ABSTRACT
Relationships between museums and communities take place within the context of complex national and local political agendas.1 They require museum practitioners to understand not only the specific economic, social and political contexts of their own institutions, but also to be aware of the ways in which communities themselves use museums as a means of expressing their identities and relationships with others. Such relationships involve negotiation and compromise on both sides but sometimes excite strong emotions that make dispassionate and impartial negotiations difficult. Museum professionals may become defensive of their expertise and reluctant to share control over knowledge, though eager to impart their own. Some communities, in turn, may be resistant to change in “their museum,” vesting energy in maintaining the status quo. Others demand new ways of practice and knowledge sharing and control that challenge a Western ideal of freedom of expression (Lagerkvist 2006), while some may have no understanding of how to work within the existing framework of knowledge and power that museums represent, and thus find themselves marginalized. Resistance to change by those familiar with the conventional performances of the museum space may be characterized as negative and reactionary while newer voices are welcomed. Those who were previously marginalized may, however, be as exclusive as some existing supporters. For many museum practitioners what results is a balancing act-policies that enable the museum and gallery to change and develop but ones which avoid confrontation with existing stakeholders. Over the last decade, or so, a great deal of attention has been paid to the ways in which
museums shape memory and identity. However, less emphasis has been placed on understanding the sophisticated ways in which groups of people, claiming to represent community interests, manage and control certain types of community resources such as gallery spaces, in order to maintain their sense of self-esteem and separateness from others, despite the best endeavors of museum practitioners to prevent this. There are some well-documented examples in which certain groups have successfully mobilized to oppose certain types of exhibition,
such as the Enola Gay (e.g. Dubin 1999), and there are many examples of the questioning of Western knowledge principles by minority indigenous groups (e.g. Hooper-Greenhill 2000, Macdonald and Alsford 1995). However, there are, on the whole, fewer attempts to review and critique the ways in
which communities in the West control the museum process to maintain their power over the institution in practice. It is in this context that this chapter seeks to understand some aspects of the work members of the Great Yarmouth museums team undertook over a seven-year period when, working in partnership with a range of organizations that included the National Trust, English Heritage and the local borough and county authorities, they sought to find new ways of working with different communities and new roles for the sites they managed, and to establish relationships with individuals who would not normally visit museums.2 During this period they conducted many different types of consultation exercises and used focus group work to help shape and develop all of the key developments in the town. This case study will explore the way in which certain groups, claiming to represent wider community interests, resisted change and, in so doing, maintained their privileged positions. It also examines how and why particular types of material culture and the ways they are made accessible are deemed to be particularly important to some community groups in the United Kingdom. This chapter also seeks to understand the relationship between theory and practice. A great
deal has been written in academic discourse about museum relationships with communities that seeks to understand the ways in which institutional structures and practices inhibit, marginalize or exclude certain types of people (e.g. Bourdieu and Darbel 1997; Merriman 2000; Hooper-Greenhill 2000; Sandell 2002; Marstine 2006; Watson 2007a). What is less clear is the extent to which such theoretical approaches, even when rooted in specific case studies, actually help museums understand and manage their relationships with communities. Danielle Rice, writing about the art museum, argues that the relationship between most theorists and museum practice is non-existent to the extent that academics are concerned with an “illusory museum” (Rice 2003: 77). This, perhaps, rather overstates something that is, nevertheless, a dilemma for those working in and studying museums-the complex relationship between theory and practice-how to liberate theory from the abstract negotiation of ideas and apply it to the issues that relate to everyday museum practice. It also underestimates the impact upon museum practitioners of training in museological theory that encourages them to experiment and reflect on their theoretical understanding of museum work. What is often lacking is time for those working in museums to write about their experiences and reflect on them. The particular projects described here are now long over, so there is opportunity to think through some theoretical issues that might help explain how and why events unfolded as they did and the lessons learnt.
