Museums “at the heart of community”: local museums in the post-socialist period in Slovenia

 

Jože Hudales*

 

The author tries to define the changing role of local or community museums in the last few decades, when the crisis of museum institutions became a fact and when museum institutions were very often labeled as “fossilised”, “ossified” and conservative institutions, and that are now facing the ongoing fast social changes. He points out that Slovenian museums, in the last decade of socialist and post-socalist rule, have also gone through the same development. The first “incentives” for making necessary changes in museums and for using different methods and approaches came after 1980, mostly in local and regional museums, and most of the new approaches and efforts for transformation came from ethnologists. Finally, he describes his personal museum experience in three museum projects from 1993, 2000 and 2006 where he tries to “humanize” museum objects and solve some problems concerning “museum crisis”.

Keywords: community museum, humanization of museum, museum crises, new museology, new museum, ethnographic objects.

 

Os museus “no coração da comunidade”: museus locais e o período pós-socialista na Eslovénia

Neste texto, o autor procura descrever a mudança do lugar dos museus locais ou de “comunidade” ao longo das últimas décadas, onde a crise das instituições museológicas era uma realidade e onde os museus eram vistos como sendo lugares “fossilizados” e “ossificados”, sendo que hoje se deparam com intensas mudanças sociais. Ele descreve como os museus eslovenos, nos últimos anos de governo socialista e pós-socialista, também assistiram a desenvolvimentos semelhantes. Os primeiros “incentivos” para a mudança obrigatória nos museus e para a utilização de novos métodos e abordagens chegaram depois de 1980, essencialmente em museus locais e regionais, em grande parte graças à iniciativa de etnólogos. Finalmente, o autor descreve a sua própria experiência pessoal de participação em três projectos museológicos em 1993, 2000 e 2003, onde procurou “humanizar” os objectos museológicos e resolver alguns dos problemas relativos à “crise dos museus”.

Palavras-Chave: museu de comunidade, humanização do museu, crise de museu, nova museologia, novo museu, objectos etnográficos.

 

 

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* Jože Hudales - PhD, assistant lecturer, Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana - joze.hudales@ff.uni-lj.si