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From Ethnology to Heritage: The Role of the Museum
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Short Description: B Kirshenblatt-Gimblett - Entre Autres/Among Others: Proceedings of SIEF …, 2005 - nyu.eduDuring the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was a close fit between
ethnology as a knowledge formation, collections, and museums, whether museu
Content Inside: SIEF Keynote, Marseilles, April 28, 2004. To appear in the conference proceedings, 2005. ==========================================================
From Ethnology to Heritage: The Role of the Museum Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was a close fit between ethnology as a knowledge formation, collections, and museums, whether museums of natural history, museums of ethnology or V�lkerkunde or Volkskunde or les arts et traditions populaires. The museum was the home for these fields, indeed for any field whose research produces and requires collections, including archaeology, biology, and geology, among others. During the twentieth century and especially after World War II, the situation changed, as the knowledge formations, in our case ethnology, moved into the university, leaving their collections behind. Museum became custodians of the collections of outmoded scientific disciplines. In reinventing themselves, museums have become agents of "heritage." My remarks are organized around the following themes: � � � � � Heritage is metacultural Tangible and intangible heritage Repudiation as an enabling condition Ethnology's heritage Museum's heritage
Heritage is metacultural I define heritage as a mode of cultural production that has recourse to the past and produces something new. Heritage as a mode of cultural production adds value to the outmoded by making it into an exhibition of itself. Central to my argument is the notion that heritage is created through metacultural operations that extend museological values and methods (collection, documentation, preservation, presentation, evaluation, and interpretation) to living persons, their knowledge, practices, artifacts, social worlds, and life spaces. Heritage professionals use concepts, standards, and regulations to bring cultural phenomena and practitioners into the heritage sphere, where they become metacultural artifacts, whether "Living National Treasures" or "Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity." At the same time, the performers, ritual specialists, and artisans whose "cultural assets" become heritage through this process experience a new relationship to those assets, a metacultural relationship to what was once just habitus. Habitus refers here to the taken for granted, while heritage refers to the self-conscious selection of valued objects and practices. The power of heritage is precisely that it is curated, which is why heritage is more easily harmonized with human rights and democratic values than is culture. UNESCO stipulates that only those aspects of culture that are compatible with such values can be considered for world heritage designation.
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