Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Engaging Concepts
- 1 The Gate in the Wall: Beyond Happiness-making in Museums
- 2 Assembling Communities: Curatorial Practices, Material Cultures and Meanings
- 3 Interview – John Tunbridge
- 4 Interview – Gregory Ashworth
- 5 Engaging with Māori and Archaeologists: Heritage Theory and Practice in Āotearoa New Zealand
- 6 Horizontality: Tactical Politics for Participation and Museums
- Engaging Creatively
- Engaging Challenges
- List of Contributors
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
6 - Horizontality: Tactical Politics for Participation and Museums
from Engaging Concepts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Engaging Concepts
- 1 The Gate in the Wall: Beyond Happiness-making in Museums
- 2 Assembling Communities: Curatorial Practices, Material Cultures and Meanings
- 3 Interview – John Tunbridge
- 4 Interview – Gregory Ashworth
- 5 Engaging with Māori and Archaeologists: Heritage Theory and Practice in Āotearoa New Zealand
- 6 Horizontality: Tactical Politics for Participation and Museums
- Engaging Creatively
- Engaging Challenges
- List of Contributors
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
… you were the first – in your books and in the practical sphere – to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others. We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this ‘theoretical’ conversion. To appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf.
(Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Michel Foucault, 1972)…an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries, and responsibility in their construction.
(Donna Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto, 1991)This book is questioningly titled ‘Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities’. Let us think about some of the everyday meanings of ‘engagement’ for a moment.1 If a toilet is engaged, then it means someone is using it and you cannot; you must wait your turn. If you are engaged to be married, you cannot marry anyone else, and you wear a ring to show this exclusiveness to others. An engaged person is not open to others, or other romantic or sexual possibilities. To want to engage someone or something is not, therefore, a neutral act; it is claiming something totally. It is a monogamous kind of claim.
In contrast, this chapter will explore a more plural and open approach to the relationships between museums, ‘heritage’ and people. That is, participation instead of engagement: a nonexclusive, non-deferential and non-loyalty-based politics of self-determination, affinity and collectivism. To begin – and throughout – I want to share particular stories of my own. I also want to offer some critical interventions. The one leads to the other and then back again. Here is the first:
I am coming back from another event on museums and communities. I am on the train. The day has left a knot in my stomach. The knot is all too familiar. It is the knot of knowing things are not right. All day, being yet again in that schizo-frame of any institutional space focused on participation and community engagement, we have either not asked enough questions, celebrating projects that have been ‘good’, or we have worried, we have confessed and we have talked about failures ‘to empower’.
Both are somehow awful. We seem to pass over the political challenges too quickly.
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- Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities , pp. 73 - 88Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2017