Complex Lives, Simple Stories: Relations of Power Embedded in Museum Interpretation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ann F. Ramenofsky: Papers in Honor of a Non-Normative Career" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Museums are a primary platform by which the public engages the past. Museum interpretation is tied to concrete, well-defined storylines, and tends to avoid the complexity of competing narratives, reinforcing the idea that there can be a single understanding of the past. Where there were vibrant communities rich with human diversity, museums present ill-shorn cavemen in raggedy skins or isolated objets d’art dramatically backlit. Contextualized within our knowledge of the messiness and ambiguity of human lives, these flattened narratives work to reenact, reconstitute, and reinforce colonial relationships with the communities and individuals who made, used, and imbued these objects with meaning, keeping with the long-standing role of museums created for the collection, study, interpretation, and preservation of objects. As museum interpretation moves toward polyvocality, participatory strategies, and power-sharing, the representative role of objects shifts. I examine the pedagogical basis for object-centered and community-centered approaches to historical interpretation, considering the many audiences of informal education. Through understanding ways objects encapsulate the relevance of history for descent, local, and other communities, museum interpreters can work within communities to construct histories rooted in place, people, and meaning.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Ann F. Ramenofsky: Papers in Honor of a Non-Normative Career

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24141