Museums are the institutions of cultural heritage. They tell of a shared past, uniting a people or nation in the form of memory. Museums are part of urban culture. Their exhibitions appeal to people with their visual aspects. Objects in museums tell stories, the interpretation of which is the responsibility of the creator of the exhibition, the researcher. Pierre Bourdieu has compared exhibitions to sacred space and rites. (Bourdieu, 1985) A museum is a place where the public is silent. The exhibition is like a rite in which the visitor participates specifically upon the conditions of those who have made it. Inviolability, silence and arrestedness are typical features museum exhibitions. (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998: 57).
Festivals and folklore festivals in particular are an important alternative for museums. Museum appeal to the sense of sigh; events affect all the senses. As multisensory, multifocus events, festivals may extend over days, weeks or months. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett regards festivals as cultural performance par excellence. (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998: 59, 61, 62) For example, the Mari Flower Festival in the summer is an event where people eat, take walks, meet friends and acquaintances, watch performances, dance and sing. In other words, people participate with all their senses of taste, smell, sight, hearing and touch. The festival also entails a factor that unites a people or a local group – heritage or folklore, a virtue comparable to shared history or memory.
Cultural heritage, national culture, is not composed only of cultural institutions but also of symbols representations. National culture is a discourse, a way of constructing meanings that steer and organize both our activities and our idea of ourselves. National cultures construct identity by producing meanings of a united people with which we can identify. These meanings are contained in shared history, the past, and things jointly experienced, i.e. memory and the images constructed from this basis. (Hall, 1992: 47) In the same way as Hungarian and Finnish cultural anthropologists have asked what Hungarianness or Finnishness is, we ask what Mariness is. Tradition, continuity and timelessness are emphasized in identity. Here, tradition means practices of a symbolic or ritual nature and norms of behaviour pointing to continuity. In the globalized world there is emphasis on the universal, while local or national identities are also reinforced. Identities have been reconstructed under the threat of globalization, and globalization may thus lead to reinforcing local identity and the birth of new identities. (Hall, 1992: 68) In a multicultural world, traditions, everyday practices and ways of life may be of decisive importance for identity.
We also consider the new tasks of ethnological museum for example the Museum of Cultures in Helsinki. How represent the diversities of cultures in the exhibits of the museum? How represent the multiple cultural / social belonging to the minorities? What means the modern object and what is it’s the symbolic sign? How represent the discourse between the public and individual life? How represent the historical reality?
Bibliography
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· Arkio, Tuula 2006. Luovuusstrategiatyö. http://www.fng.fi/fng/rootnew/fi/kehys/Teema06&arkio.htm
· Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Darbel, avec Dominique Schnapper 1985. L’amour de l’art: les musées de l’art européens et leur public. Paris.
· Giddens, Anthony 1995. Elämää jälkitraditionaalisessa yhteiskunnassa. Ulrich Beck & Anthony Giddens & Scott Lash. Nykyajan jäljillä. Refleksiivinen modernisaatio. Suomentanut Leevi Lehto. Tampere.
· Hall, Stuart 1981. Notes on Deconstruing ’the Popular’. People’s History and Socialist Theory. Ed by Raphael Samuel. London.
· Hall, Stuart 1992. Introduction. Formations of modernity. Ed. By Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben. Cambridge.
· Hall, Stuart 1992a. The question of cultural identity. Modernity and its futures. Ed. by Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew. Understanding modern societies, book 4. Cambridge.
· Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 1998. Destination Culture. Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley – Los Angeles – London.
