Museums and cultural diversity : a persistent challenge

This chapter takes up these questions by focussing on the challenge of cultural diversity as it pertains to and manifests itself in relation to museums. Cultural diversity has emerged as a challenge – or problem – for the museum sector since the last two decades of the 20th century, at least in developed Western countries, when it became undeniable that the “public” which museums tend to attract is by no means representative of the broader society. This demographic deficit has long been acknowledged with respect to class and level of education, as the influential sociological work of Bourdieu (1984) has pinpointed, but in more recent times it has been problematised particularly in relation to race and ethnicity. As Western societies have become more racially and ethnically diverse, mostly as a consequence of non-European immigration, museums are faced with the challenge of having to communicate with a much more diverse, multicultural audience if they are to be true to their claim to serve the whole “public” in society. In other words, the demographic deficit has also been seen as a democratic deficit: a marker of social and cultural inequality that museums are being called upon to address (Sandell, 2002). For example, at the 19th meeting of its General Assembly in 1998, the International Council of Museums passed a resolution concerning museums and cultural diversity, advocating “the development of museums as sites for the promotion of heritage values of significance to all peoples through cross-cultural dialog” (Silverman & Fairchild Ruggles, 2007, p. 6). In this regard, museums are asked to play a brokering role in reconciling national societies with the diversity in their midst, a social and political issue perceived as urgent in today’s irrevocably interconnected world with the rising threat of intercultural conflict and disharmony.