Thinking about others through museums and heritage

As one of the first civic, public spaces to represent heritage through the display of collections that were meant to encapsulate at the same time the world and the nation, museums have always been involved in the business of constructing and representing relations between ourselves in relation to others. It is thus not surprising that the emergence of the ‘critical turn’ in the new humanities during the 1980s under the influence of cultural theory — in anthropology, sociology and art history, in history and in archaeology — included museums within its field of critical vision, given the ways in which these, too, were involved in the production of knowledge using the very same disciplinary bases as the ‘old humanities’. Like the old humanities, museums were critiqued for their associations with colonialism, for their hegemonic functions, for their practices of ‘othering’ minority groups, for their maintenance of elite cultural values and for the creation of a canon. As Rhiannon Mason (2011, pp. 74–5) reflects in an essay dealing with the influence of cultural theory on museum studies, ‘[i]t should come as little surprise, then, that the museum — an institution that actively seeks to display multiple cultures and mark out differences — should have become a site of prime interest for those interested in cultural theory’.