Etnograafiapärandi määratlemisest ja kogumisest Eesti muuseumides

Abstract

This article examines how Estonian museums understand ethnographic heritage. More specifically, it is an attempt to answer the questions of how the concept of ethnographic heritage is made visible through museums’ various practices. An analysis of what criteria museums use when assigning objects to ethnographic collections is submitted as well as a description of what dilemmas they face when making a choice, and how these dilemmas are resolved in practice. It was demonstrated that assigning objects to ethnographic collections has been and continues to be a cognitive and subjective activity. What has served as the main ethnographic criteria is the object’s social origin (a farm environment, which is contrasted with the urban and manor milieu) and the method of production — manual production and the use of traditional work methods, which is contrasted with factory production and store-bought goods. Museums that focus on the way of life of an ethnic or social group rely on their own set of defining principles, as do those whose permanent in situ exposition dictates the ethnographic content in a more classical sense (farm and open-air museums). At the same time, the simultaneous use of disparate criteria has led to different results in practice. The effort to define ethnographic heritage as dating from the first quarter or first half of the 20th century has resulted in a "special treatment" of newer hand-made objects in museums with ethnographic collections. This mainly affects the placement of contemporary textile handicrafts in an ethnographic collection. Faced with the build-up of problematic choices, some museums have "frozen" their ethnographic collections, while others have adopted a dual attitude to previously set temporal and other criteria of ethnographicity. When assembling and organizing collections, museums are looking for ways to bypass the narrow boundaries previously set for ethnographic heritage and are attempting to view everyday culture as a whole. One such practice is the formation of a separate textile collection. Thus, ethnographic heritage (ethnographic object) is a changeable construction not only from the perspective of modern ethnological science, but also from the perspective of museum practice. Explicit collecting principles have an impact on the museums’ collection practices, or more generally, what kind of heritage is being created for the future. At the same time, less formal trends, such as the difficulty of collecting objects from recent history, or the special importance of stories in assessing the value of an object, or the lack of specialists working with collections and poor storage conditions are all important factors in the creation of future heritage. The subject of auxiliary collections and replicas is also of much greater significance in the practice of museum work than it appears from the formulated collection policy.