Rethinking the living museum concept “from below”

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the living museum from the points of view of museum workers, those responsible for breathing life into what is essentially an ethnological heritage site. Drawing specifically on the Sarawak Cultural Village in East Malaysia, it first considers the living museum as the formal product of intentional framing, shaping, and choreographing to achieve tourism and nation-building mandates. At the same time, however, performers may construct the living museum differently “from below”, with implications for what they do on site, some unaligned with how the site is fashioned “from above”. In doing so, the paper reveals the representational “work” and cultural politics of the living museum where both official and unofficial practices interweave, each activating the “living” component of the museum in their own ways. It also restores agency to tourism employees rather than treating them as passive actors realizing the goals of management, or as mere objects of the tourists’ gaze.

KEYWORDS:

• Living museum
• ethnicity
• identity
• Sarawak cultural village
• Malaysia
• heritage-from-below

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Dr Hamzah Muzaini is a cultural geographer at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, NUS. His primary work explores the politics of remembering and forgetting particularly as this intersects with issues of heritage, landscape and postcoloniality. He is co-author of Contested Memoryscapes: the Politics of Second World War Commemoration in Singapore (2016, Routledge, with Brenda Yeoh) and coeditor of After Heritage: Critical Issues of Heritage from Below (2018, Edward Elgar, with Claudio Minca).

Notes

1 This paper will not focus on the perspectives of tourists at the site, although their views may be incorporated in order to support the arguments made in this paper.

2 At any one time, the Sarawak Cultural Village employs between 120–140 staff serving as storytellers, musicians, dancers, artists, and cultural vendors. A breakdown is not possible given that the duties of the staff are constantly evolving and changing.

3 For instance, the Melanau Tall house in the village is one of only two left in the state, and many of the activities showcased in situ are no longer practiced in Sarawak today.

4 Penans are one of the Orang Ulu groups, but are singled out because of their nomadic nature.

5 There is no standardized time period for the choice of the houses; each is presented as being “typical” of the respective communities. The question of what is “traditional”, however, is fraught. For instance, members of the Iban community once lamented that the design of the Iban house was “too traditional” prompting its refurbishment to reflect better not only what the house looked like in the past but also what it is likely to look like today.

6 Some of the families left due to personal circumstances while others, especially the younger generations, felt the need to reside in the city for better amenities and opportunities. Since these departures, most of the houses have remained mere places of work for the performers.

7 Sape' is a traditional lute associated with the Orang Ulu population of Sarawak.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National University of Singapore [grant number R117000049133].