Identity as Self-Discovery: The Ecomuseum in France
Author(s)
Poulot, Dominique
Abstract
The 1970s witnessed the advent of a radically new phenomenon in the French museological landscape: the ecomuseum. This new approach was directed, a priori, against the image of the classical museum; it envisioned nothing less than a radical departure from tradition. The debate over the ecomuseum that began in the 1970s thus situated itself within the long and rich history of the idea of the museum in France; at stake were nothing less than the changing assumption and practices of the field of museology. The ecomuseum ultimately assumes that things and their uses have meaning – a reassuring proposition often applied optimistically to society’s wounds. The ecomuseum participates in the metaphysics of the mirror image, in a Socratic process of drawing out the cultural wisdom that everyone possesses but too rarely is aware of.
