Museums: Who, What, How, and Why?

We're on a museum kick this week in my public history course. Actually, the major course project is about a museum, but that's sort of a hush-hush, no-blogging-about-it, kind of project, so consider this a mysterious, veiled reference. The image of Scarlett O'Hara peeking coyly over her fan comes to mind.

Which brings me to slavery.

In her article, "Crafting Emotional Comfort," published in Museum and Society, Amy Tyson writes about two separate museums and how they address the history of slavery. Conner Prairie, in Fishers, Indiana, hosts an after-hours role-playing session entitled, "Follow the North Star." As part of this museum experience, guests are led on a 90 minute simulation of the Underground Railroad in 1836. The primarily white visitors morph into runaway slaves and endure dehumanizing treatment from the museum staff. For the psychologically delicate among the participants, everyone is given a safety sash that can be waved, should anyone need to escape the escape.

Tyson also examines Fort Snelling in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the topic of slavery is, at best, removed from sight. She notes that no re-enactors portray the black slaves who worked for Colonel and Mrs. Snelling. Moreover, when the subject of domestic labor is mentioned during tours, the guides refer to bonded women as "servants," taking no notice of their race or lack of freedom.

These two polar approaches to addressing slavery show a common thread in the museums' methods of customer service: comfort. Tyson underscores the fact that both museums take extraordinary precautions to ensure that their visitors feel emotionally at ease throughout their museum experiences. At the conclusion of the article, Tyson determines that the necessity of customer care in living history museums suggests a unique dilemma and suggests that historians of all kinds, "consider the extent to which the expectation of and preoccupation with emotional comfort has entered our own terrains" (258).

Stephen Weil addresses this question and many others in his book, Making Museums Matter. He provides a comprehensive study of the history, purposes, methods, and success of museums. His analyses enlightens the reader to the infinite decisions involved in creating and maintaining a museum that benefits its community. Like Tyson, Weil looks at museums with a critical eye and aims to provide a series of objective criterion which evaluate the quality of any given museum. He suggests that, one day, museums as a whole might have to defend their worth and he wants to be prepared.

The American Association of Museums 2008 Annual Report falls in line with Weil's concern. The report indicates new plans to bring agenda of museums to Capitol Hill and ensure the success of legislative efforts that benefit museums. Additionally, the AMA aims to raise itself to well-recognized "expert" status, to improve visibility. Perhaps these endeavors will succeed in accomplishing what Weil suggests: proving that museums have both aesthetic and commodified worth.

All of this weeks' readings cast into sharp light the difficulties facing museums and those who operate them. However, the attitude toward these problems is unabashedly hopeful. The authors recognize that museums must change to meet the evolving needs of their communities and, through their careful studies, present reasonable means to enact and evaluate these changes.