A New Type of Museum?

Abstract

The institution of the museum is a product of the Enlightenment and as such it took on an instrumental role in the politics of identity of the modern nation-state: its function was not only to organize knowledge and educate the public in questions of manners and taste, but also to have a civilizing effect and produce self-regulating and proud citizens who would identify with their nation and heritage (Duncan 1995). During the nineteenth century, museums helped to stabilize what Benedict Anderson describes as ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 2006), in which individuals are connected by the knowledge, self-perception, rules and values they hold in common and by the memory of a shared past. It has been argued that the museum in the modern sense, instigated by the opening of the collections of absolutist monarchs and princes to the public, was accompanied by an epistemic shift in the forms of representation and structures of knowing (cf. Pomian 1990; Hooper-Greenhill 1992; Bennett 1995). It established a museum-form that is defined through its role as an apparatus of the modern nation-state. The question raised here is whether the recent memory boom and its major consequences for the institution of the museum have resulted in equally far-reaching changes in museological paradigms.