Emotional Heritage: Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites by Laurajane Smith


Emotional Heritage: Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites
Title : Emotional Heritage: Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 1138888648
ISBN-10 : 9781138888647
Language : English
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 338
Publication : Published July 21, 2020

Emotional Heritage brings the issues of affect and power in the theorisation of heritage to the fore, whilst also highlighting the affective and political consequences of heritage-making. Drawing on interviews with visitors to museums and heritage sites in the United States, Australia and England, Smith argues that obtaining insights into how visitors use such sites enables us to understand the impact and consequences of professional heritage and museological practices. The concept of registers of engagement is introduced to assess variations in how visitors use museums and sites that address national or dissonant histories and the political consequences of their use. Visitors are revealed as agents in the roles cultural institutions play in maintaining or challenging the political and social status quo. Heritage is, Smith argues, about people and their social situatedness and the meaning they, alongside or in concert with cultural institutions, make and mobilise to help them address social problems and expressions of identity and sense of place in and for the present. Academics, students and practitioners interested in theories of power and affect in museums and heritage sites will find

Emotional Heritage: Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites Reviews

  • Jacob

    “Not seeing is not feeling”

    An incredible effort into the statistics of heritage visitation, Smith demonstrates that visitors only take away from museums what they bring into them. Far from educating the public or changing minds, the dialogic nature of heritage is put to question. If visitors simply use heritage to reinforce their current beliefs, either through visitation or emotional practices, what’s the point? Why do we fund and build these self-congratulatory institutions, where conservative and progressive views alike remain unchallenged through visitors’ emotional repression and narrative minimization?

    Museums have lost their magic for me after this book, but their importance to contemporary identity and understanding has become paramount. We clearly need to do more to interrogate the way heritage engages with visitors outside of “learning” platitudes. If heritage professionals want to change the minds of visitors, then visitors’ minds *must* be at the forefront of Heritage practices. It’s time heritage sites stop preaching at visitors and hoping they go home changed individuals, heritage must actively be looking to engage the visitors emotions at a deeper level.