The Blending of Place and Voice in Ecomuseums: Educating Communities and Visitors in the New Museum
Main Article Content
Abstract
The concept of the traditional museum as a temple of knowledge has been increasingly challenged with the development of new museum forms. This paper examines the history and applications in the Americas of one such model, the ecomuseum, which arose in the late 1900s in European industrial towns as a way for local communities to navigate their heritage and changing way of life in a post-industrial era. Ecomuseums are grassroots institutions whose goal is to encompass the entirety of the community’s political and economic—as well as historical and cultural—reality to constitute the museum, and thus rarely confine themselves to a single museum building. Ecomuseums have come to fulfill a number of roles as educational institutions, historic preservation centers, and seats of community activism, giving community members a voice in self-representation and bridging the past, present, and future. The ecomuseum, in locally negotiating and redefining even the physical parameters of the museum, presents a unique model for democratic heritage preservation and education. While this specific model has been applied to a limited extent outside of Europe, the ecomuseum and other similar manifestations of new museology—which have emerged in Central, North, and South America—have potential for shaping culture democratically within indigenous and ethnic communities and offering valuable awareness of alternative histories to visitors.
Downloads
Article Details
The parties agree to the following terms of publication:
1. The Author grants and assigns the entire copyright for the Work to the Publisher who shall be the exclusive holder of the copyright.
a. The Inter-American Journal of Education for Democracy is the owner of all such copyrighted materials including electronic and all machine-readable formats. No material may be reproduced in any format without permission of the Publisher. The author retains the right to store and link an electronic version of the Work on his/her own personal website, as long as it displays the Journal’s copyright.
NOTE: A work prepared by a government employee as a part of his/her official duties is called a “Work of the U. S. Government,” and is not copyrightable. If it is not a part of the employee’s official duties it may be copyrighted. If the Work was prepared jointly, and any co- author is not an U.S. Government employee, that author must be delegated to the co-authors to sign the complete agreement.
2. The Author ensures the Publisher that he/she has the right to assign the copyright and that no portion of the copyright to the work has been assigned previously.
3. The Author may reprint the work in anthologies or books which are comprised of the Author’s writings, and agrees to notify the Editors of the Journal of any such reprints of the Work.
4. The Author agrees to hold harmless and indemnify the Publisher against any claim, demand, suit, action, proceeding, recovery of expense of any claim whatsoever arriving from any claims of plagiarism, libel, slander, obscenity, unlawfulness, or invasion of privacy or copyright infringement in the Work, that are finally sustained in a court of competent jurisdiction.
5. Permission to use previously copyrighted material shall be obtained at the Author’s expense from the copyright proprietor.
6. The Author is to submit camera-ready copy for graphs and figures with their manuscripts or provide the publisher with a separate .tiff or .jpeg file. Text in figures and graphs is to be Times New Roman or a similar sans serif typeface. Graphs and figures should be approximately twice final desired size.
7. The Author shall read and correct proofs of the Work when submitted to him/her, and shall return same to the Editors on the date specified by the Publisher.
8. It is understood that the Author receives no monetary compensation from the Publisher for the assignment of copyright and publication of the Work.