(17)--V1_07_The Democratic 博物馆学概论.pdfVIP

7 The DemocraTic horizons of The museum citizenship and culture Peter Dahlgren and Joke Hermes Museums aren’t what they used to be, and neither are their publics. Within the ongoing discussions about the changing circumstances and functions of museums, our chapter strives to link museums with democratic theory, more specifically with citizenship and its practices. We see the raison d’être of museums as situated in a force field between, on the one hand, knowledge and culture – including “popular” culture – and, on the other hand, the ambitions, rights, and duties tradi- tionally associated with the role of the citizen. In contemporary theory, these two domains have moved closer to each other and increasingly overlap, providing an important conceptual setting for museums. Our analytical horizon consists of two basic and largely complementary per- spectives that we have been developing respectively: civic cultures and cultural citizenship. The framework of civic cultures (Dahlgren 2009) takes as its starting point the sociological question of what kinds of cultural factors can facilitate – as well as hinder – civic participation. In other words, it seeks to illuminate, both conceptually and empirically, the cultural prerequisites for people to act as citizens in the life of democracy, both in politics and in civil society more broadly. Civic cultures can provide citizens with knowledge and experience, with activities and social interaction, and with opportunities for self‐creation and meaning‐making, all of which serve to enhance the attributes needed for civic agency. The processes of becoming citizens, of socially and culturally developing civic identities, adds an important analytic dimension to the more formal systemic approaches to democ- racy. The notion of culture here