The practice of everyday museum making: Naturalization and empowerment in the amateur consumption of museographic language

Abstract

Amateur museum making is museum practice (museography) performed as serious leisure. This article proposes an analytical approach to amateur museum making that understands it as a simultaneous practice of production and consumption of museography: this is as a use of museum practice or as the consumption of one’s own museographic activity. With this approach, I specifically attempt to detect how processes of naturalization of museographic conventions, and of empowerment through their amateur use, are intimately linked to the use of museography as a whole and not only to its production or to its consumption as separate processes. For this purpose, I propose an extension of De Certeau’s ideas of the production of consumption in The Practice of Everyday Life and the article presents on in-depth interviews with amateur museum makers and participant observation on three case studies: The Bread Museum (Catalonia, Spain), The House of Butterflies (Catalonia, Spain) and the Toy Museum (Antioquia, Colombia).

Keywords

Amateur museums empowerment museography museology museum practice naturalization serious leisure

This article proposes an analytical approach to amateur museum making¹ that understands it as a simultaneous practice of production and consumption of museographic discourse; this is as a use of museography. I am using the word museography, mostly used in the European literature, to refer to the procedures, methods and techniques used to put the museum product into practice. That is to say, museography is the ‘applied aspect of museology’ (VVAA, 2010: 52) or, in other words, the ‘practical level of applied museology’ (Maroevic, 1998: 99). It is by analyzing the museography of amateur museums that we can develop a museological theory of them.

In this article, I attempt to conceive amateur museum practice as a practice of consumption and production that allows the situation of naturalized museographic conventions, and empowerment through them, in the specific practice of amateur museum making. I argue that this approach enlightens how power-related processes both coexist and intertwine with each other within museum practice. As a general goal, I attempt to contribute to the understanding of museum making as practice, and of power struggles in the use of museography.

I approach these questions through in-depth interviews with three amateur museum makers: founders of two amateur museums in Catalonia (Spain) and one in Antioquia (Colombia), as well as through participant observation and a field diary written during and after visiting these museums and following their guided tours. The research relies on museums in my own Catalan context, which allows me to better understand their shared cultural and historical background, as well as to compare them. The Colombian case is chosen as a contrast case with the purpose to help me identify contextual issues. I will also rely on the work of Michel De Certeau (1988), extending his proposal about the production of consumption in The Practice of Everyday Life, as well as on Norman Fairclough, Pierre Bourdieu and Stuart Hall and several authors from the field of museum studies.

I approach amateur museum making as an activity performed as serious leisure, understood after Stebbins (1992) as the definite, lasting and ‘systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity that is sufficiently substantial and interesting for the participant to find a career there in the acquisition and expression of its special skills and knowledge’ (p. 3). Serious amateurs and hobbyists are ‘committed to their endeavors, even though they feel neither a social necessity nor a personal obligation to engage in them’ (Stebbins, 1992: 10).² Apart from a few exceptions, museum studies has not paid much attention to these kinds of museums. Jannelli’s (2012) wild museums are also amateur but collective and have stronger political purposes, such as the tactical museums reviewed by Butinx and Karp (2006). Candlin’s (2015) micro-museums include amateur museums and also many other small public and private museums that are run not only by amateurs but also by professionals. And finally, Taimre (2013) has briefly conceptualized in a short paper certain Estonian museums as ‘Do-It-Yourself’ museums that could also include amateur museums. Only Klimaszewski refers to amateur museums as such in her recent research on local ‘unofficial’ ethnographic museums of peasant life in Romania (Klimaszewski, 2016; Klimaszewski and Nyce, 2014). My aim is to strictly focus on amateur museums, understanding that - as leisure-based practices - they allow for a better understanding of museum making as a practice simultaneously of consumption and production.

The Bread Museum (‘Museu del Pa’ in its original Catalan) is located in the village of Tona (Spain) 60 km north from Barcelona. Joaquim, its founder, is now a retired baker whose family owns a 100-year-old bakery that occupies the ground floor of the family home. The museum has filled the top floor of the same building since 1983, and shows a collection of baking tools and traditional types of bread from the area, as well as from other areas of Spain and from different countries. It also shows - through documentation and self-made dioramas – some types of bakery and baking processes from different historical periods (Figure 1(a) and (b)).

Figure 1.

(a) General view of The Bread Museum, Tona, Spain. (b) Details of display and labels of The Bread Museum, Tona, Spain.

The House of Butterflies (‘Casa de les Papallones’ in Catalan), a museum established in 2005, is located in the village of Planoles in the Catalan Pyrenees (Spain). It is run by Agustí and Agustí Jr, a father and son who, following a hobby inherited from the grandfather, have gathered a wide collection of butterflies, fossils, rocks and minerals and some specimens of Coleopterans and Dipterans. The museum is located in the upper floor of the vacation home of Agustí Jr, where they spend every spare Sunday away from the furniture family business in another city, Vic (Figure 2(a) and (b)).

Figure 2.

(a) General view of one of the rooms of The House of Butterflies. Image courtesy of The House of Butterflies, Planoles, Spain. Courtesy of Agustí Gabaldà from The House of Butterflies: http://www.lacasadelespapallones.com. (b) Details of display and labels of The House of Butterflies. Image courtesy of The House of Butterflies, Planoles, Spain. Courtesy of Agustí Gabaldà from The House of Butterflies: http://www.lacasadelespapallones.com.

The Toy Museum (‘Museo del Juguete’ in Spanish) is located at the centre of Medellin (Colombia) in an industrial street crowded with garages and repair shops. It shows a collection of toys mainly found in Medellin dating between the late 19th century and the present. It is located in Rafael’s own studio where he works as a sculptor. The museum now occupies the whole second floor. He started collecting old toys thirty years ago, and the collection gradually turned into a museographic space where he receives the visitors. His toys are often lent to other organizations for exhibitions (Figure 3(a) and (b)).

Figure 3.

(a) General view of the Toy Museum, Medellín, Colombia. (b) Details of display of the Toy Museum, Medellín, Colombia.

In-depth semi-structured interview was conducted with each of the museum makers, each of which was recorded and then transcribed. The interviews were conducted in the museum in the case of the Toy Museum from Medellin, in their family furniture shop in the case of The House of Butterflies, and in his home office in the case of the Bread Museum. The conversations were conducted in Catalan (the Bread Museum and The House of Butterflies) and in Spanish (the Toy Museum), but in this article I have translated the quoted excerpts into English to facilitate their reading. Participant observation in the museums and of their guided tours also provided relevant data. The three museums, as is common in amateur museums, can be visited only by appointment, with the visit totally mediated by the museum makers themselves. Furthermore, Agustí and Agustí Jr from The House of Butterflies only receive groups of visitors, for which I had to join a group in order to be able to visit the museum. Joaquim from the Bread Museum and Agustí and Agustí Jr from The House of Butterflies offer a structured guided tour, while Rafael from the Toy Museum more flexibly accompanies his visitors with whom he engages in conversations.

My approach is close to recent research on museology that, since the postmodern turn, has been greatly influenced by Foucault’s ideas on knowledge–power relations and the semiotics of discourse analysts (see, for example, Ball, 1994, 1996; Bennett, 1988; Kratz, 2011; Meng, 2004). The problem of assuming the representational intentionality of the producer and what the receiver understands from a given text (Widdowson, 1998) is often balanced by museologists through ethnographic inquiry. This helps to reduce some of the risks of inferring the intentions and understandings of producers and receptors only from the analysis of the finished products of the museographic procedures – that is, the analysis of exhibitions, catalogues, guided tours and museum shops. This kind of museology is close to the relational museology proposed by Grewcock (2014), which aims at an ‘open, comparative approach to research that is always with museums-in-the-world’ (p. 186); this is situated research in which both museum practice and the research of it are understood as a craft and as a practice. Contrasting the analysis of the museographic discourse with a closer ethnographic inquiry might reveal more of the complexity of the processes involved in museum making (Machin and Mayr, 2012). It might also suggest more complex and flexible subject-position roles than the often-still expected binary positions of producer and receptor; that is, of those who exert power and those who are subordinate to it.

In this direction, I propose to consider amateur museum makers simultaneously as producers and as consumers of their own museographic activity. This apparently ambivalent position is useful in order to, later on, detect and situate processes of naturalization and empowerment in their practice, which also occur in a simultaneous and intertwined manner.

In the following pages, I first define the concepts of naturalization and empowerment. Then, I argue for the inextricability of production and consumption within amateur museum making. Finally, I return to naturalization and empowerment in the context of the amateur use of museography as a practice of simultaneous consumption and production through the three amateur museums included in my research.

Naturalization and empowerment

Naturalization and empowerment are two distinct but interwoven cognitive processes related to the ideological dimension of discourse.³ Naturalization is the process by which a language, a discourse type, an institution, a convention or a procedure becomes perceived as natural and truthful by ceasing to be seen as historical and arbitrary. Fairclough emphasizes the ideological nature and effect of naturalization due to the perception of legitimacy of the naturalized discourse types and, as a result, the suppression or contention of other types (Fairclough, 1989: 91). Bourdieu, instead, focuses on the historical processes of institutionalization to claim that ‘the instituted institution makes us forget that it issues out of a long series of acts of institution (in the active sense) and hence has all the appearances of the natural’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 40; emphasis in original). Hall, who explains the production and reception of messages as a coding and decoding process, states that the high distribution of some codes – and the fact that we learn them in early stages of life – make us perceive them as natural. This has the ‘(ideological) effect of concealing the practices of coding which are present’ (Hall, 1980: 132). Naturalized knowledge is knowledge that becomes common sense and whose ideological effects are intensified precisely because their ideological content and origin are no longer perceived (Fairclough, 1989). Power relations are then reproduced and maintained through naturalized concepts and practices within institutions that, due to their naturalization, are also very difficult to change. The struggle to change them and therefore to change the power relations from which they originate and that are maintained by them is a struggle for empowerment.

Empowerment is the process by which persons or groups that are ‘excluded from particular types of discourse or particular subject positions within types of discourse’ use, infringe, resist or adapt conventions ‘without radically changing them’ (Fairclough, 1989: 244). This infringement requires a certain process of denaturalization, the awareness that the specific conventions or institutions that need to be changed are not natural but the result of complex historical processes. Bourdieu explains this struggle from within in a similar manner through the notion of illusio, which is a specific relation that we have with the social fields that we are part of. Illusio makes it possible for us to try to change power relations within a social field, being exactly that which demonstrates that we recognize its legitimacy (Bourdieu, 1998: 76–79):

Wanting to undertake a revolution in a field is to accord the essential of what the field tacitly demands, namely that it is important, that the game played is sufficiently important for one to want to undertake a revolution in it. (p. 78)

When naturalized institutions or concepts and practices within them become denaturalized – by the effort of some individuals or because they fail to answer the issues they were referring to – their historical and ideological contingencies become evident and other options might arise, becoming eventually naturalized in their turn. Therefore, denaturalization is a tool for empowerment, but empowerment is possible and common through the use and reproduction of naturalized codes, conventions and institutions.

The processes of naturalization and empowerment are part of museum practices as well, whether amateur or professional, and they allow for the identification of, and the partial explanation of, the power struggle through them. In the following pages, I show some of the manners in which amateur museum makers relate to museological conventions, taking their naturalization and their empowering use into special account.

Producing as consuming/consuming as producing

De Certeau (1988) suggests that consumption is a specific kind of production and not its opposite:

To a rationalized, expansionist and at the same time centralized, clamorous, and spectacular production corresponds another production, called ‘consumption’. The latter is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order. (p. xiii; my emphasis)

If we understand that this ‘rationalized, expansionist and centralized, clamorous and spectacular production’ corresponds to highly institutionalized and professionalized museums,⁴ De Certeau’s consumer will probably fit the visitor profile in the act of using the imposed museum product by walking through, seeing, reading, touching, commenting, laughing at, forgetting, imagining the exhibitions, catalogues, guided tours or museum souvenirs.

However, these visitors are not always performing the role of silent producers through consumption because their ‘ways of using the products’ become easily objectified in their photographs, their conversations or the use of the bought souvenirs, to name some of the most conventional reactions, indeed producing their own products. This approach to the visitor is close to that of relatively recent visitor studies that understand visitors as active producers of meaning (see, for example, Bagnall, 2003; Fyfe and Ross, 1996; Hooper-Greenhill, 2006; Lindauer, 2006; Macdonald, 2005; Padró, 2003). From these approaches, museum visiting is an act of production that can only be explained through the microanalysis of visiting experiences.

Nevertheless, the production of consumption is, in a more evident manner, the position of amateur museum makers, who are both ‘consumption producers’ and ‘product producers’ of museographic discourse. Like the Holocaust memorials - built by Holocaust survivors not only to inform others but also for themselves to remember and channel grief - amateur museums also become ‘a part of everyday life both for (their) makers and (their) audiences precisely because of (their) insistence on the personal’ (Witcomb, 2010: 48). In this sense, we can view museum making as an artistic practice (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2004) in which one consumes by producing and produces by consuming.

This leads me to an extension of De Certeau’s proposal: if the pure consumer does not exist, then neither does the pure producer. Discourse producers could also be understood as discourse users. As with the act of speaking, all museum makers operate ‘within the field of a linguistic system’ by effecting ‘an appropriation or reappropriation of language’ and positing ‘a contract with the other (the interlocutor) in a network of places and relations’ (De Certeau, 1988: xiii). In a similar manner, Hall also considers how language needs to be appropriated ‘as meaningful discourse and be meaningfully decoded’ in order to be used, allowing the product of the ‘the institution-societal relations’ to be realized and ‘have an effect’ (Hall, 1980: 130). From this point of view, we can consider museography, or museum practice, as a linguistic system made possible through the application of its own morphology and syntax to construct meanings. Macdonald considers museums’ language to be ‘spoken through architecture, spatial arrangements and forms of display as well as in discursive commentary’ and adds that it is a language ‘of fact, objectivity, superior taste, and authoritative knowledge’ (Macdonald, 2006). This museographic language is most evident in the exhibition space, where its traditional coded and coding elements are the exhibited objects, cabinets, signs, taxonomy, visible conservation techniques, light and so on (Moser, 2010). While some authors consider exhibitions to be texts and intertexts, or speech acts (Ferguson, 1996) that construct rhetorics specific to its language (Kratz, 2011), others have proposed specific methods for syntactic analysis of museum space (Hillier and Tzortzi, 2006). The language of museography is also part of other practices surrounding the most visible aspect of the exhibition, such as conservation and cataloguing procedures, and security measures. All these methods and practices signify and code messages that the same museum makers and museum visitors decode or attempt to do so. I defend, then, that this museographic language is appropriated and used by museum practitioners, whether professional or amateur. Such users adapt the museographic language – like any other language users do – in an ongoing bricolage process so that, as a tool, it can serve their own needs and interests (De Certeau, 1988: xiv). Therefore, museum makers find themselves in the position of users; this is of consuming museography through its use, having not only to adapt to it, but also to adapt it to their own purposes.

As language users, we are often consumers of our same or similar discourse types through the consumption of similar kind of products – produced by others – that become inputs for further uses. But more specifically, we are often the main consumers of our own products – like when we cook for ourselves, when we paint for enjoyment, when we fix our own bicycle and when we use the professional benefits of publishing an academic paper. This is a property of cultural production, in general, and it can be easily detected in amateur museums to a certain and relevant extent. In Simmel’s (1997) point of view, the cultural act involves a round trip from what he calls ‘the path of the soul to itself’ (p. 62) in which we produce cultural objects from our subjectivity – ‘objectively intellectual constructs’ (p. 57) – which we need to include back to ourselves in order to fulfill the process of cultivation. This means that the cultural process is not complete unless it returns to the producers transforming their subjectivity. This is nevertheless a generally underrated or overlooked part of the process (Cantó-Milà, 2005), and this is why it might need more of our attention. Any message – I include here any cultural production – is somehow returning to ourselves, thus turning us into our own recipients.

This return to oneself, or oneself, as the main recipient of one’s product, is especially visible in leisure. Research on leisure has paid a lot of attention to the personal benefits and rewards of leisure activities, which are, in turn, a motivation for their continuity. Although amateur museum makers work with a receiver or visitor in mind, and – despite the benefits that they might bring to their communities - they acknowledge that they mainly do it for themselves, and that they are the main recipients of the benefits of their museum making, at least because it brings enjoyment and sense to their lives. Pleasure, satisfaction, identity formation, increased self-esteem, a sense of personal accomplishment and emotional involvement, among others, have been found to be relevant motivations for leisure, in general, and also for collection (Belk et al., 1991; Bloch and Bruce, 1984; Cohen-Gewerc and Stebbins, 2013; Danet and Katriel, 1994; Formanek, 1994; Mullins, 2014). This also appears to be the case in my interviews with the museum makers - and not only relevant, but precisely the main reason for their activity. Rafael is the most explicit interviewee when talking about emotional reasons:

… it’s like when one chooses what to study, what to play, is something not so much about thinking but about feeling. I don’t think that I love my girlfriend, I don’t think, you feel that you love her, I think it’s this way, one feels a necessity […]. One starts wanting to know to whom it belongs, how it got here … one creates … that’s why they get so personal too.⁵

[…]It’s delicious to be a collector. Because you review, you go back and look, return … things have memory so I remember people again, the moments … very nice, I like it a lot. That’s how I see it. Somehow I think that it’s repeating with someone else what one has felt.

[…]… so I do everything: I paint, I do the cabinets, this I did myself, this sign [he shows me a sculptural sign waiting to be hung on the museum’s door], so everything … but this is my enjoyment, and I do it so people would come.

[…] The idea is to manage to take it to a point in which I end up … older here. That would seem very nice to me (he laughs), it would be delicious to end up my years in a place like this, surrounded with the people, with … it’s like the dream. (Rafael, interview, Medellín, 2015)

Rafael is continuously referring to the love he feels for the activity of museum making, to the enjoyment of doing it and of provoking people’s reactions. But Joaquim and Agustí Jr, who are much more frugal in their emotional explanations, also refer to satisfaction - to the fact that they do it because they like it and because they have fun with it:

You feel very satisfied, of course, you have done a task … well, but I don’t know how to say it, is this kind of thing that, as you do them bit by bit and they keep growing I don’t know if you are totally aware of what you have done. You don’t think of it, you keep on going, you keep on going (with the museum tasks). Of course then yes, at some specific moment you say ‘listen, maybe it was actually worth it’. (Joaquim, interview, Tona, 2015)

You like it and you do it, do you know what I mean? It’s a hobby that you do because you like it. (Agustí Jr, interview, Vic, 2015)

Their feelings of satisfaction seem to be linked to the effort invested, which benefits them during the process as well as when they collect some kind of acknowledgment or reward that helps them see their own work in perspective. We must remember that their commitment is a long-term one, requiring continuous dedication in a quite lonely endeavour.

We are also our own discourse recipients in that we collect the benefits of creating and transmitting messages with our worldview, or the damages of unconsciously reproducing a worldview that is in contradiction to ours. Critical Museology has long researched how museum making is used to construct discourses that defy or maintain opinions, values and visions of the world and therefore power positions within it. This is obvious in highly ideological state museums whose role is establishing and maintaining national identity (Bennett, 1988; Duncan, 1995; Kaplan, 2006), or in community museums that are built in order to serve the same community that produces them by reclaiming their own values and worldviews (Butinx and Karp, 2006). Nevertheless, it is so in any museum that we would analyze, allowing us to generalize museum practice as a tool to maintain or defy power positions and therefore a tool of power struggle between the producer and the status quo whose messages are being reproduced, even if only unconsciously. It is in this powerful ideological dimension of museum practice that the processes of naturalization, denaturalization and empowerment are especially relevant. If the naturalization of museographic language would be total, with its use one would be reproducing the implicit values and worldviews encoded in it. It could still serve one’s own interest if the use of that language brought the enjoyment that the three amateur museum makers express, even if it would be in (unaware) contradiction with one’s own values. In another degree of naturalization, the use of museographic language can serve one’s need for empowerment even if it is with the use of naturalized codes and conventions. In these situations, even if external consumers are needed to whom to communicate the museographic messages, the effect of such message on these persons returns to influence the producers’ status, making them the main beneficiaries of their own discourse in this additional sense.

To sum up, amateur museum makers are museum discourse users as visitors of other museums, as ‘speakers’ of museographic language, and as the main recipients of their own museographic processes and products. Their use of museography is a vehicle for consuming the experience of their amateur activity, which is a result of a complex museographic product. They consume the practice of museum making – collecting, cataloguing, conserving and preserving, researching, displaying and explaining; they consume their leisure time and pleasure by producing; they of course consume the goods and services needed for the production; and, finally, the benefits of such consumptions are the fuel for their long-term commitment. Importantly, they also consume the ideological possibilities of the language, even though this happens in a complex struggle between naturalization and empowerment.

The re-use of museography

De Certeau (1988) explains how some cultures adopt and adapt the imposed Christian religion, taking some of its myths and rituals and mixing them with their own in what he considers a ‘popular use’ of religion (pp. 15–18). With this example, De Certeau (1988) explains the possibilities of subversion of the established order through the re-use of ‘frames of reference which proceed from an external power’ (p. 17). This kind of use, quite directly translatable into a popular⁶ use of museography, re-employs a system constructed and spread by others. Under this light, De Certeau’s and Hall’s appropriation of language shifts toward a more politicized shade.⁷ This appropriation modifies the functioning of the frame of reference of the institutionalized practice, although without compromising ‘the sincerity with which it may be believed nor the lucidity with which […] the struggles and inequalities hidden under the established order may be perceived’ (De Certeau, 1988: 17–18). Understood as a re-use or appropriation of museography, amateur museums are slightly subverting the established order at least through the modification of its usual directionality, historically coming from the powerful and legitimated, from the institutional organizations to the individuals with a generalized absence of negotiation:

a way of using imposed systems constitutes the resistance to the historical law of a state of affairs and its dogmatic legitimations. A practice of the order constructed by others redistributes its space; it creates at least a certain play in that order, a space for maneuvers of unequal forces and for utopian points of reference (De Certeau, 1988: 18)

These museographic proposals are built from a relatively powerless position in this struggle of unequal forces, which can also be found in some community museums (Butinx and Karp, 2006). They are relatively powerless because none of the makers have formal or official education in museology or museography; they are self-made experts in their fields of toys, entomology and bread baking – although Joaquim’s bakery has the legitimacy of a 100-year old business, they make important economic efforts to keep their projects going, and despite the fact that they strongly rely on the relations with their peers, family and friends, they do not hold strong social and political positions.⁸ This means that they cannot rely on the kind of economic, cultural, political and social capital (Bourdieu, 1986), which has historically been behind the making of museums. On the contrary, it might be their museum-making activity that increases some of their cultural and social capital after a long struggle in the appropriation of the museographic institution and its symbolic capital, which could be detected in further research through the recognition received by their local communities, or the perception of legitimacy by their neighbours. With this appropriation, they redistribute some of this symbolic capital by creating De Certeau’s ‘space for maneuvers’: they are partially subverting the established order of the institution and facilitating the observation of some of its struggles, inequalities and the arbitrariness of its conventions.

De Certeau (1988) explains the operations performed by consumers and cultural re-users as ‘clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of “discipline”’ (p. xiv). I do not claim that amateur museums function clandestinely, in the sense of behind-the-scenes, and I do not think that De Certeau uses the expression in this sense either, which seems quite clear when he writes about television viewers or city walkers. What is important in relation to amateur museums is especially that they are caught in the nets of the museographic discipline. ‘Caught’ is an important term because it denotes that the position within the discipline is neither voluntary nor fully powerful, and that taking a critical distance from it is at least difficult, if even possible. Most evidence shows that amateur museum makers sincerely believe in the qualities and legitimacy⁹ of the museographic institution. This can be inferred from the taken-for-granted or naturalized use of certain museographic conventions detected through the way they refer to them during the interviews and guided tours.¹⁰

One such convention is the use of the word museum. The denomination of their museographic projects as museums hints at the importance that they attach to such naming and at some implicit meanings behind it. By sometimes showing their reaffirmation to naming their projects ‘museum’, they are also expressing some doubt about it, at least by having the need to express such assertions. Sometimes they seem to feel obliged to tinge the use of the word. Joaquim says that he works in his project ‘as it were a museum’ (Joaquim, interview, Tona, 2015) and by that he seems to insinuate that it is actually not a museum, or that he does not totally dare to make such a statement. Rafael, instead, often says that ‘he calls it a museum’ (Rafael, interview, Medellin, 2015) as different from it really being a museum. This perceived distance between what the reality of museums is and what his museum actually is forces him to often express that, whether it is a museum or not, he personally chooses to call it so. Such doubts about the right to name their projects ‘museum’ show that they have specific, implicit conceptions of what a museum is, that they perceive the effect of the performative utterance of such naming that constitutes what it names, and that in order for it to succeed it needs to be ‘pronounced by a person who has the “power” to pronounce it […], the authority to emit the words that he utters’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 111).

Nevertheless, my analysis needs to go a bit further and follow some hints of the tactical and empowering use of the word ‘museum’. Even if the interviewees do not feel legitimate enough to stop justifying their choice or their right to consider their projects as museums, they are still taking the decision of thinking and communicating them as such – after all, there are many other private collections with similar permanent museographic displays open to the public that are not named ‘museums’ by their owners. They seem to perceive the symbolic power¹¹ linked to that naming, and they dare to both appropriate it and defy their own conception of what museums ought to be. On one side, this means that they are taking advantage of the symbolic power and legitimacy inscribed in that naming. On the other, their doubts and uncertainty about the use of the word are proof that there is some distance between them and the museographic convention in which the noun ‘museum’ is inscribed: ‘When the “observer” is sufficiently enclosed within (an) institution, and thus sufficiently blind, everything goes fine. The discourse he produces has every appearance of holding together’ (De Certeau, 1988: 60).

On the contrary, their constant expressions showing doubt might show that things do not totally hold together in their understanding of their own practice, hinting their struggle with the field.

There are other taken-for-granted conventions that appear in the interviews as having an ambivalent naturalized and empowered use, such as the use of labels, the cataloguing of the collection and the museographic narrative. The three amateur museum makers struggle with the perception of what they are told and believe to be proper museum making and their own capacity and chances to perform it. Joaquim uses the cataloguing forms used by the Catalan public institutions in the 1980s because he ‘was taught to use this form’, or insinuates that there is a right amount of information to be explained during the guided tour despite the fact that he does not ‘have time to explain all what should be explained’ (Joaquim, Interview, Tona, 2015). Also, Agustí and Agustí Jr understand that there is one right manner of labelling their butterflies, different from the right manner of labelling them in the times of their respective father and grandfather. They take the rule of the convention as a fact, as a truth that is beyond their choice.

They often seem to mimic the manner in which their public and private museographic institutions of reference function. This institutional mimicry can be found not only between amateurs and professionals but also between most institutionalized organizations as a reaction to political influence and legitimacy, to uncertainty and to the pressures of professionalization (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). Although amateur museum makers are sensitive to cultural expectations and to some governmental mandates and legal issues – for instance, if they would want to be registered as museums under the Catalan legislation, they would have to meet some standards set by the administration – my analysis suggests that their isomorphic processes are mainly due to uncertainty:

When organizational technologies are poorly understood (March and Olsen, 1976), when goals are ambiguous, or when the environment creates symbolic uncertainty, organizations may model themselves on other organizations […] in their field that they perceive to be more legitimate or successful. The ubiquity of certain kinds of structural arrangements can more likely be credited to the universality of mimetic processes than to any concrete evidence that the adopted models enhance efficiency. (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983: 151)

Uncertainty can be easily expected in the studied amateur museographic projects: they lack formal museographic training, and despite relating to peers of similar profiles, they do not have much relation with professionals or more institutionalized organizations with which to exchange knowledge. From the interviews, one can perceive that they feel quite lonely in their endeavours, despite having the help and emotional support of their family and close friends, as well as occasional collaborations with public and private organizations or other professionals. This is why they also make special emphasis on any recognition coming either from other organizations (Joaquim received the Premi Mil·liari 2014, an award from Tona’s local government, and Rafael’s collection is often required from highly institutionalized museums), or from visitors (they all highlight how good they feel when visitors seem impressed by their work, when they are recommended on somebody else’s website, or when experts and professionals visit them). These recognitions are not only positive emotional rewards; they are reinforcements that help them feel less uncertain and more legitimate. In Rafael’s words,

People started to go, to write, to look for them (the toys), to call me and … I felt like more confident with what I was doing […]. One starts very lonely but feels that is on the right path …(Rafael, interview, Medellin, 2015)

These processes of mimicry facilitate taking conventions for granted and vice versa: when conventions are taken for granted, mimicry is facilitated because there is a lack of criticism about their use and the suitability for one’s own organization or project.

But rifts from what they seem to perceive as legitimate or proper museography also occur when they claim that they do as good as they can with the time and resources that they are able to invest. This uncomfortable position leads them to take a stand for their own decision-making capacity, refusing to adopt the taken-for-granted museographic conventions, tools and methods. What sometimes sounds like an apology for not fulfilling their work as well as they would want to, other times it sounds like a reaffirmation about their choices and their priorities, like Rafael often does:

I do it my way! I won’t do it … I do what I can, like when one goes shopping, you buy what you can, not what you want. That’s everyday life. When I started to find out about this, about the museum, the temperature, the … no, I don’t … There’s people that knows and says ‘for God’s sake, this shouldn’t be here’, then where? Is like my brother Alejo says: ‘don’t give me advice, give me money, if you want me to do this then bring me …’ One does what he can with what he has. I think I have a lot. (Rafael, interview, Medellín, 2015)

Ambivalence also appears in relation to public administration and organizations, as well as to private museums or potential investors, expressing both their need and hope to get their support and the fear of losing control of their projects. Rafael openly expresses a fear of public administrations and other organizations, which can also be seen in different tones and degrees in the conversations with the Catalan museum makers. Also, Agustí and Agustí Jr occupy a double and apparently contradictory position in relation to public administration, highly institutionalized museums and politicians. Joaquim often collaborates with local schools and a local archeological interpretation centre, but he still regrets that there are not many chances to get the public institutions involved. All of them hold a permanent tension and dialogue with public administration and other cultural and museographic agents that put them in a critical position, making them define where they stand and which are their ways of making. Nevertheless, we can also detect here what might be the reproduction of other common-sense forms of knowledge: a very generalized and negative view and distrust of public workers and organizations that makes them hazard the conjecture that donated collections to public museums are mistreated (Agustí and Agustí Jr, Vic, Interveiw, 2015). Despite all their fears and criticism, they seek different kinds of collaborations that would help them run their projects financially without compromising their independence. This kind of collaboration is also a way of gaining legitimacy: Joaquim’s knowledge on historical techniques of bread making is legitimated by the local archeological interpretation centre, with which he co-organizes several activities per year, or by the local schools that visit and invite him, and by the acknowledgment he received from his local government; Agustí and Agustí Jr feel legitimated when international entomology experts visit them, when they are suggested in tourism websites and magazines, or when the mayor of the village finally visits them and admires their website; and Rafael knows that without the first legitimating push that he received from a local private foundation – thanks to the influence of his wife – showing his collection of toys for the first time, his toys would have not been known and his museum perhaps would not exist.

In these examples of practices and processes of the amateur use of museography, the simultaneity of naturalized museographic conventions and procedures, and empowerment or resistance through them, is easily detected. Through them, it is also easier to understand museum makers not simply as producers but also as users of museographic language because they are producing discourses through its consumption.

Conclusion

This article proposes an approach to cultural production as consumption based on De Certeau’s ideas on the production of consumption, which permits us to understand how museum producers, like any other discourse producer, are the main recipients of their own discursive products. Also, De Certeau’s understanding of the tactical uses of language and of the re-use of cultural codes linked to the concepts of appropriation, naturalization and empowerment by other authors like Stuart Hall, Bourdieu and Fairclough explains the complexity behind the simultaneity of the production and consumption of amateur museographic practice. Also, some accounts of museum making as practice, as craft or as art help understanding the museum maker as its first beneficiary. Once we understand museographic discourse producers and the recipients of their own products, we can understand in a different light why processes of naturalization and empowerment intertwine tightly

I also suggested how amateur museum makers’ use of museography interweaves naturalized practices and conventions and their simultaneous tactical – critical or empowering – use. Such interweaving can be useful to understand other everyday struggles with museography and the complexity of the position of discourse makers understood simultaneously as producers and as consumers of their own practice. Through examples from fieldwork with three amateur museums, relying particularly on the interviews with their makers, I have given some hints of the coexistence between naturalization and empowerment in amateur museum making as a re-use of museography. The amateur museum makers’ use of the naming of ‘museum’ – both empowering and submissive to its symbolic power; the tendency of mimicking the conventions and procedures seen in highly institutionalized museums – contrasting their self-made manner to apply them or even the denial to do so; and the relation with public institutions – oscillating between criticism and distrust and hopes for their collaboration and legitimacy, show how naturalized practices and processes can be used for empowering purposes for the benefit of the producer.

Further research could delve into detecting and analyzing the results of such process of empowerment, not only from the manner that museum makers reproduce and resist conventions in their own use of museography, but trying to detect changes in their status within their local communities, the communities of professionals and public related to their field of interest – which, in Stebbins words, would conform to the professional–amateur–public (PAP) system (Stebbins, 1992) – and the community of museographic language ‘speakers’, including professionals, amateurs and visitors.

Nevertheless, the most important hint to the subversion of their proposals against the institution of museography itself is their directionality, the act of its appropriation and re-use by their own means and for their own interests. Despite mimicking other institutions perceived as more legitimate and taking conventions for granted, amateur museum makers are performing microscopic modifications in the historical functioning of the institutionalized practice. They are, often unintentionally, hinting at and timidly revealing its inequalities, struggles and the arbitrariness of museological conventions.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: With the support of a doctoral grant from the UOC.

Notes

Biographical note

Mariona Moncunill-Piñas is a doctoral student at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Her background in Fine Arts and Cultural Management (respectively, with a BA and an MA at the University of Barcelona) and her recent engagement with the Studies in Culture and Society Group (GRECS) define her approach at the interdisciplinary Information and Knowledge Society doctoral program. Since 2006, she has developed her professional activity as a cultural manager in Barcelona and as an artist exhibiting in cities like Barcelona, Madrid, Helsinki or Vilnius and receiving several prices and grants ().

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