ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the museum as a setting for thought and reflection, an environment where the museum user carries and explores personal contexts in order to learn. Museum use also involves participation in a community of knowing, and in thinking that exemplifies PolanyVs concepts of “indwelling” and “personal knowledge.” The power of these masks, out of time and under glass, is transformed by the museum and given to the museum user—to the mind in the museum—for use among all his other experiences and thoughts. The ideational processes of the museum involve objects in contexts suffused with information and rich with meaning. Thinking in museums, the user thinks of objects surrounded by ideas. The museum is a place for the dreamer to see private dreams in public places, deep memories framed anew. In the museum there is also the more immediate social continuity of the visitor who shares the same space with others, contemplates the same enclosed world.
