Heritage and Museums: scope, roles and responsibilities (original) (raw)
Related papers
Intangible Heritage and Museums: New and Old Challenges
CIDOC Icom International Committee for Documentation blog, 2017
Intangible heritage has become a buzzword nowadays, in part due to the visibility of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage (2003), which called our attention to the need of giving awareness to a living heritage, in constant modification, that is part of the identity of groups and communities and is transmitted from generation to generation. While many actors are called to take a stand on this matter, museums are among the heritage community organisations that can or could contribute to the safeguard of intangible heritage because museums are places of tangible and intangible heritage that safeguard our identity, our collective memory, our past and our present, and museums are about how we envision our future. Furthermore, museums are spaces of knowledge, where we can celebrate our cultural diversity: they are spaces of encounter and dialogue. Museums also have an educational function and a social role. Therefore, I would say that intangible heritage is embedded in the whole definition of museums; it’s at the heart and essence of what museums are or should be.
Making Differences: Transforming Museums and Heritage in the 21st Century
August: Article for Shanghai Museum Journal , 2018
‘Making Differences’ is the lead project of a new research centre that I established at the Institute of European Ethnology at the Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, in October 2015. This is the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage – CARMAH.1 Funded primarily by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, with further support from the Humboldt University, the Berlin Museum of Natural History, and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (which is responsible for Berlin’s national museums), CARMAH is, as far as I am aware, the world’s largest concentration of museum and heritage researchers taking a specifically anthropological approach. By this we mean that we work, on the one hand, in depth locally and usually ethnographically – to understand specific cases and actual practice on the ground; and, on the other, that we investigate comparatively and internationally. Bringing together these two levels of focus allows us to achieve an analysis that is attuned to institutional and national differences, while also able to identify and map broader dynamics of museums and heritage in the contemporary world. By doing so, our hope is to contribute new approaches to both the analysis and work of museums and heritage.
Museums, Heritage and International Development: A Critical Conversation
The impetus for this book came from a symposium that we organized at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam in September 2011. The symposium was the fi rst in a series that we envisaged under the rubric of 'Critical Conversations in Culture and Development'. While many claims have been made concerning the importance of culture in international development interventions, we were conscious that there was very little in the way of critical refl ection or evaluation of these claims. We were also conscious of the lack of understanding that often exists between the worlds of academic critique, policy making and development practice. Our objective, therefore, was to create a forum in which to bring together different stakeholders and interlocutors in an attempt to foster constructive dialogue and interchange. The challenges of bridging academic critique and theorization, on the one hand, and policy development and implementation, on the other, are well known, and it would be naïve of us to imagine that the meeting brought about any signifi cant breakthrough. We remain committed, however, to the idea that there is a need for such critical conversations: a need to explore, refl exively and dialogically, the relationships not only between different actors and their various perspectives but, even more so, the very concepts of culture and development.
Museums and heritage: a major issue in the UNESCO World Culture Report 2001
Museum International, 2001
Joining the so-called`information society' is a critical issue for cultural institutions, perhaps especially for the institutions most concerned with tangible and monumental cultural heritage, such as museums. Since the dawn of public interest in Internet communication networks, museums have had a proactive role to play in cyberculture. The discussion on virtual museums has revolved principally around the question of the categories of sites over the past few years, but it will be essential in the future to include the role of virtual museums on cultural knowledge in a way that will encompass other types of cultural content.
RESCUE – The British Archaeological Trust welcomes the publication of Understanding the Future: Museums and 21st century life as an opportunity to debate the role of museums at the beginning of the 21st century. We are particularly pleased to see commitments to the museums sector being made by ministers and look for these to be carried forward into practical policies which will reverse the chronic underfunding which has plagued the museum sector, and particularly the local and regional component of that sector, over the next few years. In our response to the discussion document we have sought to highlight a series of issues which affect the effectiveness of museums in carrying out their various tasks. Our concerns are focussed specifically on archaeology, but our comments may also have more general applicability
Community-based heritage organizations engage in a range of activities from establishing community archives to providing access to cultural and creative expression, the aim of which is to help shape the identity, and both preserve and promote the social and cultural history, of diverse groups. In terms of social justice, collaboration between museums and heritage organizations can begin to address issues of equity through questioning the partiality of the museum’s traditional narrative and expanding this through the inclusion of external, different, and potentially oppositional, voices. Collaborations can also serve to create parity between organizations of differing sizes, scale and scope. However, as the museum and the community-based heritage organization are distinctly and differently situated in the social and cultural landscape, variations in their mission and approach can create tensions during the collaborative process. This chapter will examine these tensions whilst questioning the potential and actual influence of the ‘margins’ on the ‘mainstream’. The benefits and drawbacks to partnership, and the challenges of working with the ‘mainstream’, will be interrogated through testimony drawn from discussion between four heritage sector practitioners who have worked collaboratively with museums. Although distinct positions are offered, this collective account can be considered as indicative of the state of the present relationship between the ‘margins’ and the ‘mainstream’.