ABSTRACT
There are many objects in museums. In cultural history museums these objects carry great significance, but this significance does not emanate immediately from the objects themselves, because they have been produced and used in everyday life and not in order to be looked at in a museum (Baxandall, 1991). Objects in a cultural history museum demand an explanation, an insertion of the object into a context of other objects—and especially some form of explanatory anchorage. Such anchorage can both take the form of verbal text, or be photographs or sound, moving images or smells. In the cultural history museum, it is natural and necessary to work with the context in order to ‘anchor’ the objects, as Roland Barthes has formulated it, as a way to create one or more narratives from the relations between the different textual forms and the things (Barthes, 1977).
