Founding narratives: Revolutionary stories at historic houses

Beranek, Christa M.

doi:10.1080/13527258.2011.541064

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…(2) questions in regards to the kinds of ideas on history and historical progression house museums create and perpetuate (see, for instance, Bann, 2000;Bruner, 1994;Casey, 2003;Dicks, 2000;Handler, Saxton, 1988;Mills, 2003;Schwartz, 1996); (3) issues of social consequence, such as the portrayal of gender, class, and race in museum narratives or issues of depolitization in museum narratives (Beranek, 2011;Christensen, 2011;Dicks, 2000;MacLeod, 2006;Pendlebury et al, 2004;Terry, 2008;. Some of these themes overlap.…”

Section: Defining a Historic House Museummentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The authors who consider HHM work as a political act examine the kinds of consequences this use of heritage produces for the public's understanding and normalization of meanings and ideas pertaining to communal history and community (Dicks, 2000;Waterton, E., Watson, S., 2011;West, 1999), power relations, social class, and labor (Dicks, 1997(Dicks, , 1999Shackel, 2001), culture, race, and identity (MacLeod, 2006;Pendlebury et al, 2004;Terry, 2008), and gender (Beranek, 2011;Christensen, 2011;Peacock, 2011;Terry, 2013). Although some research from this point of view had been done prior to 2006, the book Uses of Heritage by Laurajane Smith, published that year, is considered to be foundational to the development of this body of work, along with Rodney Harrison's (2013) Heritage: Critical Approaches.…”

Section: Historic House Museums and Issues Of Political And Social Consequencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…To be sure, my entire study is saturated with gendered experience, performance and practice. For studies of HHMs and gender, please seeBeranek, 2011;Christensen, 2011;Peacock, 2011;and Terry, 2013.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Sense of the past: historic house museums in Toronto, Canada, as forms of an urban heterotopia

Naumova¹

2021

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Historic house museums allow for reconceptualization of the meaning of tangible objects around us. We establish this new relationship with materiality through our sensory bodies. We conceive of ourselves differently and allow ourselves to move and behave in ways that are not acceptable in the world outside of the museum. We perform our new selves with permission granted by the sense of place that cannot be understood other than through embodied experience–of things, of selves, of the environment that brings it all together. In the coming together of all these elements in the immediate, intimate present, the notion of the past is defined as cultural heritage as mediated through the historic house museum curatorial work and space. I approach historic house museums as socially created and lived kinds of spatiality and sites of social practices and focus on the experiences of people that spend considerable amounts of time there–the museum staff. As a researcher, I have inserted myself within the environment of a historic house museum and attempted to open it to social inquiry through various ways of being within it–observing, writing, interviewing, interacting, sensing, entering it and leaving it. I have carried out a form of phenomenological ethnography, which included a two-year autoethnographic study at the Mackenzie House Museum, in Toronto, Canada, where I volunteered in the position of an interpreter and a historic cook; 24 participant observation visits to other historic house museums in Toronto; and 13 in-depth unstructured interviews with museum staff from various historic house museum sites in the city. The three methods addressed the key conceptual clusters–emplacement, materiality, and performance, which form three analytical chapters of the dissertation. The dissertation positions historic house museums as forms of heterotopia that function as contestations of the accepted spatial, social, and temporal norms within an urban environment. These museums come forth as attempted reconstructions of anthropological places, in the form of domestic sites that assert significance of material manifestations of familial relations and historical heritage. These sites are immersive environments bridge the gap in the current experience of body, time, and space.

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