Contextual Approach

Susan Pearce wrote about "contextual approach to understanding" that developed in museums. What she meant by this was that museums developed a "contextual approach to understanding" as a way of summarizing their belief about the way that anthropology, archaeology, history, should be looked at; that each human society or nonhuman event needed to be looked at within the context of its own time, that one cant, or shouldn't, look at another's society through the values of their own society, but within the context of the group being looked at, so that each unique aspect of humanity can be appreciated. Museums offer a way of understanding other cultures; they offer a way of sharing the material objects of a people or culture that may not be readily available to the masses. Museums offer a taste of other societies, of demonstrating shared experiences or allowing certain experiences to be shared and become part of the whole, like with the Holocaust museum. A contextual approach offers a tangibility to a certain concept; its like comparing seeing a picture or virtual tour of the Louvre on the internet as opposed to actually going there and experiencing it. Seeing pictures on the internet is nowhere near the same experience as actually hopping on a plane to Paris and visiting one of the most famous museums in the world, getting to experience a tangible piece of history. In class we compared museums to temples, equated going to a museum as a form of pilgrimage. Museums allow us to pay homage, to make the objects and concepts shown to us into a piece of ourselves. But if we look at it that way, is the experience of going to a museum the same as actually going to the place itself? If you think of it like that, no. Going to a museum about ancient Egypt will not have the same effect as actually going to Egypt and standing at the base of one of the pyramids of Giza, or walking along the Nile, or seeing Petra. But for most of us its about as close as we are going to come to some things, to understand others different from ourselves. As for if a contextual approach would be likely to be found and successful in museums today, especially considering an increasing trend towards "museums" that document modern cultural movement, moving away from an agreed upon goal of education towards one of aesthetic appeal, I'd have to say that I think a few will survive with a contextual approach. Because there will always be historians, archaeologists, anthropologists out there whose entire goal is education, who read and learn merely for the sake of acquiring knowledge for knowledge's sake. But for the most part I think with the increasing trends away from education and towards aesthetic appeal, the contextual approach in museums will largely die out, leaving a few precious places left to provide understanding and knowledge to the world.