ISS 25 (1995).pdf - The International Council of Museums

The nature of museums
MUSEUMS AND THE COMMUNITY
Lynn Maranda
There are many ways to view the nature of a museum and one illustrative way to examine the
museum's character is to ascertain what community the museum serves. It can be argued that
all museums do serve a community and that museums come into existence because of that fact.
The service which a museum gives a population is one that unites a community by supplying
it with a sense of history. Museums are another in a list of institutions which try to answer the
questions of existence which the human race is continually asking. The questions of "Who are
we?" and "Where did we come from?" are asked in probing rhetoric to help define the purpose
of our living and to shape the direction of our ambition. It is this sense of a community or
population curious to know its beginnings and wanting to know its future that the museum
ful.fils its role in the social order. Museums themselves have undergone evolution with the
change of social conditions and their own progression from private 'cabinets of curiosities' to
monolithic public institutions can be readily traced. What are separate histories accommodated
within a private collection or within a monolithic public institution are histories nonetheless
which make a commitment to the understanding of community: one commitment extremely
small, yet deemed of great value, the other large and providing a wide opinion to assist in the
understanding of a national population.
Hist0IY
A museum is a house in which history is stored. If the purpose of history is to write the story
depicting the evolution of a peoples from the beginning of a determined epoch to the present,
then the present circumstance of a community or a people is the major gravitational intellectual
force which determines the attitude of written histories. It is by this respect that histories serve
communities and museums, the warehouse of historical physical materials, serve up the
evidence of given stated historical positions. The reason such purposes are required by humans
is that when histories tell stories of evolution, they at the same time give special social meaning
to the very readers of the evolution. Histories explain the existence of a people and even if the
depicted histories do not directly retell the particular story of a given population, the very
outlook and fact of a population's existence is supported through the act of writing. For
example, even the writers of history from the Victorian era can expound on subjects other than
their own society as an indirect reinforcement of their own social conditions. It is known that
these museums which collected materials from around the world and displayed much of its
findings in support of notions of "savagery" and "racial" types endorsed the European self
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