organizational meaning (how text is shaped and arranged, including choices related to syntax and style). Ravelli spends most of the book artificially isolating and examining each framework separately, reserving only one of two final chapters for an exploration of how the frameworks are unified and mutually constitutive in actual practice. The other final chapter broadens the notion of “text” to include the museum as a whole, speculatively applying ideas about representational, interactional, and organizational meaning to other communicative resources such as space, architecture, and exhibitions.
Although Ravelli states that her book is not intended as a how-to manual for writing exhibit text, her use of actual labels as examples makes her work very accessible for museum professionals looking for practical examples of how to put her principles into action and choose a writing style that is congruent with exhibition goals. The organization of the book effectively de-centers content (objects) and shows how the strategic selection and rearrangement of linguistic elements can enable multiple meanings around ostensibly identical exhibition content, e.g., reporting information vs. provoking specific action, or distancing the visitor vs. sharing interpretive power. From a more theoretical perspective, Ravelli makes some provocative points about the fallacy of the “neutral” text, illustrating how language choices articulate with representations of power and agency. Her chapter on “museum as text” is also strong, capturing some of the multi-dimensionality (visual, spatial, kinesthetic, etc.) that is integral and unique to the museum experience. Overall, however, the work is weakened by its lack of evidence to support Ravelli’s basic claim of the visitor as active participant. She briefly cites only one actual study of visitor experience with exhibit text, making her premise of interactivity seem speculative at best—intuitively appealing but empirically unconvincing.
While Ravelli takes on the mechanics of how museums tell stories, Alison Hems and Marion Blockley’s Heritage Interpretation takes a different approach to the notion of interpretation by focusing on how the meaning of a particular site becomes connected to the kinds of stories that interpreters choose to tell. Largely a snapshot of historic site management practices and policy in the United Kingdom, this edited anthology invites fourteen heritage professionals to share examples of interpretive projects, offer evaluations of successes/challenges, and make recommendations for future practice. A recurrent theme is the connection between interpretation and sense of place, and profiled sites range from castles and ruins, to national parks, to historic houses, to urban and industrial landscapes and public art installations. Although broadly conceived and topically diverse, an intriguing linkage among the essays is each author’s engagement with what “interpretation” actually means. These definitions vary considerably and contextualize the debate about meaning in unexpected ways—the question of what stories ought to be told is heavily inflected by the question of why each institution chooses to tell stories at all.
As in many anthologies, the writing across this volume is uneven, and many of the articles are simply expository without any kind of critical anchor. Several essays stand out, however. Andrew Robertshaw’s discussion of live interpretation hits many highlights of the debate surrounding this controversial method and also raises some refreshing new questions about the nature of visitor interaction with live interpreters and the degree to which these interactions are colored by cultural differences. John Schofield troubles the waters of the notion of “heritage” with his reflection on the challenges of presenting and interpreting sites of recent military, civil, and political conflict, providing an interesting counterpoint to Ruth Taylor’s description of the National Trust’s efforts to engage site visitors in the idea of heritage as temporally dynamic and involving change, process, and cause and effect. Other high points include Margi Bryant’s critical and self-aware exploration of national parks and Tim Copeland’s theory-based recommendation of constructivism as an interpretive strategy, although the latter could benefit from more examples of how theory could be converted into practice.
Of the trio of books under consideration here, however, the most highly recommended is Elaine Heumann Gurian’s collection, Civilizing the Museum. Potentially of interest to the widest range of readers, this excellent work mines Gurian’s thirty-five-year career for twenty-three essays and conference papers that clearly illustrate why she is considered a visionary and leader in the field. Her central argument is for museums as inclusive institutions—that “museums should welcome all because they house the collective memory of all” [3]—and she groups the essays thematically according to five dimensions within which the idea of inclusion can be productively unpacked: museum and mission definitions, civic and social responsibility, space, exhibitions, and spirituality. Not simply an intellectual retrospective, the book further demonstrates Gurian’s commitment to the ongoing relevance of her topics through the addition of new “Afterwords” in many essays. In these new sections, Gurian re-engages older issues in present contexts, recognizing successes, continuing challenges, or changes in the playing field.
Gurian’s writings address topics that include communication among and within different groups of museum stakeholders (including the rarely explored arena of intra-audience interactions), uses of exhibit and non-exhibit spaces, the increasingly tenuous position of the object in the museum context, and the myth of technology as enhancing interactivity. Although all of the essays are well worth reading, some of the most powerful sections are those which explore who gets to tell the stories that inscribe meaning onto museums. Drawn largely from her experience working with the National Museum of the American Indian, Gurian delves into discussions of the shifting landscape of museum and object ownership and stewardship, and also reconsiders the museum itself as a culturally-specific paradigm of social heritage and cultural transmission. For example, several chapters touch on timely issues related to NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), as well as debates about traditional conservation practices that recast objects according to alternative worldviews—e.g., are current preservation methods appropriate for objects that need to sing and dance at night? Other sections deal with the many types of institutions of cultural transmission that function validly in other societies—poetry, song, myth, rite—and provoke serious thought about new models for museums that truly wish to be inclusive and serve the needs of their communities in ways that fundamentally challenge deeply rooted assumptions about institutional form, function, and practice.
[1] Gurian, 35.
[2] Ravelli, 3.
[3] Gurian, 2.
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[Review length: 1554 words • Review posted on September 12, 2006]