Museums are memory institutions. They serve to collect, study, preserve and mediate to the public culturally valuable objects related to human beings and their living environment. They bolster the formation of social, communal and family identities; they function as public memory institutions, supporting education and scientific research and, of course, museums provide entertainment and recreation. In this article, we look at museums from the perspective of heritage studies, and for our analysis, we use the following three dimensions: heritage objects, levels of society and processes of heritage management. Our objective is to present a conceptual framework which would highlight more clearly the connections between heritage and museums and which would lay a foundation for interlinking some theoretical concepts from heritage studies and museology and help to improve practical heritage management.
Museums and heritage are closely, if not inextricably, linked. A museum’s connection with heritage has always been one of the important features that defines it. At the same time, the relationships between various heritage institutions and their links with broader heritage paradigms have not been sufficiently researched. Since the second half of the 20th century, the number of objects and phenomena considered to be heritage has dramatically increased. Museums endeavor to keep pace with these changes, and thus more new museums are being established and the range of collection items is expanding.
For a long time, discussions of museums encompassed only national-level museums. This is due to the fact that national museums are the oldest of such institutions to have emerged, and on the other hand, it is museums at the national level that have attained the most influential position in the heritage landscape. At the same time museologists have paid rather scant attention to museum institutions at other levels. Private museums and personal collections have not received sufficient museological consideration even though they form a significant amount of social heritage and are the most natural to people, and often the most important for them too. Likewise, community and local government memory institutions have only recently become of interest to museology, which is also the case even in the context of world heritage. All activities connected to heritage may be summed up with the term ’heritage management’. Heritage management incorporates principles and practices connected to the identification, preservation, documentation, interpretation and presentation of objects of historical, natural, scientific or other interest. The processes of heritage management can be grouped according to their focus: object-based, value-based and people-centered. These approaches do not follow a specific chronological order and are not necessarily exclusive of one another. Although they come in a certain chronological sequence, all the approaches are currently used depending on the context and purpose of the inquiry. These approaches reflect an increasingly more comprehensive and integrated treatment of heritage management.
People-centered heritage management is a dynamic social process which necessarily includes diverse perspectives on the value of the heritage. Museums have made much better progress in producing multi-perspective views than heritage conservation has by comparison. One of the reasons is that the museum field is not as rigidly defined by law or regulated by bureaucracy as heritage conservation is.
Heritage management consists of a continuous re-creation of the heritage, and here again, museums are the places where such re-creations characteristically occur. It is in museums that we continually place objects in new contexts and examine how that impacts people. Each exhibition is a new interpretation of the object, offering a treatment of it from a novel perspective. In fact the exact same process takes place with regard to all other heritage objects and phenomena, but perhaps within less controllable and observable contexts.
A key issue for heritage management is the introduction of sustainable and more inclusive management methods. Museological theory and museum practice offer several examples here. People must be involved in the management of heritage at each stage, starting from the definition of what it precisely is and ending with its interpretation. It is important to develop and implement relevant practices. The idea of a participatory museum has made significant gains in this direction.
People-centered heritage management entails, above all, the creation of future-oriented values and meanings. In a sense, the perspective must shift from the past to the future. Heritage is not a thing of the past, but of the future. It is a social and cultural resource that forms the basis for our plans for the future. We believe that this is the primary function of the heritage. Heritage management is the reinterpretation of contemporary social and cultural realities by using interpretations of the past selected for this purpose. Its objective is to change the present into a desirable future. Here it is important to take into account different types of heritage as well as different levels of society. Heritage stories must be like a symphony that incorporates all the participants from all of the different levels of society.
Decentering the Status Quo : The Rhetorically Sanctioned Political Engagement of Groen van Prinsterer
