A Glance at Natural History & Museology

A few museums in the Netherlands left a deep impression on me. Back in China, the packed crowds at the Sanxingdui Museum and the ceramics museum in Jingdezhen were also a huge shock.

The Depot in Rotterdam, the Netherlands

In recent years more and more people seem to be visiting museums and galleries — I'm one of them — and I've gradually come to feel how different conceptions, different systems and different ways of running a museum lead to "a different final presentation."

A good museum and good curation are never simply a matter of sorting things out and introducing them, let alone piling up categories. They are an immersive experience with a sense of flow, letting you see history, see the threads that connect things, see the past — and see the present too.

Same as above

So I got curious about putting different museums side by side, poking my head a little way into this field and taking a hurried glance:

How did natural history begin? What is the relationship between natural history and science? And what is museology?

Let me start with the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave in Leiden, which gave me a very different kind of visiting and learning experience.

Leiden, the Netherlands | Rijksmuseum Boerhaave

The museum isn't large. Its entrance is on a very narrow street and so inconspicuous that you could easily walk right past it. On the outside wall, Einstein's field equations are written on a big blackboard.

But inside is a superb collection and presentation of the history of science, which truly let me see how natural history and experimental science drove the scientisation and professionalisation of modern science.

Our visit began with a "historical relic": an old anatomical table, moved here from a church.

This is exactly how students once stood here learning "human anatomy" — yes, real human dissection.

The skeletons around it are all genuine bone specimens used for teaching at the time.

At first there's a simple human model in the middle, an old building, an ordinary ceiling and walls.

Then projectors shine onto it, and the process of an anatomy lesson of the past slowly unfolds.

From the whole human body to the skeleton, to the blood...

Next, the walls and ceiling are also used as screens, conjuring up the shock that scientific progress brought to the human mind in different historical periods — now the unveiling of the body's secrets, now the evolution of the microscope, now the exploration of the starry sky.

Standing there, I thought of the solemn Hippocratic Oath, of generation after generation of astronomers on their lonely quests, and of how valuable the mistakes in the history of science have been.

You don't need grand architecture or lavish, wasteful materials. What you need is a deep grounding in the philosophy of science and the ability to communicate it to the public.

Natural history and science

Natural history is an ancient branch of learning about how humans deal with nature: macro-level observation, description and classification of animals, plants, minerals, ecosystems and so on. In fact, natural history encompassed much of what today we call astronomy, geology, geography, biology, meteorology, anthropology, ecology, nature writing, ethology, conservation biology and other disciplines.

The Chinese term 博物学 corresponds to the English "natural history." In ancient times, "history" meant roughly research or inquiry, so the phrase literally means inquiry into nature. This indeed matches what Professor Cohan called "natural knowledge" before the Scientific Revolution in the history of science.

In the world of natural history, Aristotle of ancient Greece is impossible to avoid. He described more than 500 kinds of plants and is hailed as the first naturalist of antiquity.

Aristotle again — he wasn't only a philosopher; or rather, philosophers in those days also took in exploring and thinking about the world.

The natural history tradition of the ancient European world went on to drive the development of science in the modern era...

The rise of modern natural history

The road of science really was carved out by many forces pushing together.

What drove natural history wasn't only pure curiosity, but also social fashion, and even vanity. Imagine: in seventeenth-century Paris, the capital of culture, an elegant lady at a salon takes out a letter and, as she opens it, "casually" shakes out some grains of sand tucked between the pages — it's a letter from a naturalist/explorer she sponsors, sent back from the other side of the world.

That was the fashion of the day, a flex on a par with "bringing out an award-winning red from your own Bordeaux château," or "a 30-year-old Macallan, independently bottled with a label you designed yourself."

The Age of Discovery and the formation of Europe's overseas expansion networks created favourable conditions for the rapid development of natural history from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards.

Besides seizing colonies and conducting trade, European countries' overseas expeditions were accompanied by a great deal of scientific exploration, including collecting, observing and analysing all kinds of animals, plants, geology and rock formations, in an attempt to build new classification systems for natural history that could take in the whole of the natural world and construct universal scientific knowledge.

Understanding nature also had religious significance. Religious figures were always an important force behind natural history; they pursued it as a delight, firmly believing that through it they could discover and glorify God.

Later, the development of scientific instruments pushed science a big step further.

The famous neuroscientist Sdyney Brenner has a well-known saying that I wholeheartedly agree with: progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.

Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order

Museology

Once there was natural history, it took a little added love — the wish to pass things down and to share knowledge with the public — for the museums that followed to come about. As I said at the start, simply piling things up does not make a museum. Hence museology.

Is museology an independent discipline? This question has been widely debated for a long time. As long as the definition of "museum" hasn't been fully settled, the museum as the object of a discipline can't be pinned down either.

Our understanding and building of museums is a process of continual change.

Early understanding of museums: collection-oriented institutions

The National Museum of Antiquities (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden) in Leiden is one of the oldest museums in the Netherlands.

Looking back, it held a number of early archaeological collections. In 1818, as a national institution, the National Museum of Antiquities hoped both to guide the public and a new generation of artists, and to let the Netherlands hold its own against other modern nations intellectually and in national pride.

The National Museum of Antiquities, on the Rapenburg in Leiden (the Netherlands), founded in 1818

In the same period, the young Kingdom of the Netherlands built a system of national museums on the basis of collecting and research. Besides the Museum of Antiquities, there was a natural history museum, a national history museum and an art history museum. A little later, the National Museum of Ethnology joined as an independent institution. The National Museum of Antiquities' holdings fall into five parts: the Egyptian collection (one of the ten largest in the world), the ancient Near East, Greek and Roman antiquities, and the large Dutch archaeological collection, divided into prehistoric, Roman and medieval periods.

Egyptian galleries: the Egyptian galleries of the National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden (the Netherlands)

Dutch archaeology galleries: the Low Countries archaeology galleries in the National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden (the Netherlands)

For its foreign collections, the National Museum of Antiquities served merely as a collecting institution, while for its Dutch collections it could fully be called a local museum. Once the whole country became a "site" telling the complete story of the nation's archaeology, the museum hoped to become that site's "visitor centre."

In the 1990s, the people running and founding museums began to ask these questions:

• Is the museum an archaeological institution, or a museum that happens to have archaeological collections?

• Is the museum only about objects, or is it a distinctive medium? Content or container?

• Academically, does the museum belong to archaeology or to some other field?

• Should it work with cultural heritage management authorities?

• Whom should it invite to the opening?

• What professional backgrounds should its staff have?

At the Dutch national museum of the time, the museum learning model favoured by most curators/researchers and educators tended to treat visitors as little archaeologists, a tendency especially popular among curators of European prehistory.

This may not count as a theoretical issue, but in all kinds of practice it made a lot of things different.

The spread of new museology: function-oriented museum structures. Beneath the seemingly superficial tension over whether a museum's subject is its identity or its means, another issue lies hidden. Broadly speaking, in the 1970s and afterwards, most Western museums disappeared because of the second museum revolution.

After the student movements of the 1960s, in response to major social shifts, museums began to re-examine their values and to engage with society and visitors in different ways. The long-standing way of organising museums hierarchically by specialist field also began to shift towards community-oriented service. France was a pioneer of this movement, and although with marked local or regional characteristics, new museology (nouvelle muséologie) began to spread rapidly around the world. By this period, the overall principle for structuring museums was based on function, rather than on collections and the disciplines supporting them.

The "second museum revolution" of the 1970s (after van Mensch, 2004)

Communication activities by museum staff, formerly under the direct control of the director, were now placed alongside the curatorial function. These activities were also called public service and presentations, including education, exhibition planning and visitor services (guides, docents). In this organisational structure, the noun "curator" also came to be used as a verb (collecting, communicating). Today, the curator's main job appears to be research; many of their earlier roles were those of specialised collection keepers, archivists and registrars. Although curators still play an important part in making exhibitions, they are no longer in the lead. Most importantly, the museum's exhibitions and activities for visitors no longer directly reflect the museum's behind-the-scenes work. Interdisciplinary story themes and narratives determine which objects are displayed. The collection departments (such as paintings, works on paper, textiles, applied arts) do not have their own galleries. Museology: the study of the processes of musealisation and heritagisation

At this point, the museum's core functions had been successfully interlinked, while also achieving a sustainable balance.

At the Reinwardt Academy in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, museology is the official name of a postgraduate programme, and it is the study of the processes of musealisation and heritagisation. Museums and other organisational entities are its objects of study. From this perspective, the museum is a meaningful and important form of social expression, a field in which cultural heritage is produced. It requires combining different kinds of knowledge and disciplines, including history, ethics, ethnology, social anthropology, sociology, conservation, collection management, meaning-making and communication, and cultural leadership. If these are arranged and summarised within a logical framework, museum functions can be rewritten as heritage competences.

Redefining museum functions as cultural heritage competences

Today, museums are increasingly seen as collaborators in meaning-making. Museums are influential in social engagement; in the UK, museums have even changed lives.

To remain effective, the cultural heritage workflow should be set up as a circle, not a line. The purpose of communication by museums and heritage institutions is to get feedback, so that meaning can be constructed together. If a museum is genuinely interested in visitors' responses, its impact on visitors, users and co-owners will show in later stages. This requires the museum to participate in, respond to, adopt and adapt to the whole process; even in collecting, choosing to add or to remove can become a response within the process of co-constructing meaning.

More and more people believe that this is what museums today should be doing.

Most of the museology content in this article is adapted from "Content or Container? Museology as a Discipline," originally published in Museum magazine, 2017, Issue 3.

Author: Riemer R. Knoop, Reinwardt Academy, Amsterdam University of the Arts.

Translator: Xu Jie, School of Humanities, Zhejiang University

Time is too limited, otherwise I should also talk properly about the Depot in Rotterdam, an art storehouse that's a wonderful, very special place well worth visiting again and again.

Let me just put up some photos for now.

All in all,

Museology has gradually shifted from institutions that held the fruits of natural history and archaeological collecting into an interdisciplinary field that helps people understand the underlying processes of heritagisation.

It keeps starting from practice, and it has always maintained a critical, reflective stance towards society and its own discipline. Its transformation is precisely the transformation of how people relate to history, to cultural relics, and to their own "self-narrative."