(32)--V1_22_Theorizing Museum and Heri博物馆经营博物馆经营.pdfVIP

22 Theorizing MuseuM and heriTage VisiTing Laurajane Smith The idea that visitors attend museums and heritage sites for the purposes of education or learning has dominated debate in both museology and heritage management. This chapter questions both the degree to which people go to museums seeking education or learning opportunities, and the degree to which museums may be perceived as educational institutions. This is not to say that learning and education are not important, but rather that they may not be as important or as all‐encompassing an explanation of the visitor expe- rience as much of the heritage and museums literature tends to assume. Rather than a learning experience, the museum visit may be understood ana- lytically as a cultural performance in which people either consciously or unconsciously seek to have their views, sense of self, and social or cultural belonging reinforced. Heritage as a performance The conceptual framework that informs this study is based on the idea that museum visiting is itself a form of cultural production (Kirshenblatt‐Gimblett 1998) and communicative action (Dicks 2000). Indeed, museum visiting is part of the process of “heritage‐making.” As I have argued elsewhere, the idea of “heritage” cannot be reduced to a concern with materiality; rather, herit- age is more usefully understood as a discourse that frames a set of cultural practices that are concerned with utilizing the past for creating cultural mean- ing for the present (Smith 2006). Further, as Poria, Butler, and Airey (2003) observe, many people go to heritage sites, among which I include museums, to “feel.” Heritage, or heritage‐making, is an embodied set of practices or The International Handbooks of Museum Studies: Museum Theory, First Edition. Edited by Andrea Wit