Digging into Downstairs: Exhibiting Domestic Service

cultureunbound.ep.liu.se

This article explores how national histories are constructed in the museums of Norway. It does so through a comparative perspective, whereby museum displays of national past in Norway are being compared to museum displays of national past in the People's Republic of China. This will involve comparing narratives, museological approaches, rationale and purposes of museum displays in the two countries. Fieldwork research in museums in Norway and China suggests that if national pasts are obviously unique to the historical trajectories of each country, their museum renditions are structured in an intriguingly similar way. Museum displays of national pasts in Norway develop around a set of themes including myths of ancestry and descent; epics of resistance leading the embryonic nation through a dark era and towards a "Golden Age"; a core of moral and aesthetic values; notions of national modernity; and selective amnesia. I will show how similar topics can be found in museum displays of the past in Chinese museums. The comparative perspective of the analysis enables me to assess the uniqueness of museum representations of the past in Norway and at the same time to explore analogies in the museum construction of national narratives beyond the European context, through the case study of China. This will lead me to put forward the hypothesis of the coagulation, at international level, of a canon for the museum representation of national history.

2007

formulated. Protestantism might be one of the explanations for the "backwardness" of the British and Dutch art museums, compared to those in other countries. * This article presents one subject related to my ongoing research into several aspects of the National Gallery (London) in the 19th century. I would like to thank Gary Thorn (Archives British Museum, London); Isobel Siddons, Jessica Collins, Alan Crookham (all Archives National Gallery, London). This is an adaptation of my article: E. Bergvelt, 'The process of modernization of 19th-century art museums. The national museums in the

2008

Sápmi, en nasjon blir til is the first exhibition ever made taking the stand to present the social-history of an indigenous political movement, by visualizing elements of a national discourse about ethnicity and assimilation, in which the main focus is not "material culture" nor art objects. By discourse I utilize Foucault's French philosophical and political definition of "discours" (1995) intended here not as purely verbal-oral construction, but as institutional and material practice. When I first visited Tromsø University as guest lecturer in 1993, I immediately became acquainted with the distinctive Norwegian term "Formidling" (Mediation of Knowledge). The paradox of such term is that it means different concepts in the languages I know (some Latin languages but also in English) and it is hard to find an allfit translation for it: it must be understood in context. Sometimes as "mediation", sometimes as "dissemination", others as "interpretation" and even as "negotiation". One thing is plausible: it is a core concept in Scandinavian academic practices of production of social scientific knowledge. Still, it triggers scholars to explore its meaning. It is a strong theoretical stand of a certain Norwegian social anthropology. In this way the aim of my fieldwork at Tromsø Museum is to gather and analyze examples of contextualization and to reflect upon how representation is affected by it. Moreover, this can become a reflection about how inclusive or exclusive for different audiences, such "museal" cultural politics may be. For this aim, I start by analyzing failures and scores of existing projects, in order to provide a lively representation of these practices, which connect academics with civil society at large, not in general terms, but in the analysis of dynamics that researchers, social actors and specific audiences create together when they encounter and react to these representations: an inclusive and dialogical practice from one and side and a constructive, strident or simply dialectical critique on the other side. These are important aspects because they provide the context to understand further how meaning is made beyond the commodity "exhibition", and how it is transformed or negotiated/omitted/exalted, etc. Moreover, manifold narratives are elicited through the meeting with the audience. These representations are context-of-reception dependant. A scrutiny of the modalities of these meetings, from the fieldwork's reflective practices, to the feed back sessions with social actors; from follow up exhibitions or productions of new media (books, films, catalogues, etc.) to surveys and monitoring of the exhibitions themselves, from local-national discursive debates, to transnational discursive representations, is my research's agenda.

Museum Making. Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions, 2012

Current Swedish Archaeology, 2010

In the late rgth century, the new Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm was a cutting-edge institution for the presentation of ideas of a universal human development from primitive to modernideas that were at the heart of the European colonial project. We argue that the archaeological collections with their unaltered Tgth-century structures still represent a narrative that reproduces a colonial understanding of the world, a linear arrangement of essential cultural groups according to a teleological development model. Contrary to this, the contemporary mission of the Museum, inspired by the late z, oth-century postcolonial thinking, is directed towards questioning this particular narrative. This problematic relationship is thus present deep within the structure of the Museum of National Antiquities as an institution, and it points to the need for long-term strategic changes to make the collections useful for vital museum activity in accordance with the Museum's mission.

Historic House Museums in the US and the UK: A History, 2017

This book shows how the museum-presentation of homes embodies an agenda of exemplary politics. It argues that the act of transforming a house into a museum – museumization in shorthand – introduces the distinctive ‘museum way of seeing’: the objectification of the house and all it contains and refers to, relative to the visitor. Thus the house museum projects a purposeful story into the public sphere, usually in a national frame of reference, or sometimes in the microcosm of the local. The conventional domestic scope of the house emerges as the vehicle of larger narratives about the character of the nation or the locality. In practice, a visit to a house museum produces knowledge grounded in the common experience of home, which contributes to collective identity and affirms national or local characteristics. Thus house museums make the abstractions of nation personal, material, visible and visitable in the familiar form of home. Visitors actively choose (or may decline) to identify with the presentation, and to acknowledge (or not) a shared heritage. This agenda, I argue, is the major frame of house museums in the transnational Anglo tradition.

in Naguib S. et al. (eds) Patterns of Cultural Valuation. Priorities and Aesthetics in Exhibitions of Identity in Museums, Special Issue ARV Nordic Yearbook of Folklore, 67, p.13-36., 2011

Nordisk Museologi

In 1973, the exhibition entitled Samekulturen (The Sámi Culture) opened its doors to the public for the first time, and for over forty years this exhibition has served as an important arena for the dissemination of Sámi culture to tourists, students and other visitors. Exhibitions have social and political consequences. Samekulturen as a social actor that contributes to the production of knowledge is the point of departure for this paper. In the view of the museological and ethno-political contexts in which Samekulturen was produced, the exhibition will be analysed as a historical document revealing how museological practices related to the representation of the Sámi have evolved over time.

In this paper I will address museum architecture as mnemonic device. I will draw on observations made in an interview with a curator at Norway’s National Gallery and make a theoretical speculation. I will argue that museum buildings gives rise to corresponding spatial constructs in the mind of professionals and are used to organise and locate cultural artefacts and collections. The architectural order, when internalised in memory, serves as a way-finding tool; its role for the thinking mind is akin to that of chapters and sections in books. Classifications of art according to periods, genres, and artists, or to collections, exhibitions, and discourses, and affiliations with the spaces may be used to bring to mind other artworks or associated sources of information: books, periodicals, sketches, manuscripts, photographs, films, etc. By analogy with the antique art of memory, an art in which arguments for speeches were memorised by placing suggestive images in spaces already committed to memory, I suggest to regard the use of museum architecture as an art of cultural memory.