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social position but also enabling the reproduction of social class – ‘classes make
themselves through the medium, not just of economic struggles, but of cultural
struggles for distinction’ (Fyfe 2004: 47). Bourdieu argued that the education
system and museums did not distribute this cultural capital, but instead repro-
duced its unequal distribution from one generation to the next. The art
museum underwrites the value of knowledge about art and a taste for art,
defining what counts as cultural capital through its collections. Through
museums, as well as schools and universities, cultural capital is institutionalized,
and its value maintained. At the same time, art museums, together with the
academic discipline of art history and practices of connoisseurship, legitimate
and universalize aesthetic value.
Bourdieu found that the art museum of the 1960s claimed to be relevant to all
the public because it was open to all, but that it actually functioned to cement
the relationship between social and economic position and culture. Bennett
makes a similar point about museums in general, though he views them, not so
much as institutions which ratify and reproduce cultural capital as ‘instruments
for the reform of public manners’. According to Bennett the public museum
might seem to address ‘an undifferentiated public made up of free and formal
equals’, but in its function it regulates and prevents ‘the forms of behaviour
associated with popular assemblies’ (1995: 90). The link between visitor
behaviour and aesthetic experience is made in Carol Duncan’s concept of
museum-going as a form of ritual. Through the enactment of ritual forms of
behaviour, transformation is achieved – visitors ‘become something’, to use
MacGregor’s phrase (see Preziosi and Farago 2004: 475–7, for a critique of this
approach to art museums as ritual experiences).
Science and natural history museums also work to produce universal value:
collecting, classifying and organizing objects to produce an historical world
narrative which is intended to transcend the limitations of culture and religion –
to be an objective account of the world. The authority of science is derived from
its attempt to be objective and value-free, and on this basis Western scientific
knowledge claims precedence over other kinds of knowledge. Here too new
interpretations, even as they contest older ones, can be seen as a force for
renewal. Thus the natural history museum is not overly unsettled by disputes
over classification, species boundaries, or changed understandings of evolution,
providing that certain scientific concepts that underpin the museum remain
consistent. Science museums also increasingly resemble art museums in their
attempt to elicit transformative experiences. Hilde Hein (2000) argues that all
museums now work to produce an experience modelled on aesthetic experience
(see Chapter 3).
The dioramas first introduced this notion of scientific education through
aesthetic experience. Typological and evolutionary displays relied on a kind of