Collections and Collectors
In this article the authors draw attention towards the museum of cultural history and the conduct of the collecting artefacts. From which perspectives, with what purposes and intentions are the museums creating their collections? In what senses are the collections influenced by the collectors’ gender and social class? How are the general and common cultural heritage acquired by the museums? With Pierre Bourdieu’s theory concerning cultural capital as a starting point these questions are discussed within a historical as well as a contemporary perspective.
Examples from the regional cultural heritage in the county of Jämtland from the beginning of the 1900s show how the field of cultural heritage was dominated by a bourgeois elite and how the museums’ collections were built with values from the bourgeois, nationalism and thoughts dominated by the divergence of gender. The collections were supposed to represent essential national and regional values.
With this as background, modern practise of gathering, the production of cultural heritage and the position of the collections in today’s museum programme are discussed. In the post-modern society, the aims and intentions of collecting differ from the purposes a hundred years ago. They speak about a democratic cultural heritage, about the people’s rights to create their own identities and so on. What the authors are saying is that the museums are working for, and highlighting the middle class’ values and standards, while they ask how this affects the collections. Further on they discuss the collections position in the post modern society. Today it’s more difficult to say that the collections are representing a once and for all common, shared and eternal cultural heritage. Maybe, according to the authors, it is time to recognize the cultural heritages as temporary, meaning useful in one historic and social situation, but not necessary in another.
