Evie Ansel

Ethics, Conservation, and the Changing Museum

For the final paper, I would like to trace the evolution of the museum in terms of shifting ethics and conservation ideologies. I will accomplish this by following the specific case of the last extant wooden whaling ship from the American fleet. I will investigate the various ways in which this ship has been approached by teams of museum directors and personnel since her conservation became a priority shortly after WWII. I will discuss how the steps taken to preserve the ship and present her to the public are representative of the ideological beliefs among curators at that particular time. I will also examine how the different periods characterized by these distinct ideologies affect how the exhibit is presented to the visitor of the museum.

Preliminary Bibliography:

Aagaard-Mogensen, Lars (ed.): 1988. The Idea of the Museum: Philosophical, Artistic and Political Questions. The Edwin Mellen Press: Lewiston, NY.

Anderson, Gail (ed.): 2004. Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.: Lanham, MD.

Hein, Hilde S.: 2000. The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective. Smithsonian Institution Press: Washington, DC.

Knell, Simon J. (ed.): 2007. Museums in the Material World. Routledge: New York, NY.

Malaro, Marie C.; 1994. Museum Governance: Mission, Ethics, Policy. Smithsonian Institution Press: Washington, D.C.

Witcomb, Andrea: 2003. Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. Routledge: New York, NY.

Posted at Apr 16/2008 01:54PM:
omur: Hi Evie,
As we spoke a while ago, I think this is a very promising project. I seriously think that Michael Shanks and Chris Tilley's chapter "Presenting the Past" chapter in Re-constructing Archaeology would help. I also suggest to take a look at Grasping the world: the idea of the museum volume. The Viking Ship Museum near Copenhagen I was mentioning to you is the one at Roskilde. There was a recent attempt in Istanbul to recreate an Ottoman vessel for tourist rides in the Golden Horn, which is not very golden any more.