No abstract

This chapter reports preliminary findings from visitor research being executed by one of the authors in a conurbation of the English Midlands. The fieldwork consists of fifteen in-depth interviews administered at a random sample of households and with a total of circa 35 subjects. The report places the research design in the theoretical contexts of class, culture and locality, presents data from three interviews and provides a detailed analysis of one interview. The data suggest: (I) that local museums are mediators between identity and structure;(2) that museum meanings are diversely determined in relation to the class trajectories of subjects; (3) that museum visiting is to be understood as a social relationship rather than as an attribute of individuals and (4) that subjects readily conceptualize locality and identity through the visual vocabulary of museums and heritage sites. Public viewingSpectacles pushed above eyebrows, the expert grasps the pot, rotates it in hand, examines the base, gives it up to the gaze of the camera and pronounces the history of its manufacture and distribution. A moment of silence follows on this, 'The Antiques Road Show', a popular BBC television programme in which people offer up their antiques to the judgement of experts. For each weekly episode the show visits a district, town or city and invites locals to submit their treasures. A typical episode begins with a camera shot of queues at the venue, perhaps a civic building, each of which goes forward to an appointed expert in painting, furniture, ceramics, toys etc. A camera gives sight of the people (;) The

The concept of cultural capital is well known in museum studies from pioneering visitor research conducted and reported by Pierre Bourdieu in the 1960s. This paper examines the concept in the light of the criticism that, whilst it illuminates the dynamics of cultural consumption and inequality in advanced capitalist societies, its socio-genesis is less well understood. It is argued that the historical sociology of fine art reproduction provides an opportunity to (i) enlarge our understanding of its formation and (ii) to explore the cultural character of the copy and the sociology of the body. The paper draws on Marx's concept of primitive accumulation, on Connerton's distinction between incorporated and inscribing practices and on Bourdieu's distinction between three states of cultural capital.

It is argued that sociology lacks an adequate conceptualization of the museum/society relationship. It is further argued (1) that the museum is an agency of classification; (2) that it is a relationship of cultural interdependence and (3) that museums have an internal relationship to modernization. The institution of the museum is shown to arise out of the indeterminacies of modernization. A dispute in the early history of London's Tate Gallery is explored as it illuminates that institution's organization of the contradictions of modernization. Pace Bourdieu and Elias, a key contradiction is seen to arise from a differentiation of the field of power and the cultural field. It is argued, against essentialist accounts of museums, that the Tate produced its point of view through the medium of this contradiction. 204

No abstract