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.