What is museology?
What is museology? This is not an easy question to answer. This article gives a survey of the field in Europe and Scandinavia. First, I reflect on the complex relationship between material and immaterial, Object and Text, and conclude that museology today deals with both. The “material” and our relationship to this is still at the core, but the more access visitors and web users gain to the collections in museums, the more documentation, contexts and connectivity the museums are forced to develop and offer. Thus, museology also has to deal with for instance strategies of documentation and preservation, and the ideologies behind all that.
Second, I give a brief survey of the definitions and objects of knowledge of museology, developing from the more practically and empirically oriented Museumskunde/muséographie/museum studies from the beginning of the 20th century to museology as “philosophy”, “heritology” or “mnemosophy” – a development which had its engines in France, and in East Europe in the 1970s. I am also discussing the concept of “new museology” and the cyclic amnesia the field is suffering from, since it always tend to forget that “new museology” is something that really has occurred before, at least three times during the 20th century. After some conclusions on the battle about definitions and the core of museology I turn to education and research in the field and present a brief history of the beginnings in different countries. I also note that a peculiar and intriguing gap exists between museological research in the Anglophone world versus the French and German speaking parts of Europe, whereas the former doesn’t hardly ever give any references to the two latter, and vice versa, even if the willingness to consider the research literature of the English is a little bigger among the German and French scholars.
Roughly speaking, in Great Britain and the US focus is traditionally on the educational role of the museum and its visitors and collections, whereas the German and French scholars often take a more sociological, critical and theoretical stand in their analysis, and consequently present more interesting theories in museological matters. And, needless to say, in Sweden, a country where nobody of the younger generation speaks any other language than English, museological education and research follows almost exclusively the Anglophone trends and literature.
