Review Essay: Museoloy as Cultural Studies

I read this collection of 33 essays on museum studies with one large question in mind: does anthropology still have anything to contribute to this burgeoning field? I hoped that this collection might supply an answer, in part because several of the contributors are anthropologists, but mainly because its editor, Sharon Macdonald, is one of the best ethnographers of museums there is. Her interest in museums began through studying cultural heritage. In her case, it was fieldwork in the Scottish HighlandsFa place whose people are often in the business of representing themselves to others and who are therefore quintessentially reflective about the self-conscious nature of cultural production in a museumified world. Macdonald went on to do a wonderfully nuanced ethnography of a science museumFof how the experts and professionals in the museum decide on what stories to tell and how to tell them, and of how the visitors to such a museum respond to its messages. It is of course, the ethnographic approach to a topic that I would suggest anthropology can and does contribute to this or any field. But the collection is not primarily a compendium of the work of ethnographers. The group of scholars Macdonald brought together reflects the current makeup of museum studies as an interdisciplinary endeavor. Some of them work in museums. Most teach in museum studies departments or offer courses that cross over from their particular disciplines into museum studies, and while they are from different disciplines, they teach museum studies from the shared perspective that has come to be known as cultural studies. The central theme of cultural studies is that societies produce representations that have political implications. RepresentationFmaking a display, a film, a bookFhurts some people and helps others by naturalizing certain visions of the world and by privileging certain voices. It is the goal of cultural studies not only to bring into conscious awareness the extent of misrepresentation that occurs, but also to create representational space for silenced voices to be heard. Cultural studies is self-consciously democratizing. It exposes representation as elitist or exclusionary. As it stresses exaggeration and erasure in dominant cultural discourses and imagery, it encourages or even ventriloquizes the voices of the silenced. Needless to say, the desire for democratization, plus a queasy reflexivity about elitism via (mis)representation, are guiding concerns in what often is called ‘‘the new museology’’Fas Macdonald outlines in the Introduction. And the new museology is an extension of what those in the education departments of museums pretty much everywhere have been trying to do since they gained a foothold in museums. For a long time now, educators have thought of themselves as populists or reformersFin favor of opening up the museum; in favor of making it more relevant; opposed to closing it to all but the most enlightened, or to using it to protect and store treasure however such treasure is defined. So the agendas of education dovetail with those of cultural studies, but it also happens that cultural studies has also inserted itself into art and art history. There are many converging paths leading to the fact that museum studies itself might even now count as a branch of cultural studiesFa site for the practical and reflexive application of cultural theory. The chapters in the first section of the Companion, ‘‘Perspectives, Disciplines, Concepts,’’ lay out the basic themes. Rhiannon Mason’s essay on the basic premises of cultural theory, and how those premises are also basic to museum studies, is among the most succinct and accessible synopses I have encountered. Gordon Fyfe follows with a deft 51