The Politics of Museums

Concerns about the source of items in museum collections following the abstraction of material from, and the outright pillaging of, sites of antiquity in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Cambodia and China have certainly demonstrated that the heated arguments about the Elgin marbles in the United Kingdom and the remains of Kennewick Man in the United States have not produced conclusive solutions to such concerns, even if they have contributed to the production of present-day international codes of conduct to cover such events. Being political, however, involves more than the simple presence of matters of contention — it also involves the mechanisms by which these may be resolved, who is rightfully involved in producing such resolutions, and the basis upon which they can then be justified to local, national and international communities. To this extent it is not the fact that museums are political institutions that is important but, rather, how this political dimension of museums can be understood and made sense of. This book is centrally concerned with providing explanations of the multiple ways in which museums are political, ranging from their relationship to globalisation and post-colonialism, to how policy choices are made within individual museums, to the role of professionals and members of the public in influencing what occurs inside both the museum itself as well as the museums sector as a whole.

Museums and galleries do not exist independently of the societies that they are a part of. Equally, they do not exist independently of the wider patterns of thought, argument, expectation and belief that are to be found at the international level of organisation and action (Sylvester, 2009, 3–6). These international factors have an important part to play in the establishment of legitimations for the variety of museum practices and customs in different countries and regions of the world, as well as in providing justifications and rationalisations for the entire museum enterprise: Duncan (1995, 16), for example, argues that ‘through most of the nineteenth century, an international museum culture remained firmly committed to the idea that the first responsibility of a public art museum is to enlighten and improve its visitors morally, socially and politically’, thus providing a purpose and focus for museums that was rooted in an accepted set of ideas that were commonly shared. In practice, the world of museums today is neither simply the product of some basic human need to collect and exhibit material that is meaningful to groups and societies, nor simply the result of some evolutionary development that can be explained as leading, in the traditionally Whiggish fashion, to a continually better set of collections, patterns of display, conservation techniques, exhibition and labelling.

Chapter 2 focused primarily on the difficulties of creating an internationally agreed arena within which common questions about museums could be debated and commonly acceptable solutions to these questions could be found. Inevitably this involved discussion not of the actual questions themselves but, instead, of the complex nature of the structures and processes that underpin the search for international agreement in the museums sector. If nothing else the chapter demonstrated that the international politics of museums and the museums sector are largely associated with a host of issues and problems that are not specifically concerned with the functioning of museums themselves but, rather, with much more far-reaching matters, such as post-colonialism, globalisation and community recognition. Apart from those areas of museum functioning that are dominated by professional interests based upon largely technical ideas about appropriate behaviour and practice, this has meant that it has proved difficult to establish much in the way of effective guidance or agreement about what museums should be doing, how they should be doing it, and what purposes might be seen to be worthwhile ones for museums to pursue.

While there are numerous pressures at work on museums that arise from both the international and the national levels of action, they all require managing at the local level of the individual museum. Despite the fact that many of these pressures operate at a level of generality that is far removed from everyday museum practice, and despite the fact that national and international political actors generally have little in the way of direct, hands-on, control over what occurs within individual museums, these external pressures cannot be simply ignored or wished away by museums staff. Instead, they establish a set of exogenously determined structural constraints that surround the decision opportunities available to museums staff. How these pressures are managed within museums forms the focus of this chapter which examines the nature of the interplay between specifically local matters affecting museums — ranging from patterns of accountability and control within individual museums, to the hierarchical and professional structure of the museum work force, to the functional roles that local museums are expected to fulfil — and the exogenous constraints within which these local matters are played out. The role of power within and over museums, the legitimation strategies that are made use of by different political actors and the ideological understandings that underpin political activity at the level of the individual museum provide the framework for making sense of how these complex relationships affect what occurs at the level of the everyday museum practices that the public is confronted with in their relationships with museums — whether as visitors or not.

The previous chapters have demonstrated that museums not only have a political dimension but that they are inescapably political. It is difficult, if not actually impossible, to deny the impact that forms of political engagement and activity have for the ways in which museums function, what they are both expected to do and actually undertake, what they provide for the various groups and individuals that are associated with them, and what the consequences of their existence are for the societies within which they are located. Each of these concerns is intimately connected to key political concepts of power, legitimacy and ideology and are worked through via mechanisms of political rationality and justification. It is also the case that the role played by these concepts takes different forms and involves different sets of actors according to which geographical perspective is adopted, with the international, national and local politics of museums operating in quite distinct fashions from each other. This final chapter brings together the arguments that have been earlier developed to establish a series of general conclusions that assess the ways in which these central political concepts can be used to make sense of the questions concerning the ‘who’, ‘which’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ of museum politics.