Edible Heritage: The Use of Food and Foodways in Multisensory Museum Encounters (original) (raw)
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A Taste of Intangible Heritage: Food Traditions Inside and Outside of the Museum
Etnološka istraživanja, Vol.1 No.10 Siječanj 2005:57-62, 2005
As nourishment, food consists of tangible, material substances which humans consume. But the knowledge and practice of food preparation, etiquette of eating and symbolic meanings tied to various foods are all intangible. How does this affect the work of museums?
Master of Arts Dissertation (Distinction), International Heritage Management, University of Birmingham UK, 2023
This research aims to establish the best interpretative strategies to present food histories, narratives and displays in Maltese museums. Given the limited presence of Maltese food in local restaurants, this study seeks to explore how tourists can engage with Maltese food culture and history through museums. Drawing from international examples of food museums and exhibitions, insights from local food curators, historians, chefs, and writers, and the results of a survey eliciting how target audiences would like to experience the interpretation of food in museums, this research endeavours to address the inadequacies in food interpretation narratives within Maltese museums, where current practices often remain object-centric. Rooted in these elicited themes and strategies this study suggests branded museum cafes and a multi-sensory and immersive Museum of Maltese Food as possible mediums for local and foreign visitors to encounter typical Maltese dishes and both historical and contemporary foodways.
Museums’ contribution to the notion of food heritagisation
Deleted Journal, 2024
In this paper the authors explore how various agents-such as museums, destination companies or small businesses-have actively contributed to food heritagisation on the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway. By examining the thematic elements and storylines that these agents convey to a broad audience, and by considering their role in the tourism sector, we assert that their collaboration serves as the driving force for preserving and promoting culinary traditions. We specifically focus on the significance of 2 of 18 museums as pivotal institutions in shaping identity. We employ the concept of food heritagisation and test it on the Lofoten Islands as our primary example. Our findings offer an analysis of the challenges and opportunities faced by agents who contribute to food heritagisation on the Lofoten Islands. Moreover, we argue that museums, in conjunction with other local agents, are playing an increasingly influential role in the process of food heritagisation particularly in regions with high tourism. Ultimately, we conclude that the heritagisation of food on the Lofoten Islands represents an overall positive step towards fostering more sustainable and innovative forms of tourism.
Negotiating Food Heritage Interpretations: Experiences of a Project at the Estonian National Museum
Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics
The article examines varied interpretations of food heritage in contemporary Estonia, relying on the authors’ experiences of a three-year research and development project at the Estonian National Museum (ENM). The study focuses on the museum researchers’ collaboration with different stakeholders, representing small entrepreneurs and the public and non-profit sectors. The authors tackle the partners’ expectations and outcomes of diverse cooperational initiatives and the opportunities and challenges of a contemporary museum as a public forum for discussions on cultural heritage. The project revealed that diverse, complementary, and contested food heritage interpretations exist side-by-side on the Estonian foodscape. Additionally, the project enabled the authors to become better aware of the researcher’s role in the heritagisation process and of the museum as a place for negotiating the meanings and values of food culture.
A place at the table? Food in museums as an “Ersatz politics” of difficulty
Food Heritage and Nationalism in Europe , 2019
The chapter analyses three political uses of food and cuisine in museums and discusses the paradoxical relations between them. In each case food is a kind of proxy (or Ersatz) for politically-based desires connected to difficult histories as well as an indicator of different forms of nostalgic remembering and re-imagining, using a phenomenological approach. The first of these desires is for a ‘happy multiculturalism’ in a present shaped by difficult issues of migration; the second, for a return to a mythic past of ‘how things were’ prior to the perceived problems of the present day; the third is the desire for public understanding of difficult times from the past and mourning for futures that never were. In each one, food is used as a means to argue for the significance of having - or in order to offer - a ‘place at the table’, where the politics of difficult issues can be revealed or hidden through the media of food or culinary objects. Based on fieldwork in museums around Europe, it examines museum engagements (or disengagements) with the politics of: migration and belonging; selective and sentimental re-imaginings of the past; hardship, hunger and the Holocaust, providing a novel framework for the analysis of difficult histories, within and beyond the walls of the museum.
Multi-Sensory Museum Experiences: Balancing Objects’ Preservation and Visitors’ Learning
2018
In the late twentieth century, museums moved from a near exclusive focus on researching, collecting and preserving objects to an increased interest in visitors' experiences and learning. Consequently, today's museums are re-focused on facilitating engaging connections between visitors and collections. Nonetheless, many current-day museum visitors are dissatisfied with their primarily visual experiences. In order to enhance visitors' intellectual, emotional and physical connections with objects, this paper argues museums should introduce new ways of visitor interaction with objects through narrative and multi-sensory experiences. By combining discursive and immersive exhibition models, museums can create narratives that emotionally and intellectually involve visitors. While museums should aim to make visitors' museum experiences more immersive by incorporating senses in addition to sight, such as touch, hearing, smell and taste, museums must also protect the integrity of their collections. Through a tiered or stratified approach to collections, museums may remain responsible for their collections yet allow visitors to increase their physical, emotional and intellectual access to more diverse types of objects. This paper demonstrates how museums may implement discursive and immersive narratives as well as tiered or stratified, multi-sensory collection experiences in permanent installations, temporary exhibitions and educational programming.
Food for Thought: Emergence of Food-Based Historical Museum Walking Tours
The purpose of this thesis was to explain why museums developed food-based walking tours and engaged in the trend of culinary tourism. This topic is significant to museology because despite the popularity of culinary tourism, it has not been studied in a museum environment. Through an email survey, this study targeted three history museums in New York, Florida, and Washington State with food-based walking tours and investigated why the museums developed this programming. This study was informed by three primary research questions: why design these programs, what are the benefits to the museum, and what are the benefits to the visitor? The results of this study showed that food-based historical walking tours were both popular with visitors and financially successful programs for the participating museums. All three museums created their food-based historical walking tours from preexisting programs. Two of the three institutions surveyed collaborated with their local communities in order to develop a food-based historical walking tour. All of the institutions surveyed reported that these types of tours were successful endeavors that expanded the museum’s audience. The primary limitation of this study was the small sample size.
NORDIC INSPIRATION -FRESH APPROACHES TO MUSEUM LEARNING NORDIC ASSOCIATIONS OF MUSEUM EDUCATION
MID – Museum Communicators in Denmark, www.museumformidlere.dk ISSN 1904-1721, 2015
The publication is one result of the project The best of Nordic museum communication-fresh network approaches from Nordic associations of museum education (NAME) 2015. The project aims to launch a Nordic network of museum associations in the field of education and communication. The project partners: MID-Museum Communicators in Denmark, www.museumsformidlere.dk PEDAALI. The Finnish Association for Museum Education, www.pedaali.fi FISOS-Icelandic Museums Association, www.safnmenn.is THE SECTION FOR EDUCATION, Norwegian Museum Association, www.museumsforbundet.no FUISM-The Association for educational development in Swedish museums, www.fuism.se COVER PHOTO Museum Stavanger.