Museums Narrating the Nation: Case Studies from Greece and Bosnia-Herzegovina (original) (raw)
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Representations of National Identity in Turkish and Bulgarian Museums (2001)
How should museums fulfil this educational role? For the Nigerian director-general of museums, Dr. Yaro T.Gella, their main function consists in emphasizing the importance of the nation, especially for countries who have been subject to colonial rule. A museum is both "the fruit of a people's history and a determinant of history", using its displays to communicate the indigenous ideas, values and systems that give meaning and order to people's lives (Kaplan 1992: 45). This can be accomplished through various methods; the chronological arrangement of exhibits that focus on ancient, as well as modern history (giving the impression that individual nations have existed for a long time); or the creation of displays that focus on key themes in a nation's history, both in the domestic and international fields. In this paper, I want to examine how these ideas have been put into practice, through a case-study of two museums - the Military Museum in İstanbul, and the Museum of National History in Sofia. There are two main purposes behind this case-study. In recent years, it has almost become mandatory that museums in the west should concentrate on the presentation and interpretation of cultural diversity (Lavine 1990: 155). The British government instructed state institutions to attract more visitors from ethnic minorities, or face a cut in funding - a directive that was only abandoned on the grounds of impracticality ("Ethnic museum" 2001: 2). By contrast, this paper will show that museum education in Turkey and Bulgaria has been designed to foster belief in a common culture, based on a single national identity. The second aim of this paper is to show how this involves a deliberate process of othering, as the museums in each country seek to suggest that their respective national identities have been forged out of cultural encounters between the two peoples. Such strategies are not 'biased' or 'prejudiced'; these terms are too crude for analyzing what is at stake, because they suggest a simple divergence from 'objectivity', which is in itself a disputed term. Through a deliberate arrangement of objects, accompanied by explanatory texts where appropriate, each institution creates a set of narrative discourses which approach the question of national identity from different, often contradictory perspectives.
National Museums in Serbia: A Story of Intertwined Identities
Foreword: A European Project, 2011
In our paper, we are analyzing five museums as the comparative objects of research aimed at exploring the processes of identity-and state-building in Serbia over the course of the last two centuries. These museums are: the National Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Yugoslav History, the Museum of African Art, and the Museum of the Victims of Genocide. We defined these museums in terms of the official interpretational discourses and the roles they perform in society both in synchronic and diachronic terms-the latter in particular often being expressed by a range of meanings and functions. These museums have been chosen for closer examination because they represent rather paradigmatic examples of both the institutions and narrative-producers, within the process of identity and state building in Serbia, which have been developed over the course of last two centuries. We analyzed the periods of nineteenth century nation-state building, as well as the twentieth century formation of Yugoslavia and the construction of socialism. Special attention, however, was put on contemporary Serbian society and the relationships between the museum protagonists and museum narratives. Surely, an integral part of the research includes a number of changes and transitions within museum policies and narratives, along with hidden, 'deaf' historical events or cultural phenomena that have not been represented in Serbian museums so far. The main analytical points and conclusions of the research are: the national museums in Serbia have played important roles within the complexity of representational discourse, which included the nation-building processes. Museum practices constructed national identity as a multifaceted entity, being based on a variety of perspectives: historical, archaeological, ethnological, anthropological, artistic and geographical. However, the museums have produced changeable visions of collective identity, mainly as a result of ideological and political context. Yet museum practices have not merely reflected certain ideological frameworks and political realities, but rather represented constitutive elements of ideological and political context. Secondly, our analysis is based on a wider understanding of the term 'national museum' and the explanation of the museum network in Serbia, as a complex, interdependent system of policies and narratives, which have a crucial role in the process of identity-building in Serbia. The network has been structured according to the simultaneity of several metanarratives: revolution, state-building, modernization/Europeanization, national authenticity/indigenousness, etc. Finally, our analysis shows that museum policies and narratives have been based on three general paradigms related to nation-and state-construction processes, each of them being heavily dependent upon interpretational discourse and firmly anchored to ideological and political context. The first one is the paradigm of exceptionalism and uniqueness; the second is the one that supports a rather mediatory concept of national identity, and the third paradigm establishes new interpretations of different historical processes.
Museums as a Means to (Re)Make Regional Identities: The Oltenia Museum (Romania) as Case Study
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In recent decades, ever more museums have begun to put a new emphasis on the education of the public, playing an important role in creating national or regional identities. This paper aims to assess the strategy chosen by the History Section of the Oltenia Museum in Craiova (Romania) to use knowledge, objects and narratives to create a sense of belonging and negotiate identities. Site visits, participant observations and discussions with museum curators, the analysis of texts and discourses were used in order to see if there is a master narrative related to regional identity and to determine the elements used to shape this identity. The results of this study point to the fact that there is an underlying master narrative of the exhibition, stressing the dominant understanding of Oltenia’s identity stemming mainly from cultural markers such as religion and language, while acknowledging wider European influences on the national and regional identity.
Qualestoria, 2024
Looking at three museums: in Zagreb – Croatian History Museum –, and in Belgrade – Historical Museum of Serbia and Museum of Yugoslavia –, we analyze institutional narrative shifts during the dissolution of the country and the Yugoslav wars, and since 2010 till today. Using critical discourse analysis, embedded in memory studies, we analyze museums’ websites, and catalogues, complemented with ethnographic visits. While in the socialist Yugoslavia national historical museums had limited impact, during the 1990s they became actors of conflict narratives in the war-affected States, focusing on exhibitions reinforcing ethno-nationalist discourses, preserving the same narrative to the present. On the contrary, the Museum of Yugoslavia serves as an example of ambivalent politics towards socialist heritage, placing itself as a paradoxical hegemonic countermemory actor.
Through the example of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Zemaljski Muzej Bosne i Hercegovine), its closure to the public between 2012 and 2015, and the different roles assigned to it, this paper identifies and focuses on two approaches in its analysis of the Museum’s current status. The first approach is concerned with cultural memory in the context of the competing national/ethnic/religious identities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The second approach highlights the role of culture and heritage in the formulation of new class distinctions. The paper proposes merging Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of class, fields of power and tastes as markers of social differences, within the context of increasing social inequalities in a post-socialist, post-conflict setting.
2012
For the purposes of EUNAMUS/Work Package 3, three cases studies from Greece were examined in order to illuminate various aspects pertinent to the broader theme of the project: i.e. how national identity is built and reinforced through reference to the past as well as the use of this past in national museum exhibitions. The three cases considered were: the first exhibition hosted at the National Historical Museum of Athens in 1884. The full title was ‘Exhibition of the Monuments of the Holy Struggle’ curated by the historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos. The second case study was the exhibition hosted at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens in 1964. The exhibition is commonly referred to as the ‘Sculptures Collection’, the curatorial work for this project was done by Christos Karouzos and his wife, Semni Karouzos. The ‘Neolithic Exhibition’ hosted at the Archaeological Museum of Volos, in Thessaly, Central Greece was also examined in detail. The exhibition opened in 1975 and ...
National Museums in Bulgaria: A Story of Identity Politics and Uses of the Past
2011
The history of Bulgarian national museums exposes several major realms of the past that received abundant representations and that have been used as sources of identity politics since the end of the nineteenth century. The interest in the archaeological heritage found in Bulgarian territory, the reassertion of medieval state glory through remnants of the Middle Ages, the glorification surrounding the national liberation struggle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the pride with the rich ethnographic and folklore heritage – were those cornerstones through which the nation portrayed itself as having got deep roots in the past and as bearing a ‘unique’ cultural specificity. The purpose of the current report is to trace – through the functionalization of these main historical realms – the construction and representation of national identity in Bulgarian museums from the late nineteenth century through the post-communist period. Based on analysis of the development of three ...
Museum as an institution has been, throughout history, inevitably connected with ideology, involved in establishing and shaping of cultural memory, and crea-tion and affirmation of collective identities, based on scientific knowledge and interpretation of the past. Nowadays, other, more effective media are involved in those processes, e.g. film, which is examined in the paper as such a medium. Also, museums and media have been used for spreading different prejudices and stereotypes – some of our identities are often based on such preju-dices, either about our own or somebody else’s past or present. Nevertheless, museum as an institution has an aura of highest authority, based on scientific knowledge and legitimized by museum collections. Museum is seen as trustworthy, unbiased and objective. Such privileged status of museums is argued and contested, and the complexities of museum discourse are traced through critical analysis of the current policy of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and this muse-um’s participation in the production of a movie Night at the Museum (2006). As part of a “global village,” museum visitors are impacted by certain stereotypical images circulating within and outside of museums, which are a dense package of ideas (rooted in science, folklore, ide-ology, politics, etc.) that thrive in cultural memory and collective imagination. These are constructed and circu-lated as commonsense or consensus narratives, en-trenched in the minds of the public, and they can take hold persistently against current scientific opinions. Mass media images that museum visitors bring with them to the museum are inevitably shaping their inter-pretations of exhibitions. What happens then, when a museum gets involved with Hollywood industry? What are the consequences of such an interaction? This pa-per’s aim is to shed some light on those consequences in the particular case of the AMNH. Keywords: museum discourse, popular culture, collective identities, the image of the Other, American Museum of Natural History, Night at the Museum.