What should museums call their stuff?
The Museum of Flight
The largest independent, non-profit air and space museum in the world!
When you think of a museum, you probably think of artifacts. But is that really the best word for what museums keep in their collection? Some museums have moved away from the term artifact, adding words like ‘cultural objects’ or ‘material culture’ to their vocabulary for several reasons.
Artifacts are generally associated with ancient or old things. Is a Boeing 787 an artifact? Is the first facemask worn on a flight during the COVID-19 pandemic an artifact?
Is the original recording of Kaye Ballard singing “Fly Me to the Moon” an artifact? Is something intangible like music an artifact?
The term artifact also threatens to strip an object of its cultural context. Museums already do this by displaying objects outside their original environment. Seeing a vintage flight attendant uniform on a mannequin will never capture what it meant the way travelling back in time to the 1930s and taking a flight in a DC-3 would.
Calling an object that may have religious significance to a culture an ‘artifact’ might impose a world view on that object which the people who created it would not share. It implies a scientific, often colonial classification rather than a spiritual or artistic one.
What do you think? If someone took your most precious belonging and called it an “artifact,” how would you feel? Would you agree or disagree? Are things found in museums artifacts? Cultural objects? All of the above? Or perhaps something else entirely?
If you want to learn more, here are some perspectives:
What is material culture? (National Park Service)?https://www.nps.gov/archeology/afori/whisar_matc.htm
Material Culture (Oxford Bibliographies) https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0085.xml
Project Management - Freelance | Part-Time (Semi-Retired) | Heritage / Tourism - Volunteering
7 个月We're often told that the objects in a Museum tell a "story". But I don't think they do. It's the complete reverse, objects need a story to exist in the visitor's mind. In so many ways, the story can exist without the object, but the object is only an object or an item without its corresponding story. People find stories compelling and their emotional engagement with any object is only because of the story. With its story, the object can become something—maybe an heirloom, evidence, or original, first, last, oldest, newest, etc.
Makes me think of an interesting paper we read in my Masters’ program: https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/whatdoc.html