Essay #3

In Pierce’s article on “The Intellectual Rationale” for museums, she seems to be advocating “a contextual approach to understanding” cultures as independent, complex systems. This is in contrast to a non-contextual, classification-based system of analysis. Though Pierce makes some good points in her support of contextualization, I feel that a broad system of classification has its merits as well.

Supporters of the contextual approach argue that objects should be understood “in terms of relationships which drew different threads together rather than which selected out like with like…to see the world in terms of separate articulating communities rather than of overarching systems” (110). An example of this from my own experiences would be when I saw the skeleton of the Australopithecus known as “Lucy” at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. Though the skeleton was the centerpiece of the exhibit, it was surrounded by contextual information and objects, including tools and examples of the African environment in which Lucy lived.

This is an entirely valid way to look at an object like Lucy, however it is not the only way. In elementary school, children are taught to create Venn diagrams in order to record both differences as well as the similarities between objects or ideas. I see the contextual approach as a good way to understand the traits that make a culture unique , but it completely denies one the opportunity to observe similarities that cross the cultural or temporal boundaries that the contextual method sets. For example, at the Lucy exhibit, in addition to the contextual artifacts, the museum also included examples of skeletons of other early hominids as they evolved over the years. This is an example of the grouping of similarly-classified objects (in this case skulls), and is an equally valid, if different, way to look at museum objects.

I believe that the contextual approach as well as the classification approach are both relatively common in museums today. The contextual approach it provides museumgoers with a breadth of information on a broader topic, while classification provides a breadth of information of a single specific topic. Both are valid, and it merely depends upon the topic and the story to be told which one (or a combination of both) is most appropriate to any given museum.