Ideas versus things: the balancing act of interpreting historic house museums

Christensen, Kim

doi:10.1080/13527258.2011.541068

Cited by 15 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Home museums can and sometimes do offer spaces that will challenge the traditional public and private, male and female division, or even acknowledge the historical nullification of women, their choices and their voices. One example discussed by Christensen (2011), about the design of the Matilda Joslyn Gage 9 house, shows that is it ‘more than possible to utilize household material culture to deal with contentious … historical subjects …, and … contemporary social issues’ (p. 164), at the center of which is women’s struggle for equality. The 1998 revelation of DNA tests which confirmed that the third President of the USA, Thomas Jefferson, and Sally Hemings, one of the enslaved workers on his estate, had had children together 10 is another case in point.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Representing women’s work and rest at home does not imply a more balanced presentation of their experience (Mayo, 2003). Whether the society involved sanctifies the family or not, gender ideology as well as home museums’ tendency to show nostalgic, apolitical domesticity (Christensen, 2011) might explain the similar symbolic emphasis on domesticity which rests on unequal gender roles in the museums we studied.…”

Section: Making Room Making Home: Men Woman and Home Museumsmentioning

confidence: 97%

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Moving gender: Home museums and the construction of their inhabitants

Vinitzky‐Seroussi

Dekel

2019

European Journal of Women's Studies

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Home museums in Israel and Germany produce a representational space in which the public figure, usually a ‘great man,’ is effectively ‘dragged home’ to the so-called private sphere so as to make the domestic worthy of musealization. Based on three years of ethnographic research in nine such museums (four in Israel and five in Germany), this article shows that when the sphere most identified with women is represented through the life and work of the men who lived there, the place of the wife and children is sidelined, belittled, and at times concealed. In representing famous persons through material space and objects in the private abode, museal techniques determine which specific domestic areas, such as the kitchen and the bedroom, become the prime location of telling stories about women who lived in the house. They provide a shared perspective for visitors who find the stories about the wives endearing, recognizing home through them.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Making Room Making Home: Men Woman and Home Museumsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Moving gender: Home museums and the construction of their inhabitants

Vinitzky‐Seroussi

Dekel

2019

European Journal of Women's Studies

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“…(2) questions in regards to the kinds of ideas on history and historical progression house museums create and perpetuate (see, for instance, Bann, 2000;Bruner, 1994;Casey, 2003;Dicks, 2000;Handler, Saxton, 1988;Mills, 2003;Schwartz, 1996); (3) issues of social consequence, such as the portrayal of gender, class, and race in museum narratives or issues of depolitization in museum narratives (Beranek, 2011;Christensen, 2011;Dicks, 2000;MacLeod, 2006;Pendlebury et al, 2004;Terry, 2008;. Some of these themes overlap.…”

Section: Defining a Historic House Museummentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The authors who consider HHM work as a political act examine the kinds of consequences this use of heritage produces for the public's understanding and normalization of meanings and ideas pertaining to communal history and community (Dicks, 2000;Waterton, E., Watson, S., 2011;West, 1999), power relations, social class, and labor (Dicks, 1997(Dicks, , 1999Shackel, 2001), culture, race, and identity (MacLeod, 2006;Pendlebury et al, 2004;Terry, 2008), and gender (Beranek, 2011;Christensen, 2011;Peacock, 2011;Terry, 2013). Although some research from this point of view had been done prior to 2006, the book Uses of Heritage by Laurajane Smith, published that year, is considered to be foundational to the development of this body of work, along with Rodney Harrison's (2013) Heritage: Critical Approaches.…”

Section: Historic House Museums and Issues Of Political And Social Consequencementioning

confidence: 99%

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Sense of the past: historic house museums in Toronto, Canada, as forms of an urban heterotopia

Naumova¹

2021

Preprint

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Historic house museums allow for reconceptualization of the meaning of tangible objects around us. We establish this new relationship with materiality through our sensory bodies. We conceive of ourselves differently and allow ourselves to move and behave in ways that are not acceptable in the world outside of the museum. We perform our new selves with permission granted by the sense of place that cannot be understood other than through embodied experience–of things, of selves, of the environment that brings it all together. In the coming together of all these elements in the immediate, intimate present, the notion of the past is defined as cultural heritage as mediated through the historic house museum curatorial work and space. I approach historic house museums as socially created and lived kinds of spatiality and sites of social practices and focus on the experiences of people that spend considerable amounts of time there–the museum staff. As a researcher, I have inserted myself within the environment of a historic house museum and attempted to open it to social inquiry through various ways of being within it–observing, writing, interviewing, interacting, sensing, entering it and leaving it. I have carried out a form of phenomenological ethnography, which included a two-year autoethnographic study at the Mackenzie House Museum, in Toronto, Canada, where I volunteered in the position of an interpreter and a historic cook; 24 participant observation visits to other historic house museums in Toronto; and 13 in-depth unstructured interviews with museum staff from various historic house museum sites in the city. The three methods addressed the key conceptual clusters–emplacement, materiality, and performance, which form three analytical chapters of the dissertation. The dissertation positions historic house museums as forms of heterotopia that function as contestations of the accepted spatial, social, and temporal norms within an urban environment. These museums come forth as attempted reconstructions of anthropological places, in the form of domestic sites that assert significance of material manifestations of familial relations and historical heritage. These sites are immersive environments bridge the gap in the current experience of body, time, and space.

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Visitor attraction management: A critical review of research 2009–2014

Leask

2016

Tourism Management

101

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Ideas versus things: the balancing act of interpreting historic house museums

Cited by 15 publications

References 25 publications

Moving gender: Home museums and the construction of their inhabitants

Moving gender: Home museums and the construction of their inhabitants

Sense of the past: historic house museums in Toronto, Canada, as forms of an urban heterotopia

Visitor attraction management: A critical review of research 2009–2014

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