ABSTRACT
Within the field of material culture studies, and particularly in museum studies, we might expect to find a well-developed understanding of the role of handling in learning from objects. As Classen has demonstrated, privileged visitors to early European museums saw touch as a vital adjunct to visual appreciation (Classen 2005b). Touch functioned as a means of verifying visual impressions, gave visitors the pleasure of an intimate encounter, and ‘allowed them to access the mysterious powers popularly associated with the rare and the curious’ (Classen 2005b, 278). Classen argues that, as museums gradually opened up to wider audiences, and particularly to middle and working class audiences, so the restrictions on touching increased. Stallybrass and White (2005) describe the nineteenth-century bourgeois perception of the ‘contaminating touch’ of the poor. As museums became more publicly accessible, concerns for the preservation and security of collections increased, and opportunities for visitors to touch artefacts almost ceased. In the UK in recent years the Labour government has exerted strong pressure on museums to ‘open up’ access to their collections. Nevertheless, the opportunity for the visitor to touch the collections is normally confined to special ‘hands-on’ areas of the museum, which focus on children’s learning and house pre-selected ‘sacrificial’ objects. The right to touch freely remains restricted—very much as it did in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—to privileged users, such as curators, researchers, or sponsors.
