ABSTRACT
Museums have become part of the modern concept of tourism. They offer visitors the possibility of becoming familiar with other cultures and other historical times (often the history of their own towns and nations). Large institutions, such as London’s British Museum, have popularized scientific knowledge for the benefit of lay people. This typically involves the selection and arrangement of objects as well as the creation of accompanying signs, sometimes translated into other languages. Museums reflect to perfection how the popularization of science (Myers, 2003) has been achieved over the past decades. These institutions rely on specialists, such as historians, to decide on what constitutes truthful facts. Myers has proposed a number of factors to understand this process, which can also be applied to museums, that assume:
– that the public sphere is, on scientific topics, a blank slate of ignorance on which scientists write knowledge;
– that this knowledge travels only one way, from science to society; – that the content of science is information contained in a series of written
statements; – that in the course of translation from one discourse to the other, this information
not only changes textual form, but is simplified, distorted, hyped up, and dumbed down. (The French term vulgarisation carries even more of this pejorative sense.) (Myers, 2003, p. 263)
These factors characterize museums as popularizers of science in general, and of historic events in particular. They play a fundamental role in portraying certain events as truthful, in projecting certain narratives difficult to resist. To some extent museums depend on the ignorance of visitors, on the fact that we are unlikely to undermine official narratives and, thus, preserve these (hi)stories for future generations. As Myers adds, the narratives travel one way, often in written form, and sometimes (but not always) in translation.
