Fortidens magt, fortidens muligheter

Progressive past? An anthropological approach to a local history museum in Shetland.Based on the example of the Tangwick Haa Museum in Shetland, I argue in this article for the importance of studying museums and their exhibitions as dynamic phenomena that form part of wider contexts and processes. The analysis questions widespread assumptions concerning the construction of history and identity in museums. Rather than «enlisting the past to combat the present», it is argued that the museum represents an appropriation of a modern way of relating to the past that answers to the felt modern need to «have a history», while exempting people from actually living as in the past. Reference is made to Sharon Macdonald's work on the Gaelic renaissance, which she interprets as re-imagenings of the past. That is, she sees it not as a return to the past but rat- her as ongoing negotiations between past and present that, while being constrained, also allow for creativity.Macdonald points particularly to the importance of ambivalence in these processes. A main concern in the article is with ambivalence relating to power in particular, and I adopt the concept of «contact zone», applied by James Clifford to museums, in order to stress ambivalence and inequality in the power relations surrounding the museum. This applies to the ambivalent roles of the museum as such, being at the same time a meeting place for answers to modern needs, and for certain conservative impulses, some of them inherent in the institution. As a result a museum that started out as a progressive initiative, may alter its role with time. Also the concept of contact zone applies to the tensions of the variety of possible and actual interpretations of the exhibitions and the felt discomfort sometimes associated with the «touristic gazes» on local culture and history.