A Museum of the Folkloric for the British Isles? Dissertation submitted for examination for an MA in Museum Studies School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester Academic Year: 2011-12 Clare Waddington, M.Phil.      

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Abstract A Museum of Folklore for the British Isles? Clare Waddington Word Count: 14,988 The dissertation contributes to discussions of the folkloric, and of folk-life, within contemporary folk-life, social history rural-life, and country-life museums in the British context. Taking a broadly comparative approach, which focuses on the dynamic and mimetic quality of such practices, the folkloric with regard to different museums (in Europe, Chapter 1, in Britain, Chapters 2 and 3), and the future for the folkloric (Chapter 4) is discussed. The potential within current museums to present narratives and representations of history within which practices can be both contextual and emergent, consonant with folkloric displays that are congruent with its practices, the discussion is of: the motivation and early life of the museum with reference to Skansen in Sweden (1); the collections management and curatorial practices of current rural-life museums and how these are relevant to the conservation of the folkloric in Britain (2); the construction of the narrative of the museum, its practices in acquisition, design and display in the context of St Fagans in Wales (3). The importance of these for constructions of identity at the individual, regional and national levels: real and illusory, authentic and contrived, and about mediated identity, are discussed (4). Some consideration of approaches to collect, document, and represent the everyday lived realities of people of different ethnic groups and in different socioeconomic strata within Sweden through the SAMDOK Home Pools scheme, alongside UN approaches to protecting and preserving traditional knowledge, are discussed as potential ways forward. These are relevant to the conservation/curation of material culture, oral traditions, and different dynamic practices. The symbolic and agentic aspects of the folkloric, so critical to constructions of identity, emergent from contested versions of history and the everyday, allow for a careful use of the folkloric in British museums, and current collections management and disposal.  

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Acknowledgements

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support and contribution to the

dissertation, made by the following people: Professor Simon Knell provided

supervision for the topic, its structure, and argument; my mother kindly proof

read chapters; also the faculty, staff, and the cohort of postgraduate students,

at the School of Museum Studies, Leicester University (2011-12).

     

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Table of Contents Introduction 5 Chapter 1: Folk Museums in Europe 11 Chapter 2: Social History Museums of various kinds in Britain 27 Chapter 3: Folkloric Approaches and the British Context 42 Chapter 4: Folklore and the future? 60 Conclusion 74 Bibliography 81 Appendix – Selected Museum in Europe and the British Isles. 1

1. Folk-Life Museums in Europe 1.1 Skansen, Sweden. 1 1.2 Norsk Folkemuseum, Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, Norway 2 1.3 Den Gamle By, The Old Town (Denmark) 3 1.4. Árbæjarsafn (Iceland) 5 1.5. Nederlands Openluchtmuseum, Netherlands Open Air Museum, (Netherlands). 6

2. Social History Museums in the British Isles: industrial, rural, agricultural, national, local history; country-life; folk-life.

2.1 Open-Air with an industrial and local history focus. 2.1.1. Beamish Museum, England 8 2.1.2 The Iron Bridge Gorge Museum, England 9

2.2. Social and Agricultural History Museums: Rural Life Museums.

2.2.1. Museum of East Anglian Life, England 11 2.2.2. The Somerset Rural Life Museum, England 12 2.2.3. Museum of English Rural Life, England 14

2.3. National Museums with a folk-life, transport, agricultural and local history focus.

2.3.1. National Museum of Rural Life, Scotland 15 2.3.2. St Fagans National History Museum, Wales 17 2.3.3. Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, N. Ireland 18 2.3.4. Museum of Country-Life, Ireland 20

2.4. Regional museums with a social, local, and folkloric historical focus.

2.4.1. The Connemara Heritage Centre 23 2.4.2. Blackhouse Museum, Isle of Lewis 24 2.4.3. Dean Heritage Centre, Gloucestershire 25 2.4.4. Gloucester Folk Museum, Gloucester 27

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Introduction

These days, the easiest (and sometimes only) way to experience traditional culture is by exploring Europe's great open-air folk museums. Usually located in spacious parks near big cities, these museums let you wander around traditional buildings — log cabins, thatched cottages, mills, schoolhouses, shops, and more. The buildings are furnished with original pieces and feature locals dressed in costumes weaving tales about life back in the day.1

 

The purpose of this dissertation is to discuss the representation and

interpretation of ‘traditional culture’ embodied in everyday practices that have

developed and have been influenced over time as emerging from different

artistic movements in the context of the museums which display this genre.

These include museums established with a folk-life and rural-life emphasis.2

The practices themselves may be considered to be crafts as may the end

product.3 In the broadest sense such traditional culture can be described as

the folkloric.4

                                                                                                               1 Steves, R. ‘Preserving the Past at Europe's Folk Museums’, at: http://www.ricksteves.com/tms/article.cfm?id=297&extras=false, (Last accessed: 18/07/2012). 2For example, the Arts and Crafts movement in England. See: Greensted, M., no date, Craft and Design: Ernest Gimson and the Arts and Crafts Movement, Leicester Museums and Galleries, Leicester: Leicester City Council. 3  For example, the process of making everyday items for use and for wear using different tools which may be more or less mechanised, including the practice of continuing to spin wool, make use of large foot-propelled looms, or indigenous customary dances in celebration of changing seasons. They may include the folk-art offerings left at sites used by ‘folk’, which may or may not be run by a nationally sponsored or funded conservation scheme, or be the stuff of myths and legends and story-telling. See for example: Hobson, J., 2007. Curious Country Customs, Newton Abbott: A David & Charles Book.  4 For examples, in the British context, see: Briggs, K.M., Tounge, R.L., 1965. Folktales of England, Aylesbury Bucks: Hazell Watson and Viney Limited; Findler, G., 1968. Folk Lore of the Lake Counties, Clapham Yorkshire: Courier Printers; Findler, G., 1970. Legends of the Lake Counties, Halifax Yorkshire: The Dalesman Publishing Company Ltd.; Jackson-Houlston, C.M., 1999. Ballads, Songs and Snatches, Aldershot: Ashgate. In the USA context, see: Dorson, R.M., 1972.

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Folkloric practices are constituted both by the process of making an artefact

and by its use. For example, painted containers and utensils so popular in

barge-style decoration also have a function and the symbolism attached to the

love spoon conveys the depth of feeling of its maker as well as having a

practical use. Importantly, folkloric elements are apparent in practices where

the outcome is less tangible, as envisaged in ritual ‘blessings’ for nature, for

community, or simply by evoking a coming together of ‘folk’, however defined,

by creating space where people engage creatively and socially. Such spaces

often provide coping strategies for different members of the community, free

of dogma often associated with membership of a particular religion, and

create possibilities for communal and individual celebration. Such practices

include: dancing around the May pole on May Day and Wassailling of apple

trees to promote an abundant harvest.5 These practices differ and have

regional variations within different conceptions of ‘folk’, community folk-life,

and the origin of particular folklore.6

Such traditions represent more closely embodied practices that are

associated with the functional and every-day use of items, which have

different forms of dynamic construction. The traditions are dynamic because

the craft methodology will have emerged from traditions that have been

influenced by different technological advances in the form of tools and

machines, and from societal changes in the form of industrial development,

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Folklife and Folklore, an introduction, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. 5 Forrest, J., 1999. The History of Morris Dancing 1458-1750, Cambridge: James Clarke and Co. Ltd. The practice is still common during January in the midland counties. 6 Dundes, A., 1980. Interpreting Folklore, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press.  

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changing trends and preferences. There may also have been demographic

changes within the group driven by rural-urban migration bringing immigrants

with a consequent acculturative process, as new groups adjust to each other’s

languages and customs. The practices keep the past alive in the present,

with different histories in different countries emerging from resistance and

contestation.7

And in another, more obvious way, they are dynamic because the ‘dance’ or

‘folk-art’ offering represents the impermanent. These traditions speak to an

aspect of identity, which is not static but fluid. In their fluidity they reflect both

an agentic and a symbolic aspect. It is agentic because it is constituted

through and by the body.8 It is symbolic because meaning is attached to the

stages of production, which have ritualistic associations.9 Folkloric practices

have been preserved and promulgated through a number of folk-life museums

in Europe, as well as the rural-life museums in the UK, which have mainly

been concerned with the re-enactment of life in pre-industrialised

communities. They are part of a group of museums which contribute to a

sense of national identity, both at the supra or sub-national or regional level.

                                                                                                               7 The causes of which may include their purloining and inauthentic use within state rhetoric. See for example: Ortiz, C., 1999. ‘The Uses of Folklore by the Franco Regime’, Journal of American Folklore, 112(446), Fall, pp.479-96; Guntarik, O., (ed.), 2010. Narratives of Community: Museums and Ethnicity, Edinburgh: MuseumsEtc; McIntyre, D., Wehner, K., (ed.)., 2011. National Museums Negotiating Histories: Conference Proceedings, Canberra: National Museum of Australia in association with the Center for Cross-Cultural Research and the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy. 8 For example the dance, the act of going to and decorating the shrine, the nimble fingers spinning the wool, the hand passing the spindle between the warp and weft, the foot peddle powering the faster looms that appeared later on, the voice curating the everyday tales and stories which are the myths and legends of oral traditions, the ears receiving those stories. 9 For example, associated with dye-making, pottery and clay-firing, meanings which the makers and users have attributed to the objects at the end of the production process which are not final but continue to have a living, intangible effect.

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The different strata of identity may be more context-specific and associated

with regional movements and practices, or they may be more community-

based and more or less fluid depending on migratory flows. They all contain

an element of self-determination for the group in question, a factor that is

clearly an important aspect of any democratic society. It will be argued that

these folkloric practices are relevant to literatures that consider national

museums and historical consciousness as contributing to a sense of

nationhood, and the national soma.10 Within the folkloric arena questions of

legitimacy and authenticity arise, particularly around the interpretation and

representation of practices, within the context of museums, including whether

and how objects that are moved, be they whole buildings such as mills and

barns, or cave or rock art paintings, retain authenticity. And the question

arises as to how artefacts maintain their authenticity outside their original

location, even if their function is maintained. It is therefore clear that folkloric

practices are difficult to ‘capture’ and represent within a museum-context.

And it is this topic that the dissertation is concerned with.

Chapter 1 will examine existing folk museums in Europe, seeking to describe

what they do and why they are important in terms of their location, purpose

and historical context. The case study of Skansen will be particularly

considered. Chapter 2 will consider their equivalent in the UK, in the sense of

their being out-door and interactive as well as concerned with local history

and the everyday, in rural-life and social or national history museums. The

cases of Reading’s Museum of English Rural Life, and Somerset’s Rural Life

                                                                                                               10 Knell, S.J. 2014 (in press). 'The nation's soma: art, national museums and the morality of nationhood', in V. Gosselin, V., Livingstone, P., (eds), Museums as Sites of Historical Consciousness, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver.

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Museum will be highlighted. Chapter 3 will describe the folkloric approaches

in the British context, with reference to museological and academic concerns,

and those relating to the specific historical context differentiated between the

different ‘countries’ or regions that comprise the British Isles: Scotland, Wales,

Northern Ireland, England (for example, East Anglia), and Eire . Some attempt

will be made to show the similarities and differences between approaches to

representing and understanding the folkloric within the UK in comparison to

the Scandinavian movement. Much of the discussion will concentrate on the

example of St Fagans in Wales. Each chapter will involve a comparative

approach by discussing the following: (i) folklore as expression of agency; (ii)

folklore as symbol of renegotiated meanings; (iii) folklore as symbol of ‘other’

– national identity; (iv) folklore as symbol of the revision of national heritage

and (v) folklore as symbol of the politics of value – a means to understanding

how trends in value change across time. These broad themes within which

the material is organised have been chosen as relevant to identity, identity

formation, and the construction of identity. They speak to the current

understanding of the past or what is traditional, passed on through

generations. They concern events that they commemorate, including the

functional purpose of the objects created, and the mode of creation.11 They

provide different ideas of how the practices mediate and are the subject of

mediation, an adaptive witness.

Chapter 4 will examine possibilities for the future of museums of the folkloric

or folk-life museums within the UK, and some considerations for a Museum of

                                                                                                               11 Including the tools used as changing over time, which are the subject of negotiation.

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Folklore for the British Isles. This will be back-grounded by discussion of

different issues of identity at the micro, regional, and national levels, broadly

within the cultural and museological context. Issues pertinent to national

museums of folk-life or the folkloric in the British Isles, their collections

management policies and research methods, will be discussed through

descriptions of the SAMDOK Home Pools approach to the ethnological

collection of contemporary households in Sweden. Some attempt will be

made to compare this with an approach to the representation of the folkloric

through UN legislation around protection of indigenous knowledge and the

folkloric, including particular recommendations made by the American

Folklore Society in 2004 of relevance to this topic: the folkloric.12

                                                                                                               12 It should be noted that some recent comparative literatures are now available on the internet, arising out of European consultative fora around National History Museums and Identity; and describe recent Europe-wide consultative processes towards understanding governmental and nongovernmental process and policy-making and their bearing on the museological context, and their modus operandi (EuNaMus). See: Knell, S., Axelsson, B., Ellersten, L., Myrivili, E., Porciani, I., Sawyer, A., Watson, S., 2012. Crossing Borders – Connecting European Identities in Museums and Online, EuNaMus Report no. 2, Linkoping University Interdisciplinary Studies, No. 14, Sweden: Linkoping University Electronic Press. http://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:516268, (Last accessed: 18/072012); Aronsson, P., Elgenius, G., (eds)., 2011. Building National Museums in Europe 1750-2010. Conference proceedings from EuNaMus, European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, Bologna 28-30 April 2011. EuNaMus Report No 1., Linköping University Electronic Press http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp_home/index.en.aspx?issue=064. (Last accessed: 18/07/2012).

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Chapter 1 Folk Museums in Europe  

National museums that exhibit traditional life and customs, as well as what

may be termed reproductions of ‘folk-life’ or the interpretation of ‘folkloric’

practices, (including tools and machinery, customs and objects) were created

during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries throughout Europe. With

diverse histories of creation as well as funding arrangements and relationship

to the national government, collections management and organizational

principles, they contributed to the development of cultural life at the national

and local level.

Founded in 1891, Stockholm’s Skansen Museum is Europe’s original open-air

folk museum – the first in what became a Europe-wide movement to preserve

vernacular traditional architecture.13 Other open-air folk museums in Europe,

popularized in Scandinavia, include the Norwegian Folk Museum in Oslo.

These museums feature craftspeople working with traditional materials and

tools, and daily demonstrations by craftsmen. The objects that are produced

are often available for purchase from the museum shop and in annual

markets. In addition, there are regular events including folk dances, concerts

and other forms of cultural reenactments.14

                                                                                                               13 For a discussion about the importance of different perspectives on the vernacular, see: Herva, V.P., 2010. ‘Buildings as persons: relationality and the life of buildings in a northern periphery of early modern Sweden’, Antiquity, 84, pp440-52. 14 While Stockholm and Oslo's open-air museums focus on rural folk-life, Copenhagen's Den Gamle By shows Danish urban life through the centuries. A re-creation of a main square from the 1500s and 1600s features the mayor's house and the residence of a Copenhagen noble. Life in the 20th century is represented by a 1927 hardware store and brewery (often selling samples), along with a 1970s street scene, complete with hi-fi record shop. In the Netherlands the folk museum located in the town of Arnhem features a yellow drawbridge, a scenic pond surrounded by windmills and cabins and a working laundry house. A giant capsule slowly rotates to gradually reveal various Dutch scenes, such as windmills, a snowy countryside, and

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The Appendix contains a few of Europe’s museums dealing with the folkloric

aspect, including descriptions of them by reference to date founded, founder,

collections, and events, along with images.

What do folkloric museums do?

The use of material objects to exemplify material culture, to explore the

meaning and context through which those objects acquire meaning and value,

is shared in common by most societies. Preziosi explains:

… every object is always potentially an object-lesson, and the artefactual environment of every culture is semiotically organized and articulated, however materially minimal or extensive. Museums are uniquely powerful semiotic and epistemological instruments for the creation, maintenance, and dissemination of meanings by fielding together and synthesizing objects, ideas, bodies and beliefs.15

The representation and interpretation of the objects, as part of displays or the

focus of an exhibit, are confined to the symbolic realm – the objects are often

treated as signs of material culture in the context of museological practice in

museums where it is possible to say, broadly, that the focus of attention was

on the end ‘product’.16 This is achieved through a separation of tools from the

process used for creation, treating the objects as ‘products’ after a capitalist

production and consumption perspective, and a non-display or removal of the

tools and machinery that evolved over time for the creation of the objects.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             house and store interiors: a sort of scenic cultural kaleidoscope. (In: Steves, R., no date. ‘Preserving the Past at Europe's Folk Museums’). 15 Preziosi, D., 2011. Preziosi, D., 2011. ‘Myths of Nationality’, in: Knell, S.J., Aronsson, P., Bugge Amundsen, A., Barnes, A.J., Burch, S., Carter, J., Gosselin, V., Hughes, S.A., Kirwan, A., (eds)., National Museums: New Studies from Around the World, London: Routledge, pp55-66, p.55. 16 For a full discussion see: Maleuvre, D., 1999. Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

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The static reproduction of material culture within the museological context is

achieved and emphasized through non-kinetic exhibiting styles of antiques

and artefacts. Thus, the dynamic, sometimes every-day, nature of the

craftsmanship inherent in creation, through which much of their meaning and

value are derived, is lost. This may serve to emphasize a static account

within historical contexts where objects are located in immutable and

contrived conceptual categories; it further enables the construction of overly-

dominant or hegemonic narratives. These can have powerful implications for

the ways that national identities are conceived of and mobilized.

In the context of national museums, particularly those concerned with

accounts of national history, of ‘folk-life’ or ‘rural-life’ by different cultural and

political groups within a nation, powerful narratives can be woven around such

objects-as-symbols (static). The narratives can be explicitly stated in the

museums, and the museological content and message augmented and

changed according to national ideology or political rhetoric of the time, and

indeed in response to its public: the national and local communities depicted

and/or involved in collections, conservation and collaborative projects. If the

exhibiting style is such, the dynamic nature can be kept ‘alive’ through

collections management and curatorial practice.

In the case of particular museums of folk-life, constructed out-of-doors, it

seems clear that they were important ways through which nations preserved

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traditional buildings and architectural styles.17 This was the case even though

the museums were contrived in their creation, through moving the buildings

from different places being re-erected on different land, re-assembled all

together to create an imaginary village or town. In many of the museums, the

museum staff work in ‘traditional’ roles, wear ‘traditional’ clothing, and create

‘traditional’ artisan crafts, between 9am-5pm.

Through this the illusion of the working village or town is created. This poses

questions of authenticity. The artificial creation of the town, the placing of the

buildings, too close together or artificially juxtaposed, the modern-day

organisation of ‘village life’ around a nine to five working day, the conveniently

placed shop for the crafts being produced in situ, all contribute to a contrived

account of and construction of national and sub-national identities. On the

other hand, by having museum staff actually work in traditional clothing,

making the traditional crafts in traditional ways representative of the era being

evoked (whether that is early rural-life or later industrialised urban life) even if

as part of a re-enactment in an artificially located setting, the effect can

stimulate an understanding of a non-static national identity. In this way

different practices and understandings can be re-worked, re-visited, revised

following a raising of questions through the experience of visiting or

assembling a working-exhibit.

                                                                                                               17  This was  a European-wide movement, arising from and contributing to the consolidation and creation of different sorts of national identity or different strata of identity that were not exclusive to each other.  

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1.1 Folklore as expression of agency

The museum has been seen as having potential for the rich deconstruction of

cultural authority.18 Others have commented on the more performative

aspects of the museum space. For anthropologists the construction has been

of a liminal space within which communication can take place about issues

that ordinarily might not be spoken about or perhaps queried or thought

about.19 Others have noted that the museum can make ‘poetic contributions

to knowledge and reality as configurations of belief’.20 Knell (2007) argues

that museum practitioners, following a skeptical approach, allow for a neutral

or acceptable authoritative realization of a truth through the suspension of

their own subjective judgment. This has enabled their own agency and

continuity of work, even whilst museum definitions and museological terms

and norms ‘unreasonably constrain institutional conceptualization and

contradict the subjective realities of museum provision’ (i.e. given finite

resources and issues of national boundaries).21 The moral position is justified

through the supposed ‘neutrality’ of the policy provision and of

professionalization that contributes to a popular understanding of museums

as ‘neutral, authoritative and trustworthy’ spaces providing an accurate

account of reality, or at least as the world ‘ought to be understood’.22

                                                                                                               18 Preziosi, D., 2011. 19 Duncan, C., 1995. Civilising Rituals: inside public art museums, Oxon: Routledge. p.20. 20 Knell, S.J., 2007. ‘Museums, reality and the material world’, in S.J. Knell (ed.) Museums in the Material World, London: Routledge, pp.1-28, cited in S.J. Knell. 2011. ‘The National Imagination’, in S.J. Knell et al. (eds) National Museums, pp.3-28, p.4. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid.

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1.2 Folklore as symbol of renegotiated meanings

If museums are seen as poetic and political spaces, rather than analytical,

within which an objective truth can be arrived at or imputed through a series of

causal relationships, then the museum becomes a space symbolizing a

performance of cultural symbolism. This implies an enactment of fantasy, the

performance of national myth, the illusory meeting the sensory - with the focus

on soundscapes and on touch in recent cutting-edge design work - in a

perfect environment of expensive glass cases with pneumatic and electrically

triggered automatic doors.23 Knell (2007) argues that whilst many nations’

national myths are represented in this way being products of a specific

national history and local circumstance, they do perform in particular ways.

Thus, the nuances of the differing national identities are historically anchored

in each case. This is particularly so in the various ways that folk culture is

displayed – a means to anchoring a ‘primordial sense of origin’, beyond

shared or distinct ethnicities, to ‘a sense of connection through the land, to

physical and social structures, and ‘traditional’ ways of life’.24

The connection to place, people, history, and ideal are felt most acutely in

Skansen in Stockholm and the Norsk Folkemuseum in Oslo. It is understood

as a ‘living culture celebrated in music and dance … a culture materialized in

instruments, costume, music and choreography’.25 Particularly in the case of

Sweden, the national identity is very much bound up with a social morality, an

essentialised notion of what it means to be Swedish, which is performed and

                                                                                                               23  And a hiding away of all paraphernalia associated with collections care: the thermometers, the barometers, the adjusters for light, for humidity. 24 Op cit.: p.11. 25 Op cit.: p.12.

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given moral legitimacy. Primarily achieved historically through a strong

gendering of roles: the female processing the emotional in private (the

agentic) in the context of the male ordering and structuring of both the private

and public spheres (the symbolic), the latter being where he inter alia

legislates and makes public speeches. In the Norwegian case, its constructed

sense of national definition through the length of time a particular group had

lived on the land was challenged through the rise of multiculturalism which, in

the case of the Folkemuseum, prompted the location of a Pakistani home

within the assortment of buildings on the sprawling parkland in 2002.26

1.4 Folklore as a symbol of ‘other’ – national identity and cognitive

dissonance.

In the case of the implied or explicit definition of the folkloric, as represented

in Sweden and Norway, it is interesting to notice that the ‘folkloric’ pertaining

to the nation as a whole is differentiated from the ‘folkloric’ pertaining to the

Saami, the indigenous nomadic group located across several borders,

migrating between south and middle Sweden and Norway and their northern

parts.27 The collections relating to the heritage conservation of Saami folklore

and folkloric life and practices are separate and contained within the

                                                                                                               26 Ibid. 27 The Saami are indigenous to the Arctic area of Saapmi, which encompasses parts of far northern Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Kola Peninsula of Russia, and the border area between south and middle Sweden and Norway. The Saami are the only indigenous people of Scandinavia recognized under the international conventions of Indigenous peoples, and hence the northernmost indigenous people of Europe. Saami ancestral lands span an area of approximately 388,350 km2 (150,000 sq. mi.), which is approximately the size of Sweden, in the Nordic countries. Their traditional languages are classified as a branch of the Uralic language family. The Saami languages are endangered. (Moseley, C., (ed.). 2010. Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, 3rd edn., Paris: UNESCO Publishing. Online version: http://www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages/atlas, (Last accessed: 18/07/2012).

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‘ethnographic’ collections in both the Swedish (and Norwegian) Folk-

museums, although this is changing because of the SAMDOK Home Pools

Scheme (a brief discussion appears in Chapter 4).28 This is no doubt owed

to the historical nature of these collections, their means of arriving at the

different folk museums, and also to the difficult history of the Saami people.29

                                                                                                               28 It should be noted that in the 1970s and 80s it was no longer considered acceptable for researchers at the Institute to go out in the ‘field’ to bring back knowledge and materials in the classical ethnographic manner, used in the study of Saami, historically. Instead collections stopped while the SAMDOK approach was elaborated (this will be discussed further in Chapter 4). In the 1990s the SAMDOK approach was widened further to include The Sami Pool. This is so far the only working group to be formed on the basis of ethnicity, and that happened after pressure from the The National Association of Swedish Sami (SSR). (Silvén, E., no date. ‘Staging the Sami – Narrative and Display at the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm’, Linkoping University, NaMu IV, pp311-9. At: www.ep.liu.se/ecp/030/023/ecp0830023b.pdf, Last accessed: 18/07/2012). 29It is a curious method of creating authentic identity within a national museum for an indigenous people, who suffered much brutalization by the governments of these nation states, through causing their practices, story-telling, and crafts, to be ‘protected’ or conserved within their ethnographic collections (which clearly also relate to academic enquiry and modes of empirical data collection), even whilst their languages and cultural practices were repressed or banned in public places, and their homeland was being sold off due to national economic development strongly altering and curtailing their traditional nomadic lifestyle which was about survival and the politics of survival. During the 19th century, Norwegian authorities strongly repressed Saami culture also within Saami cultural groups, to make the Norwegian language and culture universal. This paralleled strong economic development in the northern area of the country. Government incentives (viz.: land and water rights, tax allowances, and military exemptions) encouraged migration and settlement of non-Saami in these northern regions. Between 1900-40, Norway made as a condition for anyone wishing to buy or lease state lands for agriculture in Finnmark proof of knowledge of the Norwegian language and register with a Norwegian name. In 1913, the Norwegian parliament passed a bill on "native act land" to allocate the best and most useful lands to the Norwegian settlers. Massive destruction of the lands, houses, and all visible traces of Saami culture in northern Norway and Finland, was further brought about through the scorched earth policy of the German army during the Second World War. As late as 1970 there was still national legislation being enacted to limit the size of any house that Saami people were allowed to build. The controversy around the construction of the hydro-electric power station in Alta in 1979 brought Saami rights onto the political agenda. In August 1986, the national anthem and flag of the Saami people were created. In 1989, the first Saami parliament in Norway was elected. The authorities were less militant in their efforts in both Sweden and Finland, in the early part of the twentieth century, although Saami languages were forbidden in schools. The economic development of the northern areas of these countries led to a weakening of status and economy for the Saami. In 1913-1920, the Swedish race-segregation politic created a race biological institute that collected research material from living people, graves, and sterilized Saami women. Sweden notoriously

  19  

Whilst undoubtedly an effort to maintain the Saami heritage and identity,

clearly the location of the collection within the ethnographic collection and

apart from the folkloric working village and the more performative aspects to

the museum-life, makes the Saami identity a different identity than the

national identity.30 Held within the ethnographic collection such artefacts are

maintained within the museum, however it is not one assimilated to the

national identity, and attention is not drawn to the ways in which the different

groups influenced each other, including the acculturation processes through

trade as well as the sharing of stewardship of land and animals. These

different identities are not really considered and, as such, the ethnographic

collection of this ‘other’ identity creates a distancing between the two forms of

the folkloric (this is true despite the later developments of SAMDOK). In this

context, the museological context of the museum, the practices share much in

common though the methods for understanding and classifying them are

distinct and fall within different academic disciplines. Thus the placing of such

aspects of the folkloric within ethnographic collections, because of the racial,

social or linguistic identity of the group, is inherently about emphasizing

difference even when practices are similar, or even when the practices

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             implemented a sterilization programme on Saami women. There are some debates as to whether these policies can be described as genocidal. It is generally accepted however that these policies also ultimately caused the dislocation of Saami people in the 1920s, further fracturing different Saami groups, and hence bearing the character of an internal Saami ethnic conflict. (Broadbent, N., 2010. Lapps and Labyrinths: Saami Prehistory, Colonization, and Cultural Resilience, Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, p.304). 30 Although in the case of Skansen from the beginning certain indigenous groups were represented in the staff of the museum, wearing their ‘traditional costumes’ in the village. Thus the account, from the national perspective, was of this ‘different’, traditional nomadic group, dressed ‘exotically’, placed in ‘static’ contrived exhibits of the everyday, and everyday performing their place in the ritual of historical silence. Constructed within the museological context as being in the service of the national, the ends somehow justified the means: the folk ideal.

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represented as ‘national’ were ‘original’ to the ethnographically researched

group. This is hidden in the received historical narrative as transmitted by the

museum, creating questions of legitimacy about the origins of the practices, of

whose voice and memory counts in the museological context.31

1.5 Folklore as symbol of the revision of national heritage: the case of

Skansen, Sweden.

Artur Hazelius, the founder of Skansen, sought to re-work conceptions and

‘myths’ of national identity in the context of fraught political landscapes in the

latter part of the nineteenth century, closely associating his conceptions with

the romantic movement in Scandinavia. This importance of the feminine,

brotherly unity, the bonds created within the family externalized and active in

‘society’, was to counter what, for him, was the emergence of an estranged

individuated and competitive society: ‘inaugurating a feminine social and

emotional space for patriotic love, reverence and sympathy’.32 He articulated

his conception of a Swedish society that was founded as an organic ‘folk

community’, upon his organic role as mediator establishing the legitimacy of

the institution which rested on his centrality as arbiter between the institution

                                                                                                               31 See further in Chapter 4. Although for discussions about representing culture in a multicultural nation, see: MacDonald, G.F., Alsford, S., 1995. ‘Canadian Museums and the Representation of Culture in a Multicultural Nation’, Cultural Dynamics, 7(1), pp15-36; and even more directly relevant to indigenous groups, Simpson, M.G., 2007. ‘Charting the Boundaries: Indigenous models and parallel practices in the development of the post-museum’, in: Knell, S., Macleod, S., Watson, S., (eds), Museum Revolutions: How museums change and are changed, London and New York: Routledge, pp235-59. 32 Backstrom, M., 2011. ‘Loading guns with patriotic love: Artur Hazelius’s attempts at Skansen to remake Swedish society’, in: Knell, S.J., Aronsson, P., Bugge Amundsen, A., Barnes, A.J., Burch, S., Carter, J., Gosselin, V., Hughes, S.A., Kirwan, A., (eds)., National Museums: New Studies from Around the World, London: Routledge, pp.69-87, p.69.

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and the Swedish people and not through the museum’s representation of the

Swedish state.

Different perspectives have focused on the ways that the museum considered

liminal areas, places of intersection or meeting points between,

… the high and low in society, women and men, the intimate and the public, the social and political, as well as on ethics, science and cultural history. It reveals a female, organic, social and emotional space; the Hazelian vision of a good society.33

Constructing commonality where nature and cultural history met, Hazelius

depicted a society on the basis of common patriotic love where every person

regardless of their ‘high’ or ‘low’ birth had something to offer. Thus,

Within his organic community every man and woman from every class contributed specific functions and different callings in public… A new respect for the interpersonal relationships and everyday work of ancestral communities was fundamental at Skansen.34

There was an emphasis on the importance of the female, of the cultured

woman wherein a performance of ancestral virtue and the ultimate emotional

and social experience could be found through motherhood, the act of

childbirth (the agentic) a common feature of society irrespective of the period

being represented and evoked, and a process within society much valued at

that time for the patriotic endeavors of women to produce male children who

could then represent the nation as soldiers in successive wars (the symbolic).

For Hazelius the cultural history of Sweden was constituted by life and love,

and of this ‘folk memory’ that could transcend specific historic time-bound

                                                                                                               33 Op cit.: p.70. 34 Op cit.: p.73.

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contexts. His ideal of the movement was to restore fractures to wholeness

from the social fragmentation of the contemporary society, the conflict of life

and loss; thus ‘“folk memory” became a memorialized promise for a future

built by a firmly rooted and loving people, a “folk”’.35 The ‘living pictures’ of

Skansen were brought about through the confluence of Hazelius’ animating

genius on nature, his meeting with the ‘life force’, the essence of ‘folk’, making

the exhibitions come alive. Using idealistic and naturalistic modes of

expression to explain reality, he used art to explore the inner life of nature, the

spiritual content of truth in the physical reality, alongside a Darwinian

approach to make links between objects and people in a scientific way.36

The civic ownership of the museum was contrived to be beyond the

competitivity and selfishness that, in Hazelius’ view, constituted political and

economic relations which were symbolized through the modern institutions of

the Swedish state. Instead, the legitimacy of the institution rested upon its

ability to represent the Swedish people ‘organically through patriotic love and

cultural history’, in order to foster harmonious society.37 In this romantic

setting of love and its relationship to the eternal truth, and practical life, the

curator worked to distinguish between authentic folkloric memories, worthy of

preservation, and rubbish. The notion was of spiritual life to be found in folk

artefacts and folk stories, in a way that mass-produced items were devoid of

and considered to be ‘dead.’ The spring festivals were one of the traditions

                                                                                                               35 Op cit: p.74. 36 Backstrom notes further that, as a consequence, the museum’s cottages were ideal and real at the same time, at the meeting point between art and science, romantic idealism and Darwinian naturalism (Ibid.) 37 Op cit.: p.75.

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that were particularly evoked and emphasized by him to depict the ‘moral and

emotional aspect of the open-air museum which represented patriotic love

and public good’, and recreate the spirit of old time fairs through, for example,

the use of authentic national dress (albeit only by high-born women). The

genders were divided between the feminine motherly and caring function (the

Women of Spring Festival) and the masculine role as scholar and politician,

producer of cultural history, articulator of visions for the future characterised in

speeches on the Swedish National Day at Skansen.38 In this way he

emphasized the gendering of private and intimate as well as public life.

Within the context of the museum, staff were expected to maintain high

standards of civility for the ideal museum visitors: the morally awakened men

and women who would respond to the museum ethos of folk ethics,

acceptable standards of behavior, and lines of action within a spiritual

community which united the high and low. In addition regulations existed to

protect and guard against e.g. ‘improper’ meetings through the provision of

highborn female chaperons for ‘young ladies’ who visited.39 They were

formed into ‘family groups’ with a lone male who walked with them as

protector.40

                                                                                                               38 Op cit.: p.78. 39 Op cit.: p.79. 40  During the festivals Hazelius strongly defended his right to be the only person who was able to transgress the intimate and public social divisions through providing surveillance of the whole using an organic folk logic. His focus was the potentially amoral, relying on rumour as evidence of those who transgressed his edicts about who should be allowed in.  

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1.6 Folklore as symbol of politics of value – a means to understanding

how trends in value change across time.

Within the festivals was the opportunity for high-born women to mingle with

low-born women: museum staff who had been chosen for their ethnic origin,

dressed in the appropriate traditional patterned dress, evincing ‘patriotic love

and good deeds’.41 These married women were for Dr. Hazelius the mothers

of a homely society, and their daughters properly brought up as the symbol of

a good future. They incorporated two fundamental aspects of a folk

community: love and heritage. Both introduced and articulated through the

notion of motherhood and the contemporary idea of the essence of

womanhood and through the Women of Spring festival, their moral and

emotional worth and work legitimating their opinions based on love for and

conviction of the value of their native country, giving the museum a socially

moral reputation and legitimacy, and Hazelius’ social and educational work of

creating ‘folk’ for the good of Swedish society.42

Hazelian museology was achieved through this mixture of Romanticism with

early nineteenth century Darwinism, to show the moral and emotional

essence incorporated in buildings, objects and people, and their evolution

over time. The essence of national character and patriotic love, the

importance of women in the coherence of a folk community, the regulations

put in place to govern the museum from within guarding against inappropriate

meetings or immoral behavior and providing protection through the artificial

creation of the family groups and the strict segregation of the feminine

                                                                                                               41 Op cit.: p.80. 42 Op cit.: p.84.

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intimate with the masculine public functions. Thus it is argued that the

museum’s vision was one of the major motivating factors for the development

of an inclusive welfare state which had both conservative and social

democratic formulations, finally realized politically in Sweden in the 1930s with

associated impacts on the whole of Europe.

Hazelius also demonstrated the need for a solid academic core at the heart of

museum provision, and demanded high levels of scholarship and

comprehensive studies from those he employed. Nordiska Museet,

completed in 1907 and founded on the collections and records he began

gathering in 1872 was planned as a centre for research and serious study.

The open-air museum at Skansen was developed as the educational partner

of the Nordiska Museet which housed his recordings of the different ways of

life of the Swedish people, at a moment of profound change, by detailed

fieldwork in which material culture and oral traditions were given equal

attention. Hazelius is further credited with the establishment of the academic

field of regional ethnology, which gave to museums an intellectual basis from

which curatorial practice could develop. The first Institute of Ethology was

founded in Stockhom in 1918, across the road from Nordiska Museet and with

joint staff appointments.43

                                                                                                               43 Kavanagh, G., 1993. History in Museums in Britain: A Brief Survey of Trends and Ideas, in: Fleming, D., Paine, C., Rhodes, J.G., (eds). 1993. Social History in Museums: A Handbook for Professionals, London: HMSO, pp13-26, p.15.

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Summary

The different museums of folk-life that developed in Europe, as illustrated in

the case of Skansen, were motivated by the desire to preserve vernacular

architecture during a time of great change, when traditions and customs were

changing, and in the context of great threat and political upheaval in Europe.

The museological context was constructed around emerging ideas about

issues of particular heritage, the need for its preservation, and important

considerations about identity and the nation.

   

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Chapter 2 Social history museums of Britain

Introduction

In contrast to the Swedish experience, and despite the conditions that ‘might

have suggested it was possible for a centre for the study of British ethnology

or a national folk museum to be established in England, no such institution

developed’.44 Kavanagh documents that unsuccessful proposals were made

for an Imperial Bureau of Ethnology to be established at the British Museum;

and that in similar vein active campaigns led by F.A. Bather of the Natural

History Museum and Henry Balfour of the Pitt-Rivers Museum found little

support and were lost during the Great War.45

Arising at a different point in history (from the 1950s onwards), social history,

industrial, and rural-life or agricultural museums developed in the UK to

document the ordinary lived realities of ‘the people’. These were more

concerned with memory, and the conservation of history that was still in living

memory, than with motivating a virtuous or national identity founded on a

‘good’ or appropriate social morality. As such, they were less concerned with

the nature of the origins of the British as a ‘folk’, documenting instead

processes that had resulted in massive changes in the population, alongside

the industrial revolution, and the impact of this on farming and production

practices, as well as on transport.46 At the same time there was a growing

                                                                                                               44 Kavanagh, G., 1993. ‘History in Museums in Britain: A Brief Survey of Trends and Ideas’, in: Fleming, D., Paine, C., Rhodes, J.G., (eds). 1993. Social History in Museums: A Handbook for Professionals, London: HMSO, pp13-26, p.16. 45 Marsh, 1987, pp30-48. Cited in Ibid. 46 For example with the development of canals and railways.

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interest in industrial archaeology and history; this had developed since the

late 1950s, with a high level of scholarship evinced by local and amateur

historians.47 There was much material made obsolete due to technological

change and innovation that was available for display.

Social history museums that concentrate on industry and local

history

Many social history museums exist in the UK with diverse histories of

founding, funding, and development. Often likened to the folk-life museums of

Europe, they are open-air, containing re-located buildings of historic

importance. Industrial and transport history, coupled with an interest in

curating and conserving this history, led to a number of sites being developed

(examples include Ironbridge Gorge and Beamish Museums).48 The industrial

museums were born out of the closure of heavy and skilled industry during the

1960s and 1970s, enabled by the fact that materials for exhibition became

available and the public’s interest had been captured by the destruction of

urban sites and structures.49 Alongside regional offerings that concentrated on

local history, whether social, rural or industrial, these museums represented a

                                                                                                               47 Davies, S., 1993. ‘Social History in Museums: The Academic Context, in: Fleming, D., Paine, C., Rhodes, J.G., (eds). 1993. Social History in Museums: A Handbook for Professionals, London: HMSO, pp3-12, p.7. 48 Ibid. Ironbridge Gorge was set up in 1968 and represents 1890s England and the Industrial Revolution. The Victorian Town has a working pub, a greengrocer's shop, a captivating squatter's cottage, and a pigsty. There is the opportunity to watch local artisans at work, e.g. a candlemaker. Another example of a Social History-industrial open-air museum is The Beamish in the North of England that simulates the years 1825 and 1913. There is the opportunity to don a hard hat and explore an actual coalmine and adjoining settlement, view the steam-powered winding engine used to operate the mine elevator. ‘Known affectionately as Beamish the museum became the proving ground for post-war ideas of open-air museums and for the amalgamation of the representation of social and industrial experiences’ (Kavanagh, 1993, p.20). 49 Kavanagh, 1993.

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desire to protect the heritage of a bygone era. They recorded the effects of

the industrial revolution and the consequential changes caused by

mechanization. 50 Social history museums, like the academic disciplines to

which they relate, are concerned with the daily life of inhabitants of the land in

past ages.51

Whilst little attention has been paid to these museums in academic literatures,

the museums, as exhibitors and archive holders of oral history, have held a

respected place.52 Furthermore, although they are not primarily research

institutions, curators working within them contribute to the literatures through

exhibitions, popular publications and living history.53 And while the

relationship between academic institutions and museums is not altogether

consistent, there are examples of good working relationships.54

                                                                                                               50 These include, for example, the production and mining of minerals and fuel, how new and faster methods of textile production were introduced, the differences between dental practices, then and now). An example of a more locally based offering is that of Dean Heritage Centre which is set in a five acre site with the motivation to protect and preserve the unique history and heritage of the Forest of Dean. Exhibits include the history of the Forest from the Ice Age to the present day; a reconstructed Victorian cottage; a charcoal burner’s camp; an adventure playground; chainsaw carving demonstrations; a variety of animals and an onsite gift shop. The Centre is a registered charity and described on their website as a ‘community heritage centre founded and supported by local people’. (http://www.deanheritagecentre.com/U, Last accessed: 18/07/2012). 51 ‘This includes the human as well as the economic relation of different classes to one another, the character of family and household life, the conditions of labour and of leisure, the attitude of man to nature, the culture of each age as it arose out of these general conditions of life, and took every-changing forms in religion, literature and music, architecture, learning and thought’. Trevelyan, 1944, cited in Davies, 1993, p.4. 52 Davies, 1993. 53 Ibid. 54 In the case of Ironbridge Gorge Museum a link was established with Birmingham University through the Institute of Industrial Archaeology. This led to a collaborative venture between the Department of Local History at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery with the University of Aston, in the early 1980s, to conduct research on its buckle and steel toy collections (Ibid.).

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Recent literature concentrates on curatorial practices of material culture of

social history, which creates a secure connection between local and social

historical traditions as these relate to folk-life, archaeology, history--even

when the history itself is ‘diffuse and obscure’.55 The expansion of history

museums was further promoted through the activities of local government,

which, from 1974 during a massive re-organization, resulted in the expansion

or establishment of museum services at county level, ostensibly to represent

the history of the authority’s area.

Social history rural-life museums

At the same time, and heavily influenced by the Scandinavian folk museum

movement, a number of rural-life museums were set up in the UK.56 The

intention of their founders was similar: preservation of a way of life in the

countryside that seemed to be disappearing. This was the culmination of a

number of processes: urban migratory flows, the urban location and

development of industry and light industry, as well as the mechanization of

farming practices as a result of technological innovation, and incentives within

the rural sector.57 The museums are dated with regard to reflecting within

their collections demographic and cultural characteristics of the contemporary

                                                                                                               55Davies, 1993, p.10. 56 Shorland-Ball, R., 2000. Farming, Countryside and Museums: Museums of Farming and Rural Life at the beginning of the 21st Century, London: Museums and Galleries Commission; Rentzhog, S., 2007. Open Air Museums: The History and Future of a Visionary Idea, Kristianstad: Association of European Open Air Museums; Brigden, R., 2004. ‘Rural Museums and the National Lottery’, Journal of the Social History Curators Group, 29, pp25-31. 57 These incentives were the result of national government policy and related to the subsidies and quotas for the production of specific crops, as well as the extension of international trade markets for produce within Europe.  

  31  

agricultural labour-force: the importance of migrant workers from all over

Europe, harnessed to current farming production and harvesting practices.58

A further number of rural-life museums were inaugurated in the 1970s, run by

the local authority museums services, with a similar motivation to those

museums of the 1950s but this time about living memory and the experiences

of ordinary people, as opposed to agricultural history. This yielded a diverse

collection, ostensibly falling within the purview of social and agricultural

history, though distinct from the other categories discussed. These include

the Museum of English Rural Life, the Somerset Rural Life Museum, and the

Museum of East Anglian Life.59 The founding of the Museum of English Rural

Life (MERL) at the University of Reading in 1951 gave England its own

national museum of rural-life and brought history museums into the university

sphere.60 It had significant influence on professional practice in Britain

through its ‘insistence on thorough fieldwork and recording techniques, and

through its development of a system for classifying museum collections, which

was subsequently widely adopted’.61 Other museums following their example,

exhibited machinery that became available as rural industries and agricultural

practices changed dramatically or ceased altogether.62

                                                                                                               58 and receiving salaries, in cash or kind, far lower than most British people would consider acceptable. See: Rogaly, B., 2008. ‘Intensification of workplace regimes in British horticulture: the role of migrant workers’, Population, Space and Place, 14(6), pp497-510. 59  The Appendix provides a brief description of and images for each.  60 Kavanagh, 1993, p.20. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid.

  32  

The primary purpose of this chapter is to consider rural-life museums within

the context of the folkloric, focusing on display and collections management.

The case study examples includes two rural-life museums, located in regional

proximity to each other with similar collections: that of MERL at Reading run in

close association with Reading University (set up in the 1950s), and Somerset

Rural Life Museum, local authority-run with a Friends association (Somerset

County Council, set up in the 1970s). These provide interesting comparators

to Skansen, and will be analyzed under the same headings.63

What rural-life museums do: the policy and research context

Constructing an account of the emergence and activities of rural-life museums

in the British context from the academic literatures is difficult. The

documentation related to this sector, particularly contemporary materials, is to

be found within reports and studies. These grey literatures include Farming,

Countryside and Museums, a report that directed attention to areas within the

sector that needed reinvigorating as visitor numbers and investment had

decreased.64 To this end the Rural Museums Network was set up in 2003,

oriented to the need for more cooperation between rural museums, their

communities and other organisations. Its mission statement sums up the

cooperative approach as being about bringing museums of farming and the

countryside together for mutual benefit.65

                                                                                                               63This suggests that similarities within the sector are emergent, constitutive of practices, which include those related to matters of land and hearth, and to collections management and disposal within the museum. There are also commonalities of categorization, research, design.  64 Shorland-Ball, 2000. 65 Rural Museums Network, at: http://www.ruralmuseums.specialistnetwork.org.uk/ (Last accessed 18/07/12).

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Following the publication of Sorting the Wheat from the Chaff, which promoted

the creation of a national database documenting agricultural collections to

improve collections development and access to heritage, a problem with

storage was highlighted.66 For example, materials were being kept at

standards below the minimum for registration. These museums were

criticized that the interpretation of objects held was too basic, displays were

not regularly updated and contemporary material was absent. The report

established a series of seminars for a broad consensus about landmark

developments and significant storylines, and the material culture and objects

germane to the subject areas.67 Supplementary reports documented dairying

collections68, assessed the status of rural craft collections held nationally69,

                                                                                                               66 Viner, D., Wilson,C., 2004. Sorting the Wheat from the Chaff The Distributed National Collection: a scoping and development study of agricultural heritage collections, at: www.ruralmuseums.specialistnetwork.org.uk/asset.../dnc_jan2004.pdf, [Last accessed: 18/07/2012), p.35. 67 Wilson, C., 2006. Sorting the Curds and Whey, Dairying collections in the UK: Progress with identifying the ‘Distributed National Collection’ of Agricultural Heritage Items, at: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:05BR-KjC6lUJ:www.ruralmuseums.specialistnetwork.org.uk/asset_arena/textual/Final%2520Dairying%2520Report%252012%252005%252006.doc+Sorting+the+Curds+and+Whey,+Dairying+collections+in+the+UK:+Progress+with+identifying+the+%E2%80%98Distributed+National+Collection%E2%80%99+of+Agricultural+Heritage&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiSt3RikkjFPTc2LIRpfEvh8dOy3tCLOIdGIXWhXANR2-ceDi96gBGrSB9cxioSY-jGz3SrJDZ0_KRVOMSY5N47wCYuqg3J--jmWY-N8DqEj3ecf7YYToR7rr6h18wBPiWTMZH3&sig=AHIEtbRbxrRREQudSfs8pUvU8IzI9zqP9Q, (Last accessed: 18/07/2012), p. 68 Ibid. 69 Viner, D., 2007. A report for the Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading Rural Crafts and Trades Today: An Assessment of Preservation and Presentation in Museums and Archives, at: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:hTaLv07EEzgJ:www.reading.ac.uk/merl/online_exhibitions/ruralcrafts/craft_collections/Rural%2520Crafts%2520and%2520Trades%2520Collections%2520Today,%2520Part%2520Three%2520-%2520Bibliography.pdf+A+report+for+the+Museum+of+English+Rural+Life+at+the+University+of+Reading+Rural+Crafts+and+Trades+Today:+An+Assessment+of+Preservation+and+Presentation+in+Museums+and+Archives,&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgesPsPoxxVMX7VCRVVc1z8jXVoY4O-tHlj4TKF32DgYldUsnmb3lLWa9M431dahnlctuicy2Ei69DzvOkhsahXGBueki6kwJeC-9v1XsKMfwHVGnS6SEo2qpdjpFaIfi8K27Lt&sig=AHIEtbS_8rt-aE96yWdyjtF3vLT6Dopdug, (Last accessed: 18/07/2012).

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and led to a list of important objects held nationally, and downloadable from

the RMN website.

The South-West Museums Council developed a methodology for assessing

the significance, condition and status of rural museums in a report More Than

Nostalgia.70 It took the form of a toolkit designed to assist with the

management, assessment and future use of large collections.71 The report

strongly associated the ability of cooperative working between rural museums

with the development of coherent approaches to collections management,

with later reports focused on disposal, within the context of dwindling financial

resources.72 As the Museums Association’s Collections for the Future,

acknowledged, sustainable collections policies necessitate considerations

about disposal.73

2.1 Rural-life as the folkloric: as expression of agency

Collections policy and management appears, from these documents and

reports, to have been inconsistent during periods of high acquisition, including                                                                                                                70 Viner, D., 2001. More Than Nostalgia Agricultural Heritage Collections in the South West of England, Taunton: South West Area Museums Council, at: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:QR05fUgQbQUJ:www.ruralmuseums.specialistnetwork.org.uk/asset_arena/textual/more-than-nostalgia.pdf+Viner,+D.,+2001.+More+Than+Nostalgia+Agricultural+Heritage+Collections+in+the+South+West+of+England,+Taunton:+South+West+Area+Museums+Council.&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEEShFUM4n_zbxRTexCAgLJA3huORfEIZYJSa0gwbT6KPzScPVPDsHfgtAOWGQ-cZLOHRUb9VwTCNGcsLGZ1wdcOEj5hPwgyQwrQxFEtJj8aTEEyjftMiMNRbmxiBcq7e5DeDt9T1_&sig=AHIEtbQJylZRIlh7x6H7q-eic19OOOzqpw, (Last accessed: 18/07/2012). 71 Ibid. 72 Stephens, S., 2009. ‘Fierce Contest for HLF Cash’, Museums Journal, 109(2), p.11; Nightingale, J., 2009. ‘Tough Times Ahead’, Museums Journal, 109(3), pp28-31. 73 Museums Association 2005. Collections for the Future, Museums Association: London, at: http://www.museumsassociation.org/collections/9839, (Last accessed: 18/07/2012), p.23.

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the post-war period when many of them were set up. Many collections

evinced limited material from recent decades.74 Owing to the issues of

storage space within these museums many contemporary collections focused

on oral history, the recording of ‘voice’, collecting biographical accounts of

people’s lives, life histories, or those that are issue-focused, recorded and

listened to in the museological context.75 Recent exhibitions that are

examples of this include The Somerset Voices Oral History Archive (Somerset

County Council 2007) and Pastures New? (Staffordshire Museums Service).76

These sorts of exhibitions have become a popular device for up-dating the

story and the collection. Another example is the blog resultant from the

Collecting Cultures Programme, showing how rural museums could develop,

widening the collections focus beyond agricultural technology and rural

traditions to include a range of material relating to rural-life.77

2.2 Rural-life as the folkloric: as a symbol of ‘other’ – museums in

partnership

An important aspect of recent joined-up projects between social history and

rural-life museums and communities they serve has been the involvement of

‘socially excluded’ groups into projects that broadly fall within food production,

heritage conservation, and restoration. The Museum of East Anglian Life

                                                                                                               74‘Collecting of post-1950 materials has not happened in any systematic way partly through lack of capacity, partly through that lingering folk-life concept of what rural museums should be about, and partly through the lack of demand’. Brigden, 2004. 75 For information about this approach, see: Finnegan, R., 1992. Oral Traditions and The Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research Practices, London and New York: Routledge. 76 Copp, C., 2003. ‘Pastures New: Recording Contemporary Rural Concerns’, Social History in Museums, Journal of the Social History Curators Group, 28, pp25-30. 77By making connections between rural-life, art, the media and technology. See: Culture 24 website, at: http://www.culture24.org.uk/am18756 (Last accessed 18/07/2012).

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promotes the work of a local organization through enabling the production of

vegetables, flowers and plants that can then be sold from the museum.78 The

Beamish open-air museum worked with young people in care, in the South

Shields area, to reconstruct the Westoe Netty, a famous 1940s public

convenience. The importance of these projects is that they constitute

sustainable ones that endure within a community, rather than those which are

temporary: within working collections, with skilled staff, ‘and the potential to

carry out this work in a sustainable manner’.79 In contrast to larger institutions

which may be constrained by their size, governance, and remit, to have a

deep interaction with their communities, smaller regional museums, (open-air,

rural-life) can be more responsive.80

The Museum of English Rural Life, set up in conjunction with Reading

University’s Faculty of Agriculture, is another example of a collaborative

project in this sector. Inspired by Skansen, following John Higgs’ (Lecturer in

Farm Mechanisation) efforts to persuade the University to support something

similar, MERL opened in 1955 with the aim to preserve,

… some of the material that is rapidly disappearing from the countryside and to build up not only a collection but also a library of material that will be of use for research.81

In 1978 the collaborative project introduced the MERL classification system

for the categorization of social history objects that was adopted by rural

                                                                                                               78 Heywood, F., 2007. ‘Social Security’, Museums Journal, 107(10), pp38-9. 79 Stephens, C., 2009. ‘Reshaping the Cultural Landscape’ Folklife – Journal of Ethnological Studies, 47(1), pp106-114, p.113. 80 Davis, P., 2007. ‘Place Exploration: Museums, Identity, Community’, in: Watson, S., (ed.), Museums and their Communities. London: Routledge, pp53-76, p.72. 81 Higgs, J., 1951, cited in: Riviere, P., 2009. ‘Success and failure: the tale of two museums’, Journal of the History of Collections, 22 (1), pp141-151.

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history museums. The museum, situated close to the University (in an urban

location with limited outdoor space), holds its reserve collections in open

storage, with a reading room and accessible museum archives. Whilst the

core collection has remained stable, with limited disposal and a freeze on

acquisitions of large farming machinery, the much-acclaimed management of

the collection has caused MERL to be considered an important research

resource for rural and agricultural history.82

2.3 Rural-life as the folkloric: symbol of renegotiated meanings

MERL is currently participating in a Heritage Lottery Fund funded programme

of collecting ‘Collecting Twentieth Century Rural Culture’. The project has

inspired the acquisition of different kinds of objects from different decades of

the twentieth century that speak to a particular aspect of life in the

countryside, or attitudes to it.83 This approach has led to contemporary

courses for undergraduate students run in conjunction with the University,

based at MERL. Thus, in the case of MERL, there is a focus on active

collection, about differently conceived categories ‘newly’ relevant to the

documentation of traditional rural-life, and a didactic teaching method

consonant with the scientific approach exemplified within MERL’s

classification system.

                                                                                                               82 Brigden, R. 1993. ‘The Agricultural History Approach’, in: Fleming, D., Paine, C., Rhodes, J.G., (eds). Social History in Museums: A Handbook for Professionals, London: HMSO, pp82-6. This has enabled the museum to fulfill its pledge to facilitate ‘people to enjoy and make use of this material’, at: http://www.reading.ac.uk/merl/about/merl-about.aspx (Last accessed: 18/07/2012). 83 Information about this is at: http://www.reading.ac.uk/merl/research/merl_collectingruralcultures.aspx (Last accessed: 18/07/2012).

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2.4 Rural-life as the folkloric: symbol of the revision of national

heritage

Literature published during the 1970s emphasized the broadly functional

tropes within the exhibits in rural museums.84 That relating to rural museums

emphasized the contemporary onus of considerations of sustainability.85

Brigden argues that this can cause rural museums to change their traditional

image – choosing to emphasize the cooperative efforts of people and the

ways that they ‘live and work in relation to each other and to the environment

around them’.86 This enables stereotyped accounts of an overly-romanticized

rural past to be queried, through comparing different and earlier technologies,

for example how fruit and crops were sprayed in the 1930s serving to

challenge received opinions about biodiversity; or where artists have

represented farm life through paintings of grossly fat animals, as symbol and

record of some of the unsustainable farming practices inherited from particular

historical contexts.87 Exhibitions have focused on issues of food and

production.88 The Rural Museum Network’s toolkit advises further that object

labels might include information about the carbon footprint of machinery.89

                                                                                                               84 See: Heeley, A., Brown, M., 1979. Victorian Somerset: Farming, Glastonbury: Friends of the Somerset Rural Life Museum; Fuller, M., 1964. West Country Friendly Societies: An Account of Village Benefit Clubs and their Brass Pole Heads, Reading: Oakwood Press and the University of Reading. 85 Brigden, R., 2009., ‘Rural Museums in an Urban and Multicultural Society’, Folklife Journal of Ethnological Studies, 47(1), pp97-105. 86 Op cit.: p.101. 87 Op cit.: p.102. 88 Stephens, S., 2007. ‘Food Glorious Food’, Museums Journal, 107(2), pp28-31. 89 McGowan, H., Hall, J., 2008. Collections Toolkit: Ideas about how to interpret present day concerns about climate change using collections in rural museums, Rural Museums Networks Turning Green Project, UK: MLA (April), at: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5Rg9IWfU1GYJ:www.ruralmuseums.specialistnetwork.org.uk/asset_arena/textual/collectionstoolkit.pdf+RMN+toolkit,+Mcgowan+and+hall&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=firefox-a, (Last accessed: 18/07/2012).

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In the context of historical revision it is useful to consider a second case

study: The Somerset Rural Life Museum. This is funded and run as a local

authority museum by Somerset County Council’s Heritage Service, and is

located on the outskirts of Glastonbury.90 Following a donation of a medieval

tithe barn, the Abbey Barn, the county council’s countywide museums service

opened it in 1974. The collections’ focus was of objects that were thought to

represent the county’s rural agricultural heritage and rural crafts.91 The

Friends of Somerset Rural Life Museum have played an important part from

its inception in its running and day-to-day aspects.92

A recent feasibility study to look at the future of the museum justified the focus

on disposal of some objects that had been in storage since the early 1990s as

a way to manage collections and future investments, as well as to facilitate

                                                                                                               90 Somerset County Council Website, at: http://www.somerset.gov.uk/irj/public/services/directory/service?rid=/wpccontent/Sites/SCC/Web%20Pages/Services/Services/Community/Somerset%20County%20Museums%20Collections, (Last accessed: 18/07/2012). 91 Exhibits include a Victorian farmhouse and recreated farm kitchen, a temporary exhibition gallery, and a large courtyard containing farm machinery, chickens, a tractor, an adjoining orchard with sheep, and a working blacksmith’s shop. 92 Somerset Council Website explains: ‘The Friends of the Somerset Rural Life Museum brings together people who are passionate about Somerset's past and future. If you love museums and care about Somerset's rich heritage we want you to join us. The Association is a charity, founded in 1975, to support the Somerset Rural Life Museum, Glastonbury in the advancement of its aims and policies. Membership benefits include newsletters, exhibition previews and opportunities to undertake research work. Friends are involved in helping to increase the collection of artefacts for the Museum collections, supporting and co-ordinating research, publishing, education and advertising. […] The Friends research and publish educational material about Somerset, some of which takes into account aspects of the school curriculum. They also support the educational programme for schools visiting the museum. This includes Victorian cooking and washdays, life in 1940s and old toys and games. […] The Friends are always happy to recruit new members with an interest in Somerset's past.’ At: http://www.somerset.gov.uk/irj/public/services/directory/service?rid=/wpccontent/Sites/SCC/Web%20Pages/Services/Services/Community/Friends%20of%20the%20Somerset%20Rural%20Life%20Museum (Last accessed: 18/07/2012). It is impossible to determine from the website the demographic, social and economic aspects of this group, i.e. whether these people are ‘high’ born or ‘low’ born.

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the move to new premises in a purpose built heritage centre.93 Despite a limit

to contemporary object collecting, oral history and film recordings have made

significant changes to the content of the museum through the ‘The Romany

Gypsy’ project.94 A focus on environmental issues within the museum

prompted an entire exhibition about local industries contemporarily and in the

past. One successful method, which has been used, juxtaposes

contemporary footage with archival film of different Somerset industries, such

as modern and historical basket makers – their tools and the objects made.

The contrast shows clearly the changes in people’s lives and how rural

communities have evolved in response.

2.5 Rural-life as the folkloric: symbol of politics of value – a means to

understanding how trends in value change across time

Museological trends concerning the display of social and rural history have

changed, given the importance placed on memory and ‘personal’ nostalgia.

Over time some items more associated with the pre-war countryside, such as

horse-drawn farm wagons and wooden ploughs have become less

meaningful.95 Thus current directions within the sector have, in response to

their audiences, developed towards more dynamic interpretations of the

countryside with displays and activities that are more experiential, people-

focused and diverse: contrasting today’s countryside with the past and

                                                                                                               93 Somerset Heritage Service, 2010. Somerset Heritage Service Newsletter, Jan, at: http://www1.somerset.gov.uk/archives/, (Last accessed: 18/07/2012). 94 Run by the Somerset Heritage Service’s Learning Team. 95 Bridgen, 2004, p.35.

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highlighting a telling of diverse accounts and filmic recordings of the human

story that has shaped the countryside.96

To be relevant we need to ensure that our visitors are provided with an appropriate level of intellectual access to our displays. Farming must be placed in its wider context and our interpretation must go beyond narrow technology to encompass both products and people.97

The focus on collections management and disposal, including collaborative

projects that have involved communities, all speak to this recent change.

Summary

The rural-life museum movement in the UK achieved the following:

preservation of artefacts, re-enactment of rural ways of life, and contemporary

exhibits focused on ecological sustainability and oral history. These have

been underpinned by rigorous collections management policies, research and

classification, latterly focusing on supra-regional impetus to sustainability, of

collections, their conservation, and disposal, along with the involvement of

their communities through collaboration.

   

                                                                                                               96 Susie Fischer Group, 2006. Towards A New Territory for Rural Museums: Desk Research and Literature Review, Rural Museums Network, at: http://www.ruralmuseums.specialistnetwork.org.uk/ixbin/indexplus?record=ART639, (Last accessed 18/07/2012), pp45-6. 97 Williams-Davis, J., 2007. Museums and Agriculture: The Challenge of Relevance, Rural Museums Network, at: http://www.ruralmuseums.specialistnetwork.org.uk/ixbin/indexplus?record=ART639, (Last accessed: 18/07/2012), p.9.

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Chapter 3: Folkloric approaches and the British context

The British Isles refers to a collection of islands that include two sovereign

states: the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland), and

Eire. It is interesting that, of the countries more closely associated with Celtic

or Gaelic identities, despite distinct folkloric traditions, histories of English

control and colonialism98, there exist national museums dedicated to

preserving and representing this aspect of history and life in the country or

region within which it is located.99 These museums include: the National

Museum of Rural Life, previously known as the Museum of Scottish Country

Life, Scotland100; St Fagans National History Museum (Sain Ffagan:

Amgueddfa Werin Cymru - Welsh Folk Museum), Wales; the Ulster Folk and

Transport Museum, Northern Ireland; and the Museum of Country-Life, one

branch of Ard-Mhúsaem na hÉireann, National Museum of Ireland. All are

concerned with the preservation and conservation of practices of the

indigenous culture, of the traditional and folkloric, either wholly or partially.

                                                                                                               98 Through, for example, the active suppression of the indigenous language in public spaces at different times in history coupled with an active and growing resistance to that colonial power with its perceived threat of ‘Anglicisation’ of native customs and practices, which include movements to preserve the indigenous language. 99 For example the Celtic Literary Association saw an emphasis on reviving Irish themes in literature and traditional skills in arts and crafts. These enterprises produced tangible forms of the Celtic past and made it more accessible and relevant to contemporary society. In 1893 Douglas Hyde established the Gaelic League to promote Irish languages, and most famously spoke in 1892 on ‘the necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland’ (O’Leary, P., 2009. ‘Language Revival and Cultural Nationalism in Ireland and Wales’, Irish Studies Review, 17(1), Feb, pp 5-18). 100 The specific history and context/nature of collections of the Highland Folk Museum, founded by Dr I. Grant, will be considered, although intended as a national museum for a number of reasons, the project was never fully realized.

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There are a number of regional museums also conserving the folkloric within

local, rural or agricultural history.101

Whilst there are smaller regional folk museums in England, there is no

national museum about folk-life or the folkloric, per se.102 Though, of course,

several national museums do contain collections that are pertinent to this

broad topic including the Victoria and Albert Museum (housing art and design)

with more contemporary offerings being found at the Tate Modern (for

example, the kinetic art installations).103 As discussed above many social

history museums exist, including some with a focus on rural-life; but, although

sometimes concerned with folk-life or the folkloric, for example through

displays about craft-making, they do not explicitly orient the display or the

design to a discussion or representation of folklore or the folkloric. This may

be because aspects of the folkloric have tended to be obscured within

collections or exhibits which have an archaeological bias.104

Indeed it is a moot point whether it is possible, or even desirable, for such an

institution to be developed, given that folkloric practices primarily have

meaning at the local level and within local traditions and cannot be captured in

                                                                                                               101 These are set out in the Appendix. See as an example: the Connemara Heritage Centre, Ireland, http://www.connemaraheritage.com/, (Last accessed: 18/07/2012). 102 Gloucester Folk Museum, http://www.gloucester.gov.uk/citymuseum, (Last accessed: 18/07/2012). 103 For a contemporary reading of the place of popular culture, its representation in museums, germane to the folkloric, see: Moore, K., 1997. Museums and Popular Culture, London and Washington: Cassell. 104 For example the sites that are acknowledged to have concerned ancient folkloric practices, like Avebury, remain historical monuments to a particular period of pre-history. However, there are other sites that have been adopted by the followers of neo-Pagan practices (for example, the Silver Well, Dorset, http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=8229 (Last accessed: 18/07/2012).

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a static form. A further problem exists in cases where different national and

ethnic groups have migrated to regions within this country (in successive

waves prior to and following the Second World War). How are the practices

of these groups to be represented within the folkloric, being aspects of

‘indigenous’ heritages of different countries, many of which are former

colonies? In most cases these have been the subject of separate

ethnographic collections within individual museums, rather than being

contained within a national collection.105

Another issue is that of the history of imperial and colonial activities. This may

have oriented the British ‘national’ consciousness towards the external during

the Victorian age when other nations, like Sweden and Eire, were

concentrating on issues of national identity. With the emergence of

disciplines such as geology, geography and anthropology, all of which sought

to create ‘universal’ taxonomies and an ordering of the natural world, some of

these more ordinary or mundane folkloric practices were likely to have been

deemed illogical for collection and preservation, and were ‘repressed’ in this

sense in England during the Victorian age.106

                                                                                                               105 It is to be noted, however, that the Scandinavian countries dealt with multiculturalism through the addition of further additions to their collections (e.g. the Pakistani house added to Norway’s collection in 2001) but continued to represent the culture of the Saami within an ethnographic context. 106 Although, interestingly, not in the case of the collection of folk music and folk dance. Cecil Sharp began his work collecting folk songs and morris dances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He founded the English Folk Song Society1898 and the English Folk Dance Society in 1911. Both were the outcome of a number of the work of individual collectors and enthusiasts who wanted to share their experience and improve the quality of collecting. No geographical limit was set to the Society's activities, and although the main interest were the folk songs and dances of Britain. http://www.efdss.org/front/History/history-of-the-english-dance-and-song-society, (Last accessed: 18/07/2012). On the strong distinction made between ‘high’ discourses of poetry, and ‘low’ discourses of nursery rhymes and

  45  

It is worth pausing here to consider a clarification of terms. The term

‘indigenous’, as used here, refers to the fact that the practices concerned are

taken to be ‘other’; the term ‘ethnographic’ refers to the fact that the practices

are ‘different’ as a result of an accepted academic convention or research

methodology. The result is that collections which have been built up as

‘indigenous and ethnographic’ have been subject to different collection

policies within existing museological contexts whose literatures have

described them as being within that of the ‘traditional arts’ of a particular

nation.107 Consequently they fall within a different category, although

describing practices of persons who have settled in this country and whose

offspring of second and third generation consider themselves to be British.108

This subject is a very important one for a consideration of national

understandings, ideologies, and practices of identity that apply in any

discussion of the folkloric. As folkloric practices, and folklore, could be

described as indigenous to this country, there seems to be a problem not just

in considering what is authentically ‘folkloric’ and emergent from and

belonging or pertaining to a region or ‘group’ (for example, by dialect or

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             incantations, see: Duncan, A., 2001. ‘Spellbinding Performance: Poet as Witch in Theocritus’ Second Idyll and Apollonius’ Argonautica’, Helios, 28(1), pp43-56. On the domestic garden, see: Scourse, N., 1983. The Victorians and their Flowers, London and Canberra: Croom Helm. 107 Nicholson, J., 1989. ‘Traditional Indian Arts of Gujurat’, for the exhibition at Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery New Walk, Leicester 25/6/88 - 5/3/89, Leicester: Leicestershire County Council Publication. 108 These issues are also relevant to the national history and folk-life or rural-life museums in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland, however due to their very different national histories and construction of national identity, as well as the scale of the migration flows, perhaps not so critical as in the case of England.

  46  

language), but how to represent changes in folkloric re-production and

production through history in terms of two aspects of the symbolic and the

agentic. It is evident from the diverse histories within the different regions of

Great Britain, and within the British Isles, that folkloric practices emerged from

very different processes which, in turn, contributed to shared understandings

and identities. These include traditions that can be understood as contributing

to the communal management of the intergenerational.

Clearly, many folkloric practices (music, poetry, dance, decoration, art,

textiles) may be understood to transcend diverse socio and economic

characteristics of different groups. These practices might be seen as a

symbolic approach concerning the areas of commonality among, for example,

different classes in this country - although, of course, the meaning and sense

of the folkloric for individuals might be arrived at through very different

processes. In addition, to ignore issues of the importance of the agentic -

about how and for what purpose items are made with differential access to

resources and tools - and the meaning that is attributed to agentic processes,

might result in a species of tokenism.

Furthermore, there is the issue of where such an institution, a Museum of

Folklore for the British Isles, would be located, particularly given history.

Kavanagh (1993) comments that, although the 1930s was a time ripe for folk

museums, it was not sufficiently important enough for the British government

  47  

to sponsor one.109 Proposals made to the Ministry of Works by a special

working party looking at a possible National Folk Museum for England ‘failed

to capture the political imagination’.110 Individual efforts developed regionally

and included Iorwerth Peate at the National Museum of Wales, William

Cubbon and the founding of Creagnash and the Folk Life Survey on the Isle of

Man,111 and the gathering of collections of a Highland Folk Museum by Dr I.

Grant.112

This chapter will consider the use of and the uses to which the folkloric have

been put within the context of British museology by concentrating on different

methodologies of representation and design, but also on salient aspects

related to the treatment of folklore within academic literatures, broadly

historical, in this country. The case of St Fagans, the Welsh National History

Museum (Sain Ffagan: Amgueddfa Werin Cymru) will be considered.

3.1 St Fagans: the folkloric as expression of agency

In the context of exhibitions and its design, meaning is communicated by the

narrative choices made by the museum, evident in a recent exhibit.113

                                                                                                               109 ‘Expansion during this period can be ascribed not just to the prime years of a small number of highly motivated curators, but more powerfully to a social climate that attempted to put behind it or at least out of its mind, the war, depression, social division, industrial strife, and the apparent and threatening changes taking place in Nazi Germany. Therefore, circumstances were conducive for the establishment of museums that recorded and celebrated ways of living in what were thought to be less threatening and more secure times, before the advent of the industrial revolution.’ (Kavanagh, 1993, p.16). 110 Harrison, 1986, cited in Kavanagh, 1993, p.16. 111 Harrison, 1986, cited in Kavanagh, 1993, p.16. 112 Cheape, 1986; Noble 1977, both cited in Kavanagh, 1993, p.16-17. 113 Pearce, S., 1992. Museum Objects and Collections: A Cultural Strategy, Leicester: Leicester University Press, ‘the relation of our museum material to the ways in which we view the past and produce our narrative of what happened in the

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St Fagan’s exhibit on ‘Belonging and Beliefs’ opened in 2006, and is located

in Oriol 1, in the main gallery and administration block of the Museum of

Welsh Life. The exhibition is foregrounded with a poem by the national poet,

Gwyn Thomas, further alerting the visitor/participant that its subject is identity.

A Meeting Place I am singular My time is now And I am here. But I am not alone. At my back I hear The ticking of time past The faint breathing of many generations of my ancestors And all about me Is the family of man. Here I see what makes the fundamental me A roof above me, bed, and work, daily bread, and water; Here I see my words; Here the beliefs that sustain me. I ponder here on the meaning of me I ponder here on the meaning of we And what is my humanity. In this hall is where I’ll see Clues to my identity: I contain multitudes.

The rooms contain different collections, both audio-visual and of objects,

notable for the content and subject of the poem’s text. The museum clearly

locates the origins of almost all the myths and stories (folklore), the

craftsmanship, the local and social history, all concerned with identity,

portrayed in connection with objects. These include a full-size replica of a

Celtic cross, a full size four poster bed, a wall-art ‘mural’ of St Catherine with

her wheel (along with a large crafted chair by four Chinese craftsmen), as

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             past is both one of the most important and one of the most difficult questions that museum collections pose’, p.

  49  

emergent from contestation, conflict, and battles that may or may not have

occurred within the boundaries of what is now Wales. The exhibits, for

example, show how news of conflicts and battles were relayed through bards

from far-off Northumberland and kept alive through re-telling; one text panel

informs the visitor that the first Welsh poetry was written about a battle that

occurred in the North of England.114 In documenting conflict or crisis, an

interesting effect is produced for the visitor – one related to the focus on the

dynamic and ever-changing, and the importance of this mediation of the past

in the present.

Reflecting the diversity of the religious iconography found within contemporary

Wales, there are a series of Gods and Goddesses from Hindu and Buddhist

pantheons, including an ivory statue of Saraswati.115 These alert the visitor to

the fact that Saraswati means ‘the essence of the self’, that she is the divine

companion of Lord Brahma and that she symbolizes the creative power of

Brahma. The exhibit is located orthogonally and indirectly opposite to another

display of Christian icons, including the Virgin Mary and St. Francis of Assisi,

and a large statue of Quan Yin, the Goddess of compassion. Adjacent to this

is another display that includes objects used in ritual and everyday practice,

together with the location where they were found, for example a Wych Bottle

found buried beneath a Yew Tree outside of a house.                                                                                                                114 ‘… because oral transmission is facilitated by repetition within familiar social contexts, folk song tends to be associated with stable communities. Within such communities, especially when they are largely pre-literate, ‘folk’ songs are not the exclusive property of any particular class. However, with the newly emerging class divisions of the 18th Century, the creation and transmission of folk song tended to be concentrated in the less literate classes, giving them a distinct verbal and musical art of their own.’ (Jackson-Houlston, C.M., 1999. Ballads, Songs and Snatches, Aldershot: Ashgate, p.6.). 115  The Goddess of Learning, Knowledge, Music and Wisdom.  

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Three video installations show scenes of actual battles and conflict, which

have been reproduced by actors, captured on film, in a small cinema space;

there are stills of wall-art, as well as animations emphasizing the lunar.

Artisans and crafts-people are portrayed at work with wood and other

materials; there are mimetic practices of representation, receptivity and the

presentation of the self (or other selves with whom the visitors/participants

might seek to emulate or identify with), which are drawn on in the context of

the displays. Thus, there are scenes of educators ‘reproducing’ the historical

context of a pastor talking to his flock in a church where the congregation is a

group of school children. This installation is situated next to the exhibits of

religious icons, mentioned earlier, and speaks to the importance of the Baptist

movement in Wales, particularly associated with those working in the

collieries.

The exhibition powerfully demonstrates how a depiction of what is concerned

with human agency116 can be represented through the symbolic, within a

collection of what is available.117

                                                                                                               116  I.E. The embodied practices of making craft or traditional items, the embodied practice in warfare of the individual warrior on the battlefield engaged in the protection of his community’s location and its resources (with a continued production of heritage over time), as a display of the aspects of negotiation both of identity and construction of self.  117 One interpretation of this is: ‘All human subjects are defined by lack. An individual enters into the symbolic register that allows a sense of self and recognition of others by subordinating itself to “a discursive order which pre-exists, exceeds, and substantially “speaks it”. The subject does not possess existential being nor is it “in possession” of itself or of language. Rather, through the workings of fantasy, the subject is granted the illusion of reality, of self, of other, and of wholeness. To exist, the subject covers over the reality of lack with the illusion of being. Implicitly or explicitly, lack is also given a central place in structuralist accounts of narrative […] Narrative, and above all folkloric narrative, is predicated on lack and its ‘liquidation’. Narrative cannot exist without the drive to eliminate it […] Struggle as he or she may, the human subject can never master the symbolic register that defines him or

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The design of an exhibition which juxtaposed objects, for example the replica

Celtic cross with the authentic mural of St Catherine removed from its original

location, the different religious icons, and the multitude of love spoons, has

sought to emphasise both similarity and difference. By placing audio-visual

displays of the creative process the emphasis for the exhibit was on creative

practices as processual, with symbolic and located outcomes. The display

highlighted, indirectly, some of the implications for understanding folk-lore

within museological and educational approaches, and the construction of the

continuum: between constructivist approaches (knowledge constructed by

learner, learner empowered and assuming agency in his/her own learning

process),118 and the tradition/behaviourist interface, which emphasizes that

knowledge exists outside of the learners, and that they stand ‘on the

shoulders of giants’, being those identified as ‘the learned’ – the keepers and

transmitters of the symbolic.119

3.2 St Fagans: the folkloric as symbol of renegotiated meanings

The Museum set out to garner a collection reflecting rural material culture.

Although oral history accounts of ordinary lived realities in mining areas were

included, Mason (2011) documents that it was not until the late 1980s that a

row of ironworkers’ cottages (1987), the Gwalia Stores (1991), the Oakdale

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             her.’ (Seifert, L., 1996. Fairy Tales, Sexuality, And Gender in France 1690-1715: Nostalgic Utopias, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., p.142.). Another interpretation might consider the possibility that the folkloric is not really concerned so much with the death-drive, the concern to eliminate within the symbolic structure of the practice, although it is the case that practitioners may face obstacles in their practices related to the access to resources, as with the drive to fecundity. 118 Hein, G.E., 1993. 'The significance of constructivism for museum education', in: Museums and the Needs of the People, Jerusalem. Israel ICOM Committee. 119 Hooper-Greenhill, E., 2000. ‘Changing Values in the Art Museum: rethinking communication and learning’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 6(1), pp9-31.

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Miners’ Institute (1995), and a post-war prefab from a suburb of Cardiff (2001)

were added. Mason’s argument is that, whilst the construction of rural-life or

rural culture has historically been seen (in rhetoric and discourse) as more

‘authentically’ Welsh than its industrial Anglicized counterpart, there was a

shift within the museological discourse to a recognition of the contribution and

legitimacy of other identities apart from the romantic rural ideal, and ‘a more

pluralistic understanding of national identities within Wales’.120 Hale also

comments that another reason might be the construction of Celtic culture as

natural, feminine, and ancient (similar to Hazelius’ conception of folk-life at

Skansen), rather than industrial and modern.121

Interestingly, part of the curatorial policies governing collection practices are

concerned with taking only those buildings that are offered to it which are

threatened by demolition or in serious disrepair. The Museum, involved as it

is in recycling or salvaging, is engaged in the representation of what is

disappearing from Welsh life as opposed to what constitutes it.122 The

buildings are located differently according to the period in which they were

acquired, and the space available. Thus, there is a rather diverse mix of

objects/buildings and chronology: some are grouped together by their

function, the agricultural buildings, whilst others are mixed. The focus is on

what is sustainable and what makes use of the space in good enough ways.

                                                                                                               120 Mason, R., 2007. Museums, Nations, Identities – Wales and its National Museums, University of Wales Press: Cardiff. 121 Hale, 2001, cited in: in: Mason, R., 2011. ‘Representing Wales At The Museum Of Welsh Life’, in: Knell, S.J., Aronsson, P., Bugge Amundsen, A., Barnes, A.J., Burch, S., Carter, J., Gosselin, V., Hughes, S.A., Kirwan, A., (eds)., National Museums: New Studies from Around the World, London: Routledge, pp.247-71, p.259. 122 Huysson, 1995, cited in: Mason, 1993, p.259.

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Thus, the narrative of the museum is of a gradual accrual of buildings over the

last fifty years, and different interpretations of the traditional knowledge and

practices. For example, one label next to the barn reads,

The red pigment in the work on the plaster on the farmhouse protected against evil spirits, as did berries of the Rowan Tree outside […] But it could be that the colour of the walls merely showed the owners could afford to put pigment in the whitewash.123

3.3. St Fagans and the folkloric: symbol of ‘other’ – national identity and

its strata.

Peter Lord criticized the Museum of Welsh Life, as part of a larger critique of

the representation and interpretation of Welsh visual culture, for lacking a

reflexive approach to its self-identification as the most Welsh of all the Welsh

museums. Mason documents that this caused the Museum, on Lord’s view,

to be complicit in ‘marginalising indigenous visual culture in favour of an

Anglicised, Europeanised aesthetic canon’.124 As a result of its strong

rejection of other nearby national museums, the Museum of Welsh Life

strayed into territory that fell under the purview of the National Museum and

Galleries. Others have criticized the museum’s collections policy as being

overly romantic and highly selective, prioritizing rural culture over other

aspects of Welsh society125, emphasizing the ideas and values of Welsh

intellectuals within an ‘educational space’.126 This last particularly resulted in

a contradistinction between the focus on vernacular architecture in the out-

door exhibits (structures which had been moved from all over Wales and

                                                                                                               123 Label at St Fagans Museum, Wales. 124 Mason, 2011, p.253. 125 Dicks, 2000, p.91, cited in Mason, 2011, p.253. 126 Adamson, 1999, cited in Mason, 2011, p.254.

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reconstructed within the grounds) and the content or museological substance

or context.

Prior to 2006 and in contrast to the exhibit on ‘Belonging and Beliefs’ that

opened then, the museum had also been criticized for representing a mythic,

timeless or static past and, as such, for having amnesia about certain key

political events or movements. This is an accusation commonly directed at

folk-life museums, perceiving their treatment of history as somehow ‘closed’

or ‘concluded’,127 and sometimes causing a creation of context and text within

the museum which emphasises the wholeness and harmony rather than the

areas of conflict, contestation or dissension.128 This fabricated life ‘of the

folk’, was critiqued by Bennett for tending to emphasise the harmonious

nature of the co-existence of peasants and craft-workers, as part of a project

which rested on the use of folk life and craft as a tool to rebuild cultural pride

and a cohesive national identity.129 This ‘use’ by elites constitutes, ‘a route of

vernacular mobilization whereby an indigenous intelligentsia uses folk culture

to mobilize middle and lower strata and create ethnic nations’.130

                                                                                                               127 for a critique of the political amnesia of the Museum of Welsh Life, see: Lord, P., 1992, The Aesthetics of Relevance, Dyfed: Gomer; on Beamish Open-Air Museum, see: Bennett, T., 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London and New York: Routledge; and discussion of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, at: Kirkland, R., 1996. Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland since 1965: Moments of Danger, London and New York: Longman. 128 Dicks, 2000, p.91, cited in Mason, 2011, p.253. 129 Bennett, 1995, cited in Mason, 2011, p.256-7. 130 Smith, 1999, p.18, cited in Mason, 2011, p.256. See also McIntyre, Wehner, 2011, for a discussion of the representation of vernacular and elite historical narratives in museums, in the context of ‘difficult’ histories, e.g. of Aborigines in Australia, the Maori in New Zealand, approaches to exhibiting histories of slavery in a post-colonial context, and of British colonialists, Colonel Harrison, in Kendal, UK.

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Arguably, following Mason’s (2011) argument, it is within the space of the

Museum that competing accounts of Welshness co-exist and achieve

dynamic distillations of cultural memory, an ongoing process of remembering

that is highly responsive to the present. The preservation and representation

of the Welsh crafts-industry importantly emphasizes that the craftsman are not

alienated from the fruits of their labour. To turn to a design aspect of the more

recent exhibition on ‘Belonging and Beliefs’, the love spoons in it are all

placed together, as a multitude, and mounted on the wall in a tree-like

structure, indicating the highly relational context of both the crafts-people and

the content of their work (also evocative of the poem at the threshold, cited

above). This exhibit highly emphasized the root of many traditions, stories,

songs and poems, as conflicted or associated with documenting, in a verbal

way, as being kept alive through oral tradition, the battles and struggles, not

just over land or territory, but also over objects and identity. This is a move

away from a ‘use’ by elites to reproduce a narrative that legitimizes folk-art or

objects used by folk in their spiritual practice as an overt mechanism about

cohesion and integration in the service of a national project about identity.

3.4. St Fagans and the folkloric: symbol of the revision of national

heritage.

Many curators, until the 1970s when social history gained credibility as a

discipline, who dealt with British history in museums were ‘usually considered

to be dealing with “bygones” or “folk-life”.131 Davies considers that whilst the

                                                                                                               131 ‘”Folk life” is basically the study of people and would be indistinguishable from social, economic and local history if it were not for three points. Firstly, there is an emphasis on material culture, which is generally lacking in the others. Secondly,

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study of folk life’ in Britain has a long tradition of its own, the development of

modern, scientific approaches to its representation and interpretation within

museums owes inspiration to the Scandinavian museums on the 1930s. Folk-

life studies emphasise material culture associated with the history of people

before industrialization, the survival of traditional aspects of culture allowing

for links between national and local level museums in Wales, Scotland and

Ireland.132

The museological methodology that has evolved out of this is particularly

important for bringing together research, collection, interpretation and

exhibition. This has meant elements of fieldwork, documentary research,

formal presentations, and the importance of documenting the objects, as they

are collected – whether through archival research or using oral history

methods. Thus, Iorweth Peate (1901-82), working within the Department of

Archaeology at the National Museum of Wales, transformed a collection of

‘bygones’ into an arena of study. He did this through examining, measuring,

dating and locating each object (culturally and historically), writing labels for

them in both Welsh and English, and producing a guide about the collection in

both languages. In this way he developed a vision of a national folk museum,

in a similar vein (structurally though perhaps not substantively) to that of the

Scandinavian museums, i.e. the possibility for the museum to contribute to

some consensus about national identity and the important role the folkloric                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              “folk-life” has come to be associated either with the history of people before industrialization or more commonly, the survival of pre-industrial, rural or “traditional” aspects of culture in an industrialised and urbanized society. Finally, ‘folk life’ studies have always been naturally linked to museums, thus allowing museums at the local level to achieve links through ‘folk life’ with national museums in Wales, Scotland and Ireland.’ (Davies, 1993, p.6). 132 Ibid.

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played in national life. In 1938, he described how the museum should be (in

Welsh), as follows,

… a home for new life and not a collection of dry bones, since there will be gathered together in it every national virtue until it becomes in Welsh history … the heart of Welsh Life … a means of uniting every movement in our land into national identity … so that we may, by drinking of its living well, quench our thirst, ready for our national purposes in the future.133

Peate, himself a conscientious objector and pacifist (which resulted in his

refusing conscription during World War II and losing his job for a time),

ironically found his dream of a Welsh Folk Life Museum fulfilled because of

the war.134 His context was that of a growing intellectual movement which

sought to draw together and protect the ‘essence’ of Welsh identity. Thus the

museum itself seeks to ‘record and recover the purity of Welsh life and

tradition’ through collections that emphasise that these traditions remained

unaffected by industrialization, new technologies of large-scale production,

and other external influences.135 By contrast the work of Dr I. Grant was not

nearly so successful in achieving national recognition and official status for

her articulation of hopes for a Highland folk museum in Scotland. Also

inspired by Scandinavian models of folk museums, careful fieldwork and

comparative recording, she founded her own Highland Folk Museum on the

Isle of Iona. It was subsequently moved, in 1944, to its present home in

                                                                                                               133 Stevens, C., 1986. Writers of Wales: Iorwerth C. Peate, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, p.6. 134 In 1942, the Welsh Reconstruction Advisory Committee proposed that an open-air museum was an essential adjunct to the National Museum of Wales, and in 1949, the Welsh Folk Museum opened in St Fagans (Kavanagh, 1993). 135 Kavanagh, 1993, p.17.

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Kingussie.136 Kavanagh (1993) comments that this was a remarkable

achievement, given the indifference and non-cooperation that she faced.

3.5. St Fagans and the folkloric: symbol of the politics of value – a

means to understanding how trends in value change across time.

The museum’s representations of Welsh national identities, which may not be

explicitly stated, have recently involved a mixture of research and marketing

about its visitors/public, its geographic location, and in response to national

conversations about identity in the context of the relatively recent creation of

the Welsh National Assembly in 1999.

Following the Brown Report of 1986, which indicated that the visitor profile

mainly comprised day-visitors living in the local area, a high proportion of

which lived within a 30-60 minute radius of the site, its marketing strategy was

re-oriented. This involved policies that caused it to be re-named the Museum

of Welsh Life (1995), to adopt a standardized corporate image (with shared

logo, own website and colour scheme), and to ‘recognise the over-riding need

for the Museum to maintain, and if possible, increase its appeal within the

area’.137 The collections policy altered to reflect other non-rural communities

including the Anglophone and the post-industrial area of South Wales, which

has only latterly begun to be included. Mason notes that this caused a

                                                                                                               136 Details of the current museum can be found at its website: http://www.highlandfolk.com/collections.php, (Last accessed: 18/07/2012). 137 Brown Report 1986, cited in Mason, 2011, p.260.

  59  

tension in the traditional representation of rural ‘Welsh-speaking’, and its local

audience: industrial ‘Welsh Wales’.138

Summary

St Fagans, like the rural-life museums in England, documented rural-life in the

Welsh context and was successful in creating and locating sustainable

collections. Though vulnerable to critiques of presenting an Anglicised

account of Welsh national and regional history, in the context of great change,

the museum has created a place within which different Welsh identities and

their heritages can be curated: and specifically in relation to language.

Arguably through this de-construction of the possibilities for an

‘homogeneous’ culture, contesting narratives of ‘integration’ and ‘cohesion’ at

the British governmental level, museums, in this Celtic-fringe, have been more

successful in capturing something of what Skansen achieved in depicting the

folkloric.

                                                                                                               138 Mason, 2007.

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Chapter 4: Folklore and the future?

 

As has been discussed in the previous three chapters, folk-life and the

folkloric, as represented in a variety of museum contexts, have been and

continue to be connected with identity. This is not merely because the

impetus for their founding was the result of specific historical drivers around

the construction of national identity, as in Sweden, for example with the

emphasis on promoting a ‘virtuous patriotism’, or in Wales with the emphasis

on protection of the Welsh language as well as the customs of Welsh rural-

life, but also because the folkloric, as it provided a record of folk-life was often

seen to capture some quasi-primordial ‘origins’ which were to be found in

societies that were rural, pre-industrial, natural, feminine and ancient.

However, in the context of the global movement of groups and the

acculturative processes which resulted, museological theory has moved on.

Academics who advocate the further development of folk-life representation

have begun to argue for an ethnological approach grounded in regional and

local or micro history and studies. The chapter concerns that shift in theory.

It is grounded in ethnological approaches to exploring the everyday within the

context of regional history with methods and style of curatorship that laid ‘the

foundation for an academically respectable and socially relevant museum

discipline.139 In the British context, the focus of ‘folk-life’ studies in the 1960s

                                                                                                               139 Kavanagh, 1993, p.19. ‘The work of Peate, Grant and Cubbon and many who shared their views and methods gave regional ethnology and folk life museums a chance to develop into a coherent form. Albeit highly selective and at times hopelessly romantic, their style of curatorship sought to create long-term social archives and the development of museums with distinct cultural purposes. They

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concerned how people of all classes and social groups related to their natural,

social and cultural environments. However, this focus was often restricted to

pre-industrial times; it needed to change to reflect contemporary collections

with an emphasis on material from industrial processes and urban

environments.140 Kavanagh comments that in Sweden the change had

resulted in the ‘term “folk life” [being] abandoned in favour of “regional

ethnology” and “cultural history”’.141 In the UK this caused curators to look to

‘regional studies’ for methods of collection of objects and data, co-existing

alongside a ‘local history’ interested in understanding the history of a place

from its landscape, buildings and documentary evidence. Latterly attempts to

represent multicultural Britain in the museum context, through outreach

projects and using feminist or post-colonial methods of interpreting and

representing historical and current lived realities of ordinary people, have

been located within ‘community history’.142 In this context the curatorial

debate about ‘the museum, the roles of collections within it, and the value of

the material (of and pertaining to culture and contextualized in historical

continuous and current practice) and oral evidence’ is particularly

important.143

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             embodied active, purposeful and directed curatorship that did not rest on convenience. The folk life specialists operated to high standards of scholarship, while at the same time working for and with, in Peate’s phrase, ‘the people who matter”. 140 The Society for Folk Life Studies has a respected journal and conferences. Established by I. Peate, its role has changed to being about the maintenance and promotion of scholarship in the field of regional ethnology. (Kavanagh, 1993). 141 Kavanagh, 1993, p.20. 142 This has been vulnerable to criticisms of a lack of authenticity due to the tendency, perhaps for pragmatic and budgetary reasons, to represent communities as hermetic, focusing on issues of exclusion or parameters for inclusion. 143 Kavanagh, 1993, p.21.

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This chapter will consider the contemporary regional studies approach in the

context of the folkloric, as it relates to the representation of communities and

their practices within a museum setting, by reference to identity and museum

studies literatures. This will include a discussion of the approaches adopted to

document the history of the everyday. Ways forward will then be considered

by reference to two examples: that of SAMDOK in Sweden, and of the UN

promoted approach to the conservation of traditional practices as these relate

to everyday life. The examples consist of protective policies that are less

about exoticising or fetishizing mimetic practices, than about their

representation as continuous throughout time, transcending fixed place, and

involved in the complex mediation of past and current lived realities. The

examples emphasise similarities that exist among and between very diversely

situated communities and the need for protection alongside conservation.

4.1 Identity and community in the museological and national context

The ability of a museum to influence the everyday life of its public and the

communities it serves through contributing public understanding of where

politics and culture intertwine is an area of great potential particularly within

the context of multicultural Britain.144 This is relevant to representing the

folkloric’s diversity of practice, as the museums constitute a public space

within which different communities can ‘imaginatively live both …older, time-

                                                                                                               144 For a discussion of this in the context of Education for All within Multiculturalism in Britain and its impact on the museological context: Coombes, A.E., 2004. ‘Museums and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities’, in: Carbonell, B.M., (ed.), Museum Studies – An Anthology of Contexts, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., pp.231-46.

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tested truths and explore the possibilities for new ones’,145 within an existing

and ever-changing political, ideological and budgetary context.

In contrast to literatures that emphasise the ritual aspect of the museum as

‘cultural temple’ with an interpretive lens coded through attention to the

performative, the museum, as marked-off space away from the ordinariness

of everyday life, sets the scene for a script around visitor performance, and

the attention is on the symbolic which, according to Duncan (1995), offers a

vision of identity through a ‘spiritual’ universe of timeless values. Other

literatures focus on ‘belonging’ and the fragmentation of identity. This focus

gains legitimacy through the telling of stories within different groups or

communities. The emphasis is on agency, on the very practices that carry

with them normative values that provide the context for ‘belonging’, which is

predicated upon adherence to cultural values and the structure of what is

considered to be acceptable behavior within different communities.

The ideas and myths of identity, their representation, re-presentation and at

times mis-representation, which are transmitted within the museum space, are

often powerful and can be manipulated, created, confirmed, questioned or

even destroyed from within the space, by the community of museum workers

or through audiences as ‘participants’, ‘critics’, or ‘members of community’.

Whether a museum is engaged in the production of ‘familiar’ or

‘foreign’/unfamiliar identities’, the issue is that ‘self’-representation and ‘other’-

representation are connected, often emerging from histories of alienation.

                                                                                                               145 Duncan, 1995, p.133.

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Thus, an exhibition about a foreign group by one group may also contain

indirectly a discussion of itself. Dollar’s contention that modern identity is ‘the

constant reconstruction and the reinvention of the self’, the human subject

constantly re-constructed in relation to its environment, is further elaborated

by Bhaba in his theory of the possibilities of national hybridity.146 Thereby,

moving away from ossifying monolithic structures of culture, and an admission

of the creation of new forms of identity that resulted, showing that,

… it is in the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains in difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated.147

Gone are static constructions of identity in favour of dynamic, negotiated or

contested identities; in their place is an emphasis on the processes of

acculturation and of how different groups affect each other through trade,

migration, and decisions taken at the national level.148 However, these issues

are problematic because of the issue of adaptive preferences in the formation

of norms and values within groups and at the communal level.149

                                                                                                               146 Bhabha, H., 1994. The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, p.240. 147 Bhaba, cited in Kirwan, A., 2011. ‘Postcolonialism, Ethnicity and the National Museum of Ireland’, in: Knell, S.J., Aronsson, P., Bugge Amundsen, A., Barnes, A.J., Burch, S., Carter, J., Gosselin, V., Hughes, S.A., Kirwan, A., (eds)., National Museums: New Studies from Around the World, London: Routledge, pp.443-52, p.445. 148 Ideas about hybridization of groups is beyond the scope of this study. However it is worth noting that they have been criticized as being an applied form of ‘miscegenation’ (and about an innate intolerance of difference), which undermines the possibility and efforts for minorities to affirm their rights and sentiments of difference. See for example, Taylor, C., 1994. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Princeton: Princeton University Press; and Fraser, N., 1997. Justice Interruptus. Critical reflections on the “postsocialist” condition. London: Routledge. 149These may be pejorative or arise from constraints in conditions that result in preferences that appear illogical. See for example, Elster, J., 1993. Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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It is in this way that a primary purpose can be maintained with the focus on

new-museological imperatives: to provide collections of information rather

than ‘treasure’, to engage with an increasingly diversified audience, and the

potential for the telling of ‘stories’ through multiple voices (by gender, class,

race, ethnic and/or cultural/linguistic group, age, and (dis) ability).150 These

can contribute to dystopian and utopian dreams of a better society or future,

that are somewhat connected to narratives arising from the interpretation of

the objects and exhibits themselves, which are located within and reflect the

constantly negotiated cultural construct of the museum and its changing

methods of classification.151 If it is accepted that history and acts of

representation evoke and invoke myth, then,

… the acceptability of myths – judged by an individual’s and society’s moral position in relation to them – becomes a guiding principle. The infusion of myth into rationalism changes our relationship to the museum for there is no longer any point in merely exposing the politics of the museum.152

Knell makes a powerful argument that ‘society needs its soma’, with

ideologically-driven interpretation that can convert ‘art’ to a transformed status

that is antithetical to fetishization, but that also indirectly promotes, a particular

                                                                                                               150 Witcomb, A., 2003. Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum, London: Routledge. For a discussion of the importance of language as an important area where social hierarchies are maintained and reproduced, or contested and re-negotiated, see: Hooper-Greenhill, E., 1994. Museums and Their Visitors, London, Routledge, p.116. 151 ‘Museum Studies’, perhaps becoming ‘Museums Studies’, reflects both the multi-disciplinary analytical, critical and theoretical perspectives brought to bear on Museums, and the contribution made by humanism whereby similarity is emphasized and difference embraced. There is a successful de-universalising of the museum concept. 152 Knell, 2014, p.3.

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rendition of the nation, sanctioning our actions or supporting our tastes’.153

Thus ‘good’ art, may be understood to be,

… both deeply embedded in a complex cultural ecological system and transcends it. Good work can be viewed both ways singularly as artifact-in-context or as art-standing-by-itself, and binocularly as a creative work possessing both local history and comparative significance.154

These issues point towards a motivation for museums that, whilst fulfilling

touristic demand, are not wholly developed with tourism in mind, but rather

respond to an authentic desire to tell the people’s story, in its diversity, sure

that this will be heard.155 It is this story, which resonates in the life of its folk,

and is directly relevant to accounts of ‘personhood’, of the ordinary everyday

lived experience of the ‘folk’: as diverse and different, as citizens of a nation,

and as contributors to a national soma, the individual ‘body’ (the citizen

                                                                                                               153 Ibid. In relation to historical consciousness Knell argues that, whether museum workers take on or resist this purposing of the construction of material reality in particular ways within the museum to serve the ‘ideology of nationhood’, depends on the context and interface between policy, politics and practices. Thus, many of the monuments in London, for example, are seen as artefacts of the past rather than as having political or ideological resonance, because the English ‘as an island people feel no threat to their sovereignty’. This is contrasted to continental Europe where borders may be pervious, particularly in the case of some nomadic groups whose livelihood depends on mobility across geographical landscapes that may not conform to an atlas (e.g. the Saami). 154 Holm, B., 1983, cited in: Ames, M.M., 1992. Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums, Vancouver: UBCPress, p.75. 155 Richter, L.K., 2005. ‘The politics of heritage tourism development: Emerging issues for the new millennium’, in: Corsane, G., (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries. An Introductory Reader, London and New York: Routledge, pp.257-71; and Macdonald, S., 2005. ‘A people’s story. Heritage, identity and authenticity’, in: Corsane, G., (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries. An Introductory Reader, London and New York: Routledge, pp.272-290; Feltault, K., 2006. ‘Development Folklife: Human Security and Cultural Conservation’, Journal of American Folklore, 119(471), pp90-110.

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somatised) as symbol (conduit of social information) and agentic (active

participation in the social world - lived experience).156

4.2 The history of the everyday approach

The history of the everyday takes as its starting point a non-judgmental and

non-prescriptive or proscribing perspective, lacking statements about morality

and virtue. Instead, the approach documents historiographically that most

forms of historical representation (and not just written history) deploy form,

affect, ideology and cognition, as means of mediating between the past and

present, creating different ‘distance effects ... that modify and reconstruct the

temporality of historical accounts, thereby shaping every part of our

engagement with the past.’157 Furthermore, no one version of historical

narrative is complete, exclusive, or concluded. Thus, micro-history and other

accounts of everyday life frequently seem to make two rather contradictory

claims. One is about strangeness (and therefore distance and difference), the

other about familiarity (and therefore closeness and similarity). This historical

narrative cannot distinguish, ‘difference between grand narratives and micro-

narratives. No story is innocent; all narratives involve plotting’.158 Consonant

with a humanist approach, the position is not a voyeuristic account of an

exotic past. Lived experience is subjectively defined as, ‘not a given, given by

                                                                                                               156 Reischer, E., Koo, K.S., 2004, ‘The Body Beautiful: Symbolism and Agency in the Social World’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33,pp297-317, p.298; on body as site of lived experience, see: Csordas, T.J., 1994. Embodiment and experience: The existential ground of culture and self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.    157 Philips, 2004, cited in Brewer, J., 2010. ‘Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life’, Summer, no.5, (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena), at: www.cas.uni-muenchen.de/publikationen/e.../cas-eseries_nr5.pdf (Last accessed 18/07/2012). 158 Brewer, 2010, p.9.

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a “pure reality,” but the spontaneous “lived experience” of ideology in its

peculiar relationship to the real.’159

The source interpretation emphasizes what it sees as an a-historical

interpretation of historical evidence prompted by the historian’s sympathy and

identification with actors in the past, an association that destroys difference

and the distance between the past and present. Documenting the history of

the everyday seems to be a stochastic method vulnerable to the criticism that

only some histories of the everyday are documented. And perhaps rests on

the tradition of collecting that inspired a ‘by-gones’ approach i.e. of curios, of

interest to the collector, etc. From the perspective of a national institution

dedicated to the folkloric, and to the documentation and collection of practices

and objects that are broadly representative of the contemporary lived realities

of those living within its borders, a more rigorous approach may be needed.

4.3 The SAMDOK approach – regional history and ethnological

collections

In consultation with the SAMDOK Secretariat, the Homes Pool was started in

1978. It consisted of five museums located diffusely within Sweden, which

were variously responsible for the systematic collection and documentation of

the contemporary household environment, of objects in and of themselves,

and in their surroundings. This pool was subsequently expanded to include

                                                                                                               159 Althusser, L., 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, p. 223.

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another museum in 1982,160 and a Saami pool in 1990 specifically in order to

create an understanding of how its culture changes and develops in the

traditional settlement areas, in the urban environments and in the wider

world.161 In practice this meant that each museum would research a type of

household every five years, to be selected for their good social and

geographic spread (households of different sizes, consist of diversity

demographically, and in different areas within rural and urban) and in

accordance with a scheme developed by the Department of Field Research

and Archives of the Nordiska Museet. A research model involved taking

photographs of every single room, all objects catalogued, as well as furniture

plans.162 The family was also interviewed about personal data and details of

their work and daily life, including leisure, lifestyle, work, education, routine,

food habits, hygiene, and economy. The museum then went on to purchase

all the objects which the household had acquired during the previous year,

either bought or loaned by the household, and acquired the furnishings for

one room or part of a room that they had decided to exhibit. The choice of

                                                                                                               160 These are: Halsinglands museum, Hudiksvall (regional museum); Nordiska Museet, Stockholm (national museum); Jamtlands Ians museum, Osterland (county museum); Goteborgs historiska museum, Goteborg (regional museum); Kulturen Lund (regional museum); Torekallbergets museum, Sodertalje (local museum which joined the pool in 1982. (Stavenow-Hidemark, E., 2007. ‘Home thoughts from abroad: An evaluation of the SAMDOK Homes Pool’, in: Knell, S.J., 2007. ‘Museums, reality and the material world’, in S.J. Knell (ed.) Museums in the Material World, London: Routledge, pp.51-9. 161 Silvén, no date, p.317. 162 Stavenow-Hidemark (2007, p.52) notes that the catalogue per room organized the material under the following headings: household members, relatives, immediate environment and close contacts, distant environment and distant contacts, timetable, environment round building, outdoor area, description of the building, fixtures and fittings and technical equipment, vehicles owned, furniture, textiles, electrical fittings, wall decorations, ornaments, work and hobby equipment, plants, contents of cupboards and drawers.

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which room and collection has to be agreed with the SAMDOK Secretariat,

and the contents accessible to other museums for their research and display.

The aim of the SAMDOK research project was to ‘make an adequate

collection of contemporary objects’, which, as of 2007, amounts to more than

1,100 objects, and is envisaged to be a common resource for other cultural

museums within Sweden.163 These objects are seen to ‘have the potential to

illustrate very well how the families who were researched lived’, and,

additionally, because the catalogue reflects both the objects found within the

home as well as those acquired during the last year, basic functions within the

home can be illustrated and the material further stratified to reflect

demographic trends.164 For example, an old age pensioner may not acquire

so many objects in the previous year as a younger person. Particularly in the

case of the Saami Pool, the study increased resources to the regional

museums in the north of the country and Saami-dedicated research activity

was taken up.165 This formed radically new conditions for the national

museums to address Saami questions, at first in relation to their material

cultural heritage, a slowing down of accession of Saami objects at the

Nordiska Museet, while the Museum of Ethnography deposited its Saami

collections at Ájtte (the national institution that seeks to present Saami voices

and perspectives).

                                                                                                               163 Stavenow-Hidemark, 2007, p.57. 164 Op cit., p.58. 165 This included the creation of Ájtte as well as the establishment of Sami research at the University of Umeå. At the newly started Nordisk Samisk Institutt (Nordic Saami Institute) in Kautokeino, Norway (Silvén, no date).

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This kind of approach, with its rigorous focus on objects and documentation,

results in a ‘quasi-scientific’ collection of household objects and information

relating to the ‘lifestyle’ of the everyday but with its rhythmic five-yearly

randomized but controlled approach, ensures that the diversity of households

is represented in the sample.

4.4. Beyond Europe in the context of the world: UN conventions and

legislation

The Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic

Resources, Traditional Knowledge, and Folklore (GRTKF) of the World

Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) confronts a range of issues,

Basic definitions of folklore and traditional knowledge to the rights of traditional knowledge and folklore bearers and from the relationships between folklorists and the people they collaborate with in their work to the relevancy of current legal regimes of national and international intellectual property to the needs and local processes developed through customary and traditional systems.166

 

The conventions mandate processes and participation on a number of

different issues, which include: that the identified needs of indigenous and

traditional knowledge communities are the primary guardians and interpreters

of their own cultures (i.e. the people and communities affected by the work of

the IGC-GRTFK should have a major role in identifying and determining the

results of that work); that WIPO should recognize that traditional knowledge

and folklore are part of the culture of both indigenous and nonindigenous

peoples, including those who have migrated from their historical places of

                                                                                                               166 Sanford Rikoon, J. 2004. ‘American Folklore Society Recommendations to the WIPO Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge, and Folklore, Journal of American Folk, 117, Summer, 296-9, p.296.

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origin. And, given the onus placed within this approach on the issue of ‘self-

determination’ for individuals and groups, that the IGC-GRTKF must

‘consistently strive to be sensitive to the needs of diverse knowledge systems

and communities, as well as to issues of social and political justice bound up

in diverse forms of expressive culture’.167

The American Folklore Society makes a number of recommendations on how

WIPO can best go about its sensitive and respectful treatment of this

knowledge168; assisting within the diversity of legal frameworks, and systems

of ‘law’ in different contexts, to protect knowledge and its use.169 Finally, there

must be recognition of both the tangible and the intangible values of traditional

knowledge and folklore, with support given ‘to develop systems and standards

that allow indigenous peoples and traditional knowledge communities to

directly negotiate commercial use of their traditional knowledge and

folklore’.170 This would include responsible scholarship carried out in a spirit of

partnership with indigenous people and traditional knowledge communities.171

                                                                                                               167 Op cit., p.297. See also: Baron, R., 2010. ‘Sins of Objectification? Agency, Mediation, and Community Cultural Self-Determination in Public Folklore and Cultural Tourism Programing’, Journal of American Folklore, 123(487), Winter, pp.63-91. 168 Through providing assistance and ‘capacity building’ to developing nations, indigenous peoples, and traditional knowledge communities, (conservation, documentation, leadership training 169  Through providing assistance with patenting (understanding it, allowing continuity of use by traditional communities when a patent has been issued, making applications for a patent when considered a necessary means to protect traditional knowledge.  170 Ibid. 171 See: Westerman, W., 2006. ‘Wild Grasses and New Arks: Transformative Potential in Applied and Public Folklore’, Journal of American Folklore, 119(4710, pp.111-128.

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Summary

Recent trends suggest that it is possible to construct contemporary and

authentic accounts of the folkloric, contained in the everyday experiences,

within a museological context that does not seek to collude with national

attempts to contrive an ‘integration’ of identities towards a questionable ‘ideal’

of social cohesion within a multicultural British context. Clearly approaches

that seek to document this diversity also in contemporary life, through for

example SAMDOK’s Home Pool Scheme in Sweden, or protect some

traditional practices and knowledge, through legislation that exists at the

supranational level (UN), would be useful to consider as possible approaches

towards the construction of a national museum of the folkloric in Britain.

Whilst arguably representing spaces within which healing and reconciliation

could be mediated, owing to different experiences of colonialism in the Celtic

and Gaelic regions and fringe, particularly in Eire, it seems rather late in the

day to be considering a Museum of Folklore for the British Isles.

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Conclusion

The dissertation has concentrated on the emergence of different museums of

folklore and folk-life in the European (Chapter 1) and British contexts

(Chapters 2 and 3). These chapters have sought to organize the material in a

way that facilitates a comparison between the different approaches evident,

how they have influenced each other, and how the folkloric evokes a dynamic

mediated account of history through mimetic oral and craft practices that arise

from particular geographical regions where particular dialects and languages

are spoken, in the context of particular customs and traditions. As such they

are both emergent and constructed. The museological context and narrative

are important ways in which the folkloric is represented, emulated, even

embodied. This has significant ramifications for regional and national identity.

The folk-life museums of Europe considered in Chapter 1, alongside some

scene setting, demonstrated the museological context of how to curate and

conserve the folkloric within a national museum. The case of Skansen in

Sweden was particularly discussed in relation to the principles and early

practices upon which is was founded: the production of a virtuous ‘folk’, with

foundations in the organic soil of pre-industrial endeavor, through the

preservation of an overly-idealised historical narrative and account which

were of its time. Successful in conserving traditional vernacular architecture,

there was some obscuration of the situation of the Saami, a group indigenous

to the north of the country whose languages and practices were actively being

suppressed by the national government at the same time. This was emergent

through practices to separate different ‘folk’, that uncritically reproduced socio

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and economic relations of the time between the Swedish ‘folk’ and the

indigenous Saami within the museum context (in the workforce, in the

collections management, and in the terms used to describe the different

classification systems, categories, and methods: ‘the ethnographic’ and ‘folk’).

The social history museums in the UK that were much inspired by the

Scandinavian folk-life movement and museums were discussed in Chapter 2.

The rural-life museums-movement was diffuse. It was staggered over the

post-war period, enabled through funding from academia (e.g. University of

Reading in the 1950s) and Local Authorities (in 1970s), and was emergent in

response to quickly changing rural landscape and peoples’ memories (as

successive generations died). This chapter argued that these museums

provided a sense of an identity, relevant to the folkloric, because they

exhibited objects and practices that were embodied, in that they were carried

out by the body (pre-industrial life), and productive of the symbolic (?), so

worthy of preservation. Symbolic in a different way, though no less

meaningfully so, to the foci placed on recording in the literatures available

(through grey literatures documenting policy change at regional and local

government through reports and on websites) on collections management,

disposal and conservation of collections, collaborative projects (between local

groups, museums and universities), and the modernization of exhibitions

about rural-life through new design technology that detail through the

narratives and stories of ‘ordinary’ people (through oral history and local

history projects) accounts of important changes, issues of the environment

and sustainability, and a different (potentially uncontrived) rendering of

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history. Thus the agentic practice within the museum re-enforced in a ‘hidden’

way the importance of rural-life, and the folkloric, through conservation,

collections management, and curation practices: the everyday aspect of

museum life, and its focus on representing ordinary peoples’ lives, every-day

practices and histories in the construction of local and social history narratives

of rural-life.

A consideration of specific national museums of folk-life in the British context

with particular reference to St Fagans, National Museum of Folk-life in Wales,

was discussed in Chapter 3. Through the literature available, it was possible

to document the origin of the museum, as well as how its museological

context changed over time, responsive to internal and external criticism, and

the imperatives driving tourism (the perceived need to increase numbers of

visitors) in the local and regional area. These issues contributed to a

contemporary and innovative account and representation of the folkloric in the

context of a changing multicultural Wales and the diversity of traditions of

crafts, of knowledge, of language spoken, of practices. Furthermore the

museum, through its own narrative account and in its history of acquisitions of

collections, evinces a sustainable approach that has been about recycling and

salvaging rather than a romantic ideal or construction of a memory of rural-life

from times gone by. Recent exhibits (since 2006) particularly speak to the

careful construction of a dynamic and renegotiated account of history, conflict,

contestation, and mediated narratives of self-hood.

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A discussion of possible ways forward for folkloric approaches in the UK,

associated with these issues of identity (symbolic-agentic-individual-regional-

national) took place in Chapter 4. Folkloric practices, in common with all

cultural expressions, can be viewed as being about mediating aspects of the

past to the present, and, in turn, the present to the future. It is for this reason

that folkloric exhibits are seen to retain contemporary relevance when they

are measured through collections and disposals policies which are of objects

‘in living memory’ of the group concerned. Of additional importance, within

the museological context, are the research practices and methods, particularly

those that concern the collection of oral histories, myths and storytelling, the

methods of recording such practices172 and new movements about

sustainability as this impacts upon the motivation for disposal or collection.

Mimetic design practices emphasise the re-enactment of and re-creation of

the folk-life setting, in villages or towns, in specific periods of history often

involving the relocation of buildings, through material culture and by means of

video-installations and re-enactment of historic battles. Approaches taken up

by SAMDOK Homes Pool in Sweden, in ethnological attempts to document

the everyday in successive five-yearly periods, and the UN’s GRTKF-WIPO

were considered to be relevant contemporary approaches to documenting,

conserving, and protecting the folkloric and traditional (or ‘indigenous’)

knowledge, representing as they do very different world-views.

                                                                                                               172 For example grey literatures, exhibition catalogues, national indices, and published literatures by academics and curators

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It could be argued that by capturing and recording folk-life, something

intrinsically ‘authentic’ as being both connected to place and to community

could be represented in a way that transcended the diversity of individual

groups. However, criticisms have been leveled at folk-life museums, which

provided overly romantic or bourgeois ideological accounts of pre-industrial

society. This was often seen as a mechanism for controlling or educating

different strata, particularly those in the lower or working classes. In addition

the onus placed within the museum collections, particularly in the rural-life

museums, on the objects being still in use or in living memory places

restrictions on a contemporary understanding of the folkloric within this

context (obscuring as it does the ‘origin’ or historical tradition). Contemporary

representation of the folkloric and folk-life, requires careful consideration.

These considerations are not just about the museological context, but also the

associated research methodologies employed in the acquisition,

representation, interpretation and disposal of collections. These include a

variety of factors: the method of creation of oral traditions and stories, the

mimetic ‘showing’ of dynamic practices in situ, the demonstration of dance or

music, and audio-visual installations with historical re-enactments. Given that

the representation of the folkloric is particular of both place and time,173 it

                                                                                                               173 At certain times of the day, food and eating, or different times of the year and the seasonal harvesting crops, or celebrations such as Samhain or Solstice. An example of an exhibition that represented annual festivals is reviewed here: Thatcher, E., 2004. ‘Folklore: Illuminating Then and Now. Curated by Kristi A. Bell and Jill Terry Rudy. In the L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University Press, Provo, Utah, February 20-May 31, 2003.’ Exhibit Review, in: Journal of American Folklore, 117, Fall, pp.466-8. An example of an exhibition that focused on portraying customs around killing and eating, is reviewed here: Clintberg, M., 2011. ‘Slaughtering and Eating Beautiful Creatures: Kim Waldron’s Folk Feast, ETC (Montreal, Quebec), 92 (F/Mr/Ap/My), pp29-35. In the

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would seem that museums must develop collections management and

conservation practices that have integrity with a folk-life ethos. It is in this way

that the mimetic, represented in a strong design and practitioner element of

the making of crafts, or re-enactment of battles, or dances or songs, can also

infuse the museological context so that the methods utilized to display or

exhibit folk ‘traditions’, whether for art, for the everyday, or for prosperity and

protection, can be seen to be authentic. Through authenticity the museum

maintains its contemporaneity: showing that practices may still be conserved

within communities by ordinary folk all over, and that the museum is keen to

represent what is current and dynamic, at times fraught or contested or

renegotiated. A history that is not ‘concluded’ or final.

It could be argued that, taking into account the variety of different practices

found within the British Isles, as contextualized within different ‘traditions’

which have themselves involved acculturation and fusion in their conservation

by ordinary everyday ‘folk’ over time, the museums that have emerged have

themselves included, in addition to aspects of national identify and social

history, aspects of a ‘national folk image’. A focus on mimetic practice in

design and representation/interpretation, rather than ‘performance’ or

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             UK, Animal Stories, Nov 2011 - Feb 2012, a temporary exhibition at New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester City Council Museums and Galleries: included myths from Pakistan, India (ancient and modern urban), and classical (Perseus), stories about animals in China, the snow leopard in South and Central Asia, poetry by Lewis Carroll: ‘Twas Brillig’, Wordsworth’s ‘To a Skylark’, ‘Tyger Tyger’ by William Blake, nursery rhymes, art-work, artefacts (e.g. textiles recording stories), stuffed animals, a praxinoscope with moving images, and audio-visual installation featuring cartoon animation. The animal noises soundscape and laminate shadows of large trees, as silhouettes on the walls around the art, text and narratives/objects, added to the effect.

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‘performativity’ could further maintain integrity to the folkloric and practices of

folk-life exhibited within the museum.

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