Settoriali - museums

Heritage and the heritage industry

The heritage industry is a leisure service often concerned with marketing ephemeral images of the past. The emergence of this service is part of a wider service-class culture, which developed during the 1980s. Heritage is used to support the construction of national identities (e.g., in England → stately homes and industrial sites).

Past conception of time and history

Time has not always been based on the idea of progress. In the Middle Ages, the concept of time was very different: it was basically a destructive force which implied also an iconographic point of view. People could barely date their letters. Its representation was very similar to the representation of death (hourglass, scythe, or sickle).

The actual representation of time is a late conquest that began in the XVIII century, a period when a new historical perspective of time emerged. This perspective was founded on the inevitability of human progress and technology to transform its knowledge. This progress is achieved by the destruction of previous times. This is evident from a number of publications from the late XVIII century, that expressed a single thought of Nicolas de Condorcet in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of Human Mind.

Another concept is the idea that in pre-industrial society the concept of time and memory was of a very different nature: time was closely related to territory or community. It meant that the territory itself with its landmarks had the function as a help for the memory and that were important for ancestral traditions which were transmitted orally from generation to generation. At the same time, people found a sort of physical evidence in these landmarks. So, this produced what is generally referred to as organic memory.

Organic memory is related to this idea of rooting in the territory and collective sharing: it's the memory shared by the community. What industrialization induces, through the following century, is a very rapid, abrupt, almost violent, change in people's lifestyles. The major one was urbanization that introduced the passage from the idea of community to society. It generated negative feelings, like the sense of loss and nostalgia, and it is connected to heritage.

Industrialization is based on the idea of technological progress. Progress is reflected in the work of the economist Adam Smith (1776), which is a milestone in The Wealth of Nations history of economics. In it, the belief that people are naturally selfish is articulated; each of us pursues our interests. This idea derives from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who had previously claimed in 1651 that man is wolf to man (homo homini lupus). But Adam Smith affirmed that our selfishness efforts to improve our conditions, so the individuals should be free, shouldn't be restrained, inhibited by unnatural, artificial limits. In this way, economy and society would develop naturally, as a natural process, in the interest of everybody. This idea was very influential, and we can find it at the bases of the Victorian thought. Victorian people embraced this idea, and they thought they could find also a scientific base and evidence of this in Darwin's evolution theory.

Epistemology and social development

Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that studies the epistemic scientific method we use to understand reality. In the late XIX century, intellectuals used it as a sort of warranty for scientific rigor. This episteme was applied also to a number of other disciplines. This idea of evolution was applied to the ideas of the development of societies.

How did you date the objects? That was a major problem at the time, so the evolutionary episteme contributed to the early ideas of social development. It isn't an accident that from the late XVIII century the modern disciplines of history and archeology were led, and the first history book was written by Leopold Von Ranke, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations (1824). Ranke's aim was to represent the past as it really was, in a very honest way, to discover what really happened. His idea was to construct a narration of the past, on the basis of the evidence provided by available manuscripts and available archeological finds.

The second author is Thomas Babington Macaulay, who wrote The History of England from the Accession of James the Second (1848). Again, this is a proof of the discipline of history. Of course, along with history, the other discipline was archeology. The teaching of history and archeology at the university developed in the XIX century. Archeology was a new conquest because, in earlier times, archeologists didn't space so much from antiquarians. The difference between them was that archeology emphasizes the use of artifacts and archeological findings within the evolutionary understanding of human progress.

Development of archeology

A very early example of this is the work of Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, who was the first curator of the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen (in 1816). He was the first to arrange collections systematically, on the basis of the Three-Age System, a linear development scheme of technological change moving from the use of stone artifacts to bronze and ultimately iron.

What is interesting is that this careful model of human progress was applied also to the observation of the present so there was a strong belief developed at the time that the cultures of different people could be compared measuring their individual development up against a universal standard model of human progress (the line). So the idea was that human nature is the same irrespective of different races, but every culture has developed to different degrees.

These studies were based on ethnographic data (observation and scientific description of different cultures, costumes, habits) that were gathered from around the world by explorers and missionaries. Ethnographic data seemed to provide scientific evidence of different statuses of development and therefore produced a form of institutionalized racism.

Since the late XIX century, archeology and history have been used as supportive evidence of the superiority of the white people and the most disastrous, catastrophic application of this derived from the works of Gustav Kossinna, an archeologist. His archeological research was on the origins of Germanic people, and it was used in the Nazi ideology. According to Kossinna, the territories where artifacts have been found, that he considered Germanic, were part of the Germanic territories, and on the basis of the scientific evidence, he argued, for example, that Poland should be part of the German empire.

The development of museum – The cabinets of curiosities

The early forms of museums were the Cabinets of Curiosities. It is in the 15th and 16th centuries that we can observe the emergence of these proto-museums. They showed private collections and, apparently, they were considered very prestigious, and this is the reason why philosopher Francis Bacon in 1594 said that no gentleman should be without a cabinet. Such cabinets seemed full of random objects, and it seems to us that this huge diversity denies a serious scientific intent.

This early conception of the museum was born in the Renaissance and conceived as a display of a private collection of exotic objects gathered all around the world. This collection was designed to signify the importance of the owner. These objects were arranged not so much using a chronological order, but on the basis of formal correspondences, analogies, similarities.

That time was when new spaces and new species were discovered, so these cabinets became a sort of catalog of this opening world: our vision has extended very rapidly, and therefore the emphasis was on the ability of man to know and discover the world. These cabinets of curiosities are a sort of microcosms, a microcosmic reproduction of the huge world.

The first proto-museums were constituted for the unique benefit of the family who owned them, and for the family, these cabinets were means of acquiring prestige and renown. They were ways to attempt to represent the world and its order as it was perceived by the owner and therefore they were an attempt to represent nothing else than the universality. There were preserved animals, skeletons, minerals, corals, samples from exotic locations. Each object was cataloged and, to be able to label and name an object, it needed to know it and understand its position in the world.

Institutional collections

In the 17th century, a major change occurred, represented by the origin of institutional collections, which are an intermediate form between the previous cabinets of curiosities and the public museum. The main difference between the institutional collections and the previous ones was that the destiny of the objects was not linked to the destiny of the family.

An example of an institutional collection is the Royal Society, which opened its museum in 1666. In Britain, the modern museum movement, which developed later, has a foundation in this institutional collection, owned not by a family but by philosophical and literary society: at the time intellectuals were supposed to be polymaths, people who knew more than one discipline at the same time. The objects collected by the Royal Society were especially of the period after the Napoleon wars, the time of the enlargement of the Empire. This collection usually consisted of objects not taken by explorers but by common people and travelers with interest in geology, natural history, antiquities, and ethnography. These objects were donated to the Society, and they came from both the Empire and the so-called "informal Empire" (countries that were not part of the Empire but under British economic and financial influence). This meant that there were almost limitless resources for these early museums.

Public museum

England's first public museum was the Ashmolean in Oxford, a very early example because it was opened in 1683, and in actuality, the public museum as a massive phenomenon was not characteristic of this age. This museum was specifically built in a house and it displayed the collection of the family and Elias Ashmole, but it was regularly opened to the public. Furthermore, it was organized so that the University of Oxford could use it for teaching people. It might be considered a precursor to the establishment of the British Museum.

The British Museum inaugurates the phenomenon of the public museums in England, and it was created by an Act of Parliament in 1753. The British Museum had a very slow development: at the beginning, it was a sort of cabinet of curiosities. During its formative years, the entry was restricted to 60 visitors a day; however, this number increased to 120 at the beginning of the 19th century, and finally, the daily opening was introduced in 1879.

What really boosted this phenomenon was the famous acquisitions of the Elgin Marbles in 1814-15, that gave the museum an important international reputation in the field of classical antiquities. It was Thomas Bruce who brought these marbles (parts of the Parthenon in Athens). At the time Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire, and apparently, the Turks used to burn all the crumbling sculptures and architectures they found in Greece in order to produce lime and construct buildings. So Thomas Bruce saved the Elgin by bringing them to London.

The aim of the public museums and of the British Museum in particular was again the ordering and understanding of the world. This need was strictly related to the enlarging of the Empire: it was a way to show the prestige of the Empire, it became a celebration of the British Empire as the master of the world.

The rest of the country: North of England

The North of the Country was the part involved in the process of industrialization (Manchester, Liverpool...), which meant population growth and urbanization. The living condition was very hard to bear, so an attempt was made to improve it, and this effort resulted in a strong civic pride. This Victorian civic pride manifested itself in various ways, but the most evident was the construction of public buildings such as splendid town-halls, for example in Birmingham and Manchester, which were both begun in 1832.

Another way which the civic pride manifested itself was the institution of public parks, modern public spaces and public libraries. Museums and public libraries began to appear more and more in large, organized towns, and this was partly due to the effort of William Ewart. He was a liberal member of Parliament who encouraged the development of them, and it was thanks to him that the Museum Act became law in 1845. This act gave town councils the power to establish public museums, and this meant that various philosophical societies transferred their collections to them. The real first museum boom occurred in the second half of the 1800s: from 90 museums in 1860 to nearly 180 in 1880.

In addition to the Museum Act, there was another major element which encouraged this development: the Education Act (1870), that introduced universal education for children between the ages of 5 and 14. This meant that the culture level of the population as a whole increased. However, museums were never successfully popular with the lower classes, but they became very popular with the enlarging middle class. So museums reinforced the national consciousness of the British, the national identity, and allowed the education of the middle class.

Conquest of space

The conquest of space started at the end of the Renaissance, and by the 19th century, the world was finally rebuilt and the conquest of space was largely over, so there was no longer the idea of unknown space, everything was already known and measured. This gradual conquest of space meant the development of more and more accurate, sophisticated maps, in other words, there was the need for the objective representation of space. This conquest of space, therefore, was of paramount importance. Time as well was a dimension which needed an objected, indisputable measurement; an accurate measurement and standardization of time was seen as functional to a model of society.

So besides the conquest of space, we have the conquest of time. The factories required workers to observe strict timetables. So both industrialization and the advent of railways in Britain meant that a national standard time was required. Before the advent of the railways in 1840 (beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution), time measurement varied from town to town, but railways timetables required the imposition of a standardized time and rigid timekeeping across the country. The railways should adopt Greenwich time.

The topic of this discourse is the idea that museum displays were ordered indisputable representations of time, of past times. This allowed another form of understanding and control over the unfolding of time.

Preservation of heritage

In Britain, the movement to the establishment of the governmental bodies, public bodies responsible for the archeological and historical environment was a very gradual process. The awareness was: there is a problem, and so find a way to solve it. The development of this awareness for the need to preserve heritage was very gradual. It is symptomatic of this difficulty that in 1882 the Ancient Monument Protection Act was published. This act was the first law which protected heritage in Britain; it was a long process because it was discussed and debated for 10 years. This long discussion was determined by the opposition of many tourists and liberals, who perceived preservationism as an attack on the right of private property. (If I am a landowner and I own a huge, marvelous country house, I want to be able to do whatever I want without preservation laws: if I meant to dismember it, I want to be free to do it).

This group argued that these monuments were already protected by landowners and if these monuments were not protected it meant that they were not important. Generally, preservationism grew very rapidly in the later half of the 19th century, especially in the awareness of the middle classes. This meant that at the end of the century another preservation group originated. And these preservation groups were societies for the protection of ancient heritage. The most important was the National Trust of 1895. By 1907 the National Trust was given legal powers to protect sites and use them for the nation.

A number of photographic record societies emerged. The first one was founded in 1890 and was a Scottish photographic survey, and it was followed in 1897 by an English photographic survey. What has to do with the preservation of the past and future? British society was changing very rapidly as a consequence of urbanization and industrialization, which meant that there was a sense of loss of memory, of past lifestyles, past costumes. So there was a need to preserve something that was about to disappear. Photographs could fix (in a form of record, document) lifestyles, and costumes which were still present but probably were about to disappear.

The National Photographic Record Association (founded by Sir John Benjamin Stone) took photographs of human interest and placed them in British museums. Stone's aim was to record life scenes of historic, cultural, and ethnographic interest. This form of preservation was a symptom of a nostalgia for the past which was rapidly disappearing. The aim of the National Photographic Society was to record buildings, folk costumes, and other survivals of historic interest for the future. Benjamin Stone tried to create a national memory bank, as a sort of pride. Photographs create a tradition with which we might identify as our national identity - past determine what we are.

The cult of the country house

In the first half of the 20th century, the number of preservation societies increased and the experience of modernization produced the desire to compensate for increasing the accelerating change. On one hand, we move forward, on the other we feel a desire to slow down transformation. Part of this desire (to slow down transformation) has its roots in the wish to maintain traditions which the upper and middle classes associated with the nation and specifically with England, rather than the UK. Certain types of heritage, especially the castle and the country house, were considered to possess qualities which could maintain and promote the identity of the nation.

During the Second World War -