GUIDING PRINCIPLES: NETWORKED MUSINGPLACES

Foreword: In connection with her work as a museum ethnologist, Dr Andrea Hauenschild  asked herself a question, prompted by Dr. Herbert Ganslmayr, Director of the Übersee Museum, “whether and how local and regional museums as adult educational institutions could contribute to societal development, that is to coping with everyday life and to improving the conditions of life.” In her exploratory research she "discovered" ‘new museology’, a trend in modern museum practice in which the concept of the museum appeared to hold an answer to her question.

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In protest against attempts to change established, stagnating, museum practice in the 1980s there was the formation of an association of museum workers called the International Movement for New Museology (MINOM). New museology had its foundations in the 1970s and it informed NINOM. 

The American ’museologist’ Nina Simon might well be regarded as a trailblazer here and her book The Participatory Museum is something of a standard text for current scholars in the area. 

New museology is an idea of the museum as an educational tool with participatory programming in the service of social development. 

Its an idea that essentially says that musingplaces should be one of the most highly perfected tools that society has available to formulate and attend musingplaces own transformation. 

Importantly new museology embraces concepts such as returning looted cultural property, the acknowledgement of cultural realities, the appreciation of competing histories, community cultural enterprise, placedness, decentralization, cultural and scientific collaboration, community participation and not the least equity and equality in regard to all this. 

At the heart of new museology is the concept that musingplaces should be safe places for dangerous ideas. Or put another way, the base stations for transient truths and inconvenient memories. 

Aboriginal Cultural Knowledge and Property

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As the original people belonging to this once remote place, Tasmania’s Aboriginal people are owed acknowledgement of, and respect for, their cultural and intellectual property. Tasmanian Aboriginal people are themselves the custodians of an ongoing culture that dates back at least 30,000 years. Tasmanian Aboriginal communities’ stories and histories are rich with insightful visions of place and overflowing with perceptions that need to be better understood within the Aboriginal community and other communities – Tasmania, nationally & internationally. 

Tasmanian musingplaces need to be more proactive in their engagement with the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. This needs to be as 200 years plus of colonial settlement Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural realities are poorly understood and the effort to turn that around needs to be increased in collaboration with the community. 

A key objective of a networked Tasmanian musingplace should be, in some respect, pay closer attention to Aboriginal cultural knowledge systems. 

Musingplace Collections

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Musingplaces’ collections are the repositories of cultural material filled with the kind of memories and evidence that lend meaning and substance to not only cultural life but community wellbeing also. Albeit the methodologies available to store these things are undergoing a paradigm shift via emerging digital technologies the collections, in whatever format, remain important cultural property. 

Typically musingplaces’ collections are imagined as “cultural objects”, and then as such, they are then imagined as being a part ‘artistic endeavours’. What is seemingly forgotten is that much of musingplaces’ collections’ value is in the scientific information and knowledge vested in them – and in multifarious and multidimensional ways. Indeed, siloing collections, and siloing musing, is inappropriate in the context of ‘new museology’ and the 21st C. 

Cultural research takes scholars, and musers, into every aspect of the world we live in, and all at once and all the time. Knowledge systems are generally careless about the silos it is often placed in when the research leads the investigators elsewhere. 

A key function of a musingplace is to build collections of things that enable other, present and future, to muse upon the world in the context of the cultural knowledge we leave in our wake. 

Albeit outside the scope of this paper, it has to be said that the credibility of a musingplace is very much to do with the integrity, appropriateness and sustainability of its ‘collection environment’ – infrastructure integrity, climate control, security arrangements, conservation protocols, management systems, etc.