On May 18th, anothehttps://icom.museum/en/resources/standards-guidelines/museum-definition/r of the conventional dates is celebrated, in this case the International Museum Day (DIM in disciplinary slang), this year dedicated to the theme “Museums for equality: diversity and inclusion”.
However, the lack of definition about what is and is not a museum persists. After the impasse generated by the revolt of the “national committees” in the middle of the Kyoto General Assembly, in 2019, where the decision on the proposed definition was postponed, the executive committee ended up renaming a new commission to study the subject.
I have already stated my opinion several times about the futility of this debate. To define a thing is to categorize it. Create limits on what is included and what is not included. The problem with defining what a museum is is that it is necessary to distinguish what the formal institution “museum” (organization) is about, what it does there (and the relationships that are established there (processes).
Now, we have known for a long time that the processes linked to heritage and memories, as social relations, happen in the whole society and in all social organizations, on which they build their mnemonic narratives of legitimation of power. It is not an exclusive attribute of the “Museum”.
However, there is an organization called “Museum”, which being a social construction, likes to portray its history as a “sacred place”. A place of contemplation that assumes as exclusive, because in it there are objects that do not exist, because they are endowed with an essence. This individuality is only accessible because it is mediated by a “priest”. The definition of “Museum” as an organization is a result of this debate over time, which reflects the different commitments about what is sacred and exclusive with criteria and categories established in a time of regularities.
Walter Benjamim, in his “Theses on the“ Philosophy of History ”, which I remember having a book in an edition of Assírio e Alvim (About Art, Technique, Language and Politics, 1982), speaks of the 19th century as a century of Museums. Like a time, where the nations under construction created narratives about an inherited past materialized in objects filled with aura (symbolic objects that had the function of allowing a transcendence of the individual and collective being).
Throughout the twentieth century, museums and their heralds have been cannibalized in different ways through different channels. They lived for a long time with other institutions of memory, (archives, libraries, universities), took the form of institutions (national museums, military museums, business museums, municipal museums), functionally specialized (art museums, ethnology, archeology, of natural history and philosophy of science). In some cases, they are modernized by building their own object (science and technology museums), in other cases by incorporating the social (of communities and territories).
Within the museum itself, where general and specific museology was stabilized, instability was installed, first through educational services (1950s), then through community museums (1970s), complaining about the “integral museum” and “museum as an instrument of development” (eco museum).
Between the first definitions of museums and their successive mutations and adjustments (for a history of the definition see hear, we can find the various dialogues and tensions experienced in different times that will influence the readings of the museum concept. Over time this concept varies and adapts. The current discussion is revealing of the impasse reached between the various visions in tension.
In the next DIM2020 we have an old definition that some defend, others consider as small to contain the new impulses. A definition that is announced to be reformulated and that pleases some and deserves doubts from several professionals.
What this means is that instability is installed, and as much as the current definition pleases many, it has already changed. Not to recognize the change is to do like the ostrich that hides its head in a hole to hide.
Will it be able to accept the challenge of Diversity and Social Inclusion?
OpenEdition sugere que esta publicação seja citada da seguinte forma:
Pedro Pereira Leite (14 de Maio de 2020). Poetics of autonomy XXI – The Place of Museums. Museum on Education and Diversity. Recuperado em 18 de Maio de 2025 de https://doi.org/10.58079/p2d2