10.6092/issn.1973-9494/5447
Heritage sites and museums displaying history and culture are used in many different ways by visitors. Understanding the ways in which people use and engage with sites of heritage allows a greater understanding not only of the ways in which history and the past are understood, but more importantly how the past is actively used in the present by individuals. This use may range from the negotiation of contemporary social and political issues, aspects of personal, ethnic or national identity, and most importantly, the mediation of past and contemporary experiences that under pin ideas of identity.
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1973-9494
5447
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Laurajane Smith
Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage
heritage tourism
Visitor Emotion, Affect and Registers of Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites
Text.Serial.Journal
https://conservation-science.unibo.it/
14
Articles
2014-12-30
2015-09-24
2014-12-30
2016-06-14
125-132
CSCH
Laurajane Smith
2014/12/30
10.6092/issn.1973-9494/5447
125
Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies
School of Archaeology and Anthropology
The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
1973-9494
2
heritage tourism
en
132
Young, Iris 2000. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Visitor Emotion, Affect and Registers of Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites
https://conservation-science.unibo.it/article/download/5447/5160
14
V    ISITOR EMOTION, AFFECT AND REGISTERS OF
     ENGAGEMENT AT MUSEUMS AND HERITAGE SITES

   Laurajane Smith
   Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies
   School of Archaeology and Anthropology
   The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

   Keywords: heritage, emotion, museums, heritage tourism


  Introduction

   Why do people visit museums and heritage sites? This is on the surface a relatively
simple question, and is addressed in academic discussion, policy and practice as such.
Responses have traditionally been framed by two core assumptions: people come to
either learn and/or to recreate as tourists. Both assumptions tend to define visitors as
passive consumers of curatorial or interpretative messages, and tend to foreclose the
possibility that other things may be occurring during individual and collective visits to
such places. Work that I have been doing since 2004 has aimed to question these as-
sumptions and explore what the visit not only means to visitors, but to identify the wider
cultural, political and social work that visiting does.

   My arguments are predicated on the idea that heritage is a cultural process that
individuals and societies engage in to negotiate not only the meaning of the past, but
the ways in which the past is used to legitimize or to remake cultural and political




                                                                                                   CONSERVATION SCIENCE IN CULTURAL HERITAGE
values and narratives. Museum collections, heritage sites or other items and places
normally identified as heritage are, I assert, not in and of themselves heritage, but
rather cultural tools that are utilised in an active performance of heritage creation
in which remembering and memory making occurs. Heritage is a performance inti-
mately tied up with the legitimation of identity, belonging and sense of place, but it is
a negotiated process or performance in which heritage meanings or heritage making
are constantly made and remade for the needs of the present. These negotiations
often occur at or around the practices of management and curation, decisions on
what to collect, list or define as heritage, what to save and what to destroy and so
on. However, these performances also occur individually and collectively through
the visitation of particular places or sites. This definition also rejects the boundary
often drawn between museums and heritage sites, and argues that both are theatres
of memory, as well as sites of historical consciousness and heritage making. I also
argue that the performances that curators and heritage managers engage in are not
necessarily the performances with which visitors engage.

   One of the key issues emerging from the data is that heritage sites and museums
are places where people go to feel, to be emotional. Understanding the emotional
nature of visiting has not only revealed that the learning/recreational paradigms of
understanding visiting is far too limited, but has also shown that museums and herit-
age sites are used in many different ways and for many different purposes by visitors.

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                                                                                                      Understanding the emotional content of the visit reveals the complex ways in which
                                                                                                      visitors react to curatorial messages. This is because it is this ability to feel, particularly
                                                                                                      when dealing with contentious or dissonant issues, that is often central to the develop-
                                                                                                      ment of critical and progressive insights into the past and its meanings for the present.
                                                                                                      Conversely, however, emotionally flat responses may also close down critical engage-
                                                                                                      ment and reinforce understandings of and commitments to consensus views of history.
                                                                                                      Thus, my overall aim is to attempt to untangle these affective responses and to explore
                                                                                                      how they impede or facilitate visitor engagement, and the role they play in the framing
                                                                                                      the moments of heritage and meaning making in which visitors engage.

                                                                                                         The project over the last four years has been concerned with interviewing visi-
                                                                                                      tors to heritage sites and museums in Australia and the US and it builds on several
                                                                                                      similar projects commenced in 2004 and 2007 in England (Smith 2006, 2010). The
                                                                                                      combined database consists of just under 4,500 visitor interviews at 45 different sites
Laurajane Smith - Visitor emotion, affect and registers of engagement at museum and heritage sites




                                                                                                      or exhibitions. Just over 2000 interviews have been collected in Australia and the US
                                                                                                      over the last 4 years.


                                                                                                         Methodology

                                                                                                          The interviews consist of a number of demographic questions to determine, among
                                                                                                      other measures, age, gender, occupation and distance travelled. These are followed by a
                                                                                                      core of 12 open-ended questions, although depending on the site or museum in question,
                                                                                                      further questions are often added. Responses to the open-ended questions were recorded
                                                                                                      with the permission of the interviewee. Interviews were generally administered just before
                                                                                                      people exited the museum or site, with the intention of undertaking one-to-one interviews,
                                                                                                      although group interviews were taken where couples, family groups or visitor groups desire
                                                                                                      to be interviewed collectively. All interviews were transcribed and read through to identify
                                                                                                      themes. Each question was then coded according to the themes that had emerged in the
                                                                                                      read through. These codes were used to derive descriptive statistics using SPSS and
                                                                                                      cross tabulations were undertaken against the demographic variables.


                                                                                                         Findings

                                                                                                         There are a range of themes that emerge from the data and a number of different
                                                                                                      types of heritage performances that visitors engage in. There are two overall key is-
                                                                                                      sues, however, that I want to draw to your attention and then I will look at some of the
                                                                                                      specific performances. The first issue is the idea of registers of engagement. It is a
                                                                                                      prosaic observation that individuals will engage differently with a particular aspect of
                                                                                                      history and that different sites may engender varying levels of engagement. However,
                                                                                                      measuring different levels of engagement reveals the limitations of much of the herit-
                                                                                                      age and museum interpretation literature, which draws on educational studies that
                                                                                                      argue deep engagement is more significant than shallow engagement. Some visitor
                                                                                                      engagement can be quite shallow, banal even, but nonetheless such engagement
                                                                                                      does important cultural and political work, while some deep engagement can generate
                                                                                                      a lot of emotional feeling, but does not necessarily go far in developing critical insight
                                                                                                      for the visitor. For example, here is a visitor deeply engaged with an exhibition about
                                                                                                      Star Spangled Banner at the Smithsonian National History Museum:

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      Interviewer: Does an exhibition like this have meaning for contemporary America?

      Daughter: I think so. I think it creates a link to the reason we became a country.
      [Interviewee becomes so emotion she excuses herself and disappears sobbing]

      Mother: I think it has meaning for the younger generations [...] Just supports my
   strength for our country even more. The patriotism.
      (F30 (daughter), 18-24, student; F31 (mother) 45-54, teacher, Caucasian American)


   This deep emotional engagement can, as much as banal or shallow engagement,
rehearse what Gramsci defines as ‘common sense’ narratives and readings of the past
and present. Deep and shallow visitor engagement can also be either conservative/reac-
tionary or liberal/progressive, however, understanding registers of engagement is impor-
tant for understanding both the emotional, imaginative and intellectual investments that
visitors may make in their visits, the ways emotions and critical insight interact, and the
meanings that are subsequently rehearsed or rejected and reconstructed during visits.

    The second key issue is that of ‘reinforcement’. The terms reinforcement, confirma-
tion or other synonyms are not used in the interview schedule. However, these terms
commonly occur when people talk about the meaning of the visit or the messages they
take away from their visit. For the vast majority of those interviewed, across all genre of
site types and all three countries, noted that the visit is about reinforcing not only what
they already know, but more importantly, what they already feel and believe, for example:

      Each time we come to a place like this it just reinforces what I’ve seen and just
   makes me feel good to be an Australian. […] I don’t think I’ll take anything new um




                                                                                                     CONSERVATION SCIENCE IN CULTURAL HERITAGE
   [away]…at all, but it’s [my knowledge and views have] been reinforced. Reinforce-
   ment is really what I take away.
      (LR9 male,55-64, manager, Australian)

      No not really, my knowledge and experiences were relatively similar to this be-
   fore [I visited] so I think it’s just reinforced my ideas on it already.
      (NMA033: male, 25-34, teacher, Anglo-Saxon-Australian)

      It just reinforces my inner feelings that for people to come to another land, es-
   caping religious persecution there, and then to do what they did here is pretty
   arrogant because they don’t understand another culture. It makes me ashamed.
      (PM72: female, 55-64, real estate agent, Italian-American)

      It reinforces, it makes me appreciate and feel proud of my country.
      (EI81: female, 35-44, nurse, American)

   The idea that such visits should be a learning or educational experience was hardly
ever organically raised by visitors. When it was, it tended to be in relation to children or
groups of people other than that to which the speaker belonged, or as something that
they felt they should be doing, even if they acknowledged that actually they were not.
This is not to say learning was not important for some visitors, but it was not on the


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                                                                                                      whole what people saw themselves doing, rather they were affirming. As this speaker
                                                                                                      shows, what was being affirmed was often a sense of emotional commitment to par-
                                                                                                      ticular narratives and political or social values:

                                                                                                           I don’t’ go to museums for education, I can read material on the internet and in
                                                                                                         books, I come for emotional reasons. Coming for education makes no sense.
                                                                                                           (NCRM61: male, 55-64, retired health care, African American)

                                                                                                         I want to look at some of the types and ranges of performances that visitors en-
                                                                                                      gage in to do this I want to explore one quite complex visitor response to the ques-
                                                                                                      tion: ‘Are there any messages about the heritage or history of America that you take
                                                                                                      away from this museum?’ The speaker is a woman visiting the Civil Rights Museum,
                                                                                                      in Memphis, USA with her 12-year-old son; she is a postal worker, who identified
                                                                                                      herself as Black American:
Laurajane Smith - Visitor emotion, affect and registers of engagement at museum and heritage sites




                                                                                                              It really is, just the history of it is so, to know – you know, […]. And me being a
                                                                                                         union president and things, it puts me on focus. And being a parent, a parent of
                                                                                                         young kids, and a young parent, it just puts me on focus as to my kids. When I first
                                                                                                         brought my youngest son here, he’ll be 13 next month, and we walked through
                                                                                                         what the Klu Klux Klan clothes were, I think he may have been about 4. And when
                                                                                                         we came through my first thought was, ‘What are white people doing in their head
                                                                                                         because they know what they did to us?’ I mean, just honestly. And I’m looking
                                                                                                         around ‘cos I’m astonished at that, and then, when my son walked upon the Klu
                                                                                                         Klux Klan he said, out loud, as kids do, ‘Momma, who pyjamas are those?’ and
                                                                                                         everybody turned and looked at me, and I was like, ‘Those aren’t pyjamas.’ I said,
                                                                                                         ‘I’ll tell you about them’, and you know they’re waiting for my answer, so we keep
                                                                                                         going and I’m like reading this stuff to him, saying, ‘And this is what they did to black
                                                                                                         people and this is what…’ and he bust out again, ‘Who’s black, mama?’ And I said,
                                                                                                         ‘Oh my God’, and I looked at him, and you know I saw this guy watching and I’m like
                                                                                                         [pause] ‘You’re black’. And he was like, ‘No I’m not. I’m not black. I’m yellow.’ And I
                                                                                                         said, ‘Okay’, and I remember what my pastor said: ‘You don’t know you’re poor until
                                                                                                         you’re told you’re poor. You don’t know you’re black until you’re told you’re black.’
                                                                                                         He never knew he was black. So, you know, I’m like, Wow. So, when I bring him
                                                                                                         here he learns more, and we come every year ‘cos I have family down here.

                                                                                                          This speaker touches on a range of issues also raised by other speakers. Firstly,
                                                                                                      she is using the museum to remember and commemorate her own experiences in
                                                                                                      the civil rights movement, and with this remembering comes a reinforcement of her
                                                                                                      political and social values. This was a strong theme in many visitors’ visits to almost
                                                                                                      all genres of heritage site and museum examined in this study, but was particularly
                                                                                                      strong at museums of labour, immigration, Indigenous histories and civil rights. At
                                                                                                      sites or exhibitions that were seen to represent consensus national narratives what
                                                                                                      was remembered was often less personal, but no less strongly held emotional com-
                                                                                                      mitments to master narratives of nation and citizenship. These narratives were fre-
                                                                                                      quently maintained and reinforced even in contexts where the curatorial message
                                                                                                      aimed at destabilising and challenging these narratives.




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   To go back to the speaker: This is her and her younger son’s fourth visit to the mu-
seum, and she is using this and previous visits to pass on familial history and political
values to her son. The ways in which museums were used as arenas for socialisation
and acculturation was another significant finding. Museums and heritage sites were
used as cultural tools in the passing on of familial memory, knowledge and values. In
some instances, the performance of visiting and where you visited was also some-
thing parents taught their children – for instance, visiting presidential houses or stately
homes in all three countries was something people from a particular ethnic and socio-
economic background did and were engaged in passing on to their children. The visit
itself was seen as a statement of belonging to a particular ethnic and class group.
National Museums and heritage sites were also used by recent immigrants to all three
countries to acculturate themselves into their new national identity.

    The speaker here, however, is expressing discomfort at the presence of white
visitors at the museum. In certain genres of museum or site in all three countries there
was often a reiteration that people liked to visit places where they would see people
like themselves. In most cases this was often expressed by politically dominant groups
such as Anglo Australians, white British or Caucasian Americans – being in places with
people like yourself was a statement or performance of identity. However, the reasons
the speaker at the Civil Rights Museum is expressing distress at the presence of
people unlike herself is more complex and tied to the politics of recognition. I draw on
Nancy Fraser (2000) and Iris Young (2000) to define the politics of recognition as part
of pragmatic negotiations over not just social and cultural identity but the distribution
of resources. Heritage, moreover, is implicated in the way claims for recognition are
made and legitimized or delegitimized. There are a range of heritage performances
that occur across all genres of museum or heritage site that are linked to either recog-
nition or misrecognition. Some visitors talk explicitly about their visit to heritage sites




                                                                                                     CONSERVATION SCIENCE IN CULTURAL HERITAGE
that are not their own as a statement or act of recognition. Other visitors assert self-
respect and see their visit to sites of their own heritage as an assertion or claim for rec-
ognition. Sometimes visitors from hegemonic groups engage explicitly in recognition of
themselves as the inheritors of privilege, and in varying ways use their visit to certain
sites to negotiate what that may mean both for themselves and other members of their
society. Others use museum displays as a social barometer to assess the extent to
which wider society is offering recognition or misrecognition of themselves.

     Our speaker here, however, is engaged in a form of self-recognition. To under-
stand her discomfort, we need to appreciate that she is passing on social and familial
memories of not just discrimination, but of the civil rights movement’s continuing
struggles to overcome prejudice to her son, and thus creating self-recognition of his
place in US society. As Judith Butler notes one of the problematic aspects of recogni-
tion is that it can ‘inscribe injury into identity and makes that a presupposition of po-
litical self-representation’ and, as she goes on to warn, injury cannot then ‘be recast
as an oppression to be overcome’ (Butler and Anthanasiou 2013: 87). The mother
speaking here is reacting against this possibility; she is uncomfortable about the
presence of whites in the museum because of the opportunity of misrecognition of
self that their presence presents for her son. She does not want established ideas of
recognition of African Americans to prevail; she does not want injury to be part of his
self-recognition. As she noted earlier in the interview, being at the museum made her


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                                                                                                      ‘feel good to know that there was a history for us to move forward’ from (NCRM53).
                                                                                                      In effect, she is using this museum to offer self-recognition as a point from which to
                                                                                                      continue struggles for equity. However, the more public arena of the museum opens
                                                                                                      up, for her at least, greater risks of misrecognition. One of the enduring ideas about
                                                                                                      museums is that they are safe places to explore complex topics. For some, as this
                                                                                                      speaker illustrates, museums are simply not safe.

                                                                                                         They can also be unsafe places for people who are confronted with a curatorial
                                                                                                      message that they find cognitively dissonant, that challenges their treasured entrance
                                                                                                      narrative. What this research is also illustrating is the way such visitors can use emo-
                                                                                                      tional responses to render an unsafe or challenging museum or heritage site safe
                                                                                                      and unchallenging. The research is revealing a range of strategies that visitors use to
                                                                                                      disengage with the unsafe and thus re-assert both their entrance narrative and their
                                                                                                      sense of self-identity. However, the research is also identifying the strategies that some
Laurajane Smith - Visitor emotion, affect and registers of engagement at museum and heritage sites




                                                                                                      visitors use to embrace the unsafe and work with the challenges museum staff may
                                                                                                      offer to reassess their sense of self and the narratives they held.


                                                                                                        Conclusion

                                                                                                         In this short paper, I can only touch on some of the themes coming out of this
                                                                                                      research. However, by way of conclusion I want to stress that understanding the
                                                                                                      emotional aspect of visitor interactions with heritage is crucial, and I draw your atten-
                                                                                                      tion to one last interview that reveals some of this emotional complexity. During all
                                                                                                      the interviews I have done, I have had many people break down and cry or become
                                                                                                      speechless with emotions too complex to voice. Through all that, there was one in-
                                                                                                      terview that reduced me to the same state.

                                                                                                          It was July 5 2012, the day following American Independence Day, and it was a
                                                                                                      blistering hot day in New York City and I was standing on the forecourt of Ellis Island
                                                                                                      watching visitors come and go to the museum. I watched as an elderly woman, and
                                                                                                      what I assumed was her daughter, enter the museum to exit it a short time later. The
                                                                                                      elderly woman sat on one of the benches overlooking the Hudson River, while her
                                                                                                      daughter returned to the museum. I approached the older woman and she agreed to
                                                                                                      be interviewed. She told me she was 97 and that she had lived in NYC all her life, but
                                                                                                      this was her very first visit to Ellis Island. She was not much interested in the museum
                                                                                                      displays she explained; rather she had chosen to sit looking out at the water because
                                                                                                      she was ‘waiting for her father’. She went on to quickly state that I was not to think she
                                                                                                      was crazy or anything, but that her father had passed through Ellis Island in 1901, she
                                                                                                      had loved and respected her father very much and Ellis Island had been a very impor-
                                                                                                      tant site for him. She had never been to the island, but now, despite the heat, thought
                                                                                                      it was time to come to, as she repeated, to ‘wait for her father’.

                                                                                                         Heritage sites and museums displaying history and culture are used in many differ-
                                                                                                      ent ways by visitors. Understanding the ways in which people use and engage with sites
                                                                                                      of heritage allows a greater understanding not only of the ways in which history and the
                                                                                                      past are understood, but more importantly how the past is actively used in the present
                                                                                                      by individuals. This use may range from the negotiation of contemporary social and


                                                                                                130
political issues, aspects of personal, ethnic or national identity, and most importantly,
the mediation of past and contemporary experiences that under pin ideas of identity.


      References

[1]     Butler, Judith and Athena Anthanasiou, 2013. Dispossession: The Performative
        in the Political.Cambridge: Polity.
[2]     Fraser, Nancy 2000. Rethinking Recognition, New Left Review, 3, May/June:
        107-120.
[3]     Smith, Laurajane. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge, 2006.
[4]     Smith, Laurajane 2010. ‘Man’s inhumanity to man’ and other platitudes of avoid-
        ance and misrecognition: an analysis of visitor responses to exhibitions marking
        the 1807 bicentenary, Museum and Society, 8(3): 193-214.
[5]     Young, Iris 2000. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.




                                                                                                  CONSERVATION SCIENCE IN CULTURAL HERITAGE




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