Materiality matters

Abstract

This chapter focuses on physical things, although of course museums often hold and interpret many other sorts of things, too. It treats the physical thing as synonymous or at least interchangeable with the 'object'. The chapter shows that it constitutes a serious missed opportunity in museums. Of course, first impressions could be that, unlike in much material culture scholarship, in museums the object is not missed out or overlooked. Yet ironically, the very rationale and modus operandi of museums act to limit the extent to which people can directly, physically, engage with the things on display. However museums choose to present objects, it is, then, inherent in the very nature of the museum that the material things displayed are almost always distanced from the viewer in ways that do not replicate human relationships with things in the outside world. If museums keep open the space that lies between artefacts being either carriers of information or objects of detached contemplation.

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