Museums displaying artifacts of traditional life, often in a park-like, rural, or “village”
setting. The origin of the folk museum has been generally credited to museums
established in Scandinavia in the late 19th century. Artur Hazelius’ idea of the folk
museum led to what is known today as the Nordiska Museet and Skansen (meaning openair museum) in Stockholm. In his earliest museum exhibit work at the 1878 World’s Fair
in Paris, Hazelius is said to have “arranged his exhibits as stage sets with one side open
facing the public, the figures arranged in highly emotional tableaux similar to the way it
is done at a waxworks.” Bernard Olsen, founder of the Danish Folk Museum, found
Hazelius’ method of exhibition unsatisfactory when he saw it at the Worlds Fair in Paris
in 1878. He preferred the approach that the Dutch had employed, a complete room that
one could walk into and where “each single thing came from old houses and stood in its
accustomed position.” Olsen later recalled: “In contrast to the Swedish manner the effect
was stirring, and from the moment I entered the room, it was as if one were in another
world—far away in time and space from the crowded, modern exhibition. It was clear to
me this is how a folk museum should be.”
These early reflections on the proper approach and organization of the folk museum
were shaped also by the national Romanticism of northern Europe. Later, in 1891,
Skansen, the first open-air museum, was founded in Stockholm, where old farmsteads
and community buildings from Sweden and Scandinavia were saved, moved, and then
reerected. Both the Nordiska Museet and Skansen provided the impetus for other nations
and smaller community efforts in the development of folk museums.
These early folk museums fostered the concept of the open-air or outdoor museum and
the spread of ethnological research in Great Britain and then to Canada and the United
States. Folklife museums in the late 20th century explore a variety of approaches to the
investigation and understanding of human social organization and stress the holistic
nature of a traditional culture on all levels of society.
The concept of the open-air museum was utilized as a model for American museums
such as the Farmer s Museum in Cooperstown, New York; Colonial Williamsburg,
Virginia; Old Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts; and the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn,
Michigan. In Europe the influence of the Skansen model led to the growth of additional
open-air museums on into the 20th century. Among the major museums were the Welsh
Folk Museum, St. Fagans, Wales; Osterreichische Freilichtmuseum, Stubing, Austria;
and SchleswigHolsteinisches Freilichtmuseum, Kiel, Germany. The growth of these
open-air museums encouraged the development of smaller complexes across Europe, the
United States, and Canada.
The open-air museum as a folk museum was designed to provide a focal point for the
study, collection, and interpretation of national, regional, and local culture. The emphasis
has been primarily on the assembly of buildings in a new interpretive setting where the
cultural life of a particular place in time is re-created. Over the years, museum stafFs
have enhanced the presentation of the cultural life of the nation, region, or locale by involving traditional artists and performers, tradition bearers, and interpreters, as well as
re-creating the patterns of daily life by utilizing animals, plants, gardens, and features of
the natural world to re-create a more natural context.
The idea of the folk museum has evolved to be a conceptual approach to various
specific cultural traditions. The folkmuseum movement has been spurred by the scholarly
desire to depict the history and lifeways of average families, typical communities, and
everyday life. The result has been the creation of living history farms, museums linked to
occupational traditions—such as those of miners, textile workers, or ironworkers—urban
museums featuring tenement-house life or immigrant communities, and museums that
serve to present local ethnic and cultural traditions.
Folklife as a discipline has contributed substantially to the development of these new
community-based museums. With the goal of re-creating a living museum experience
where the visitor encounters authentic contexts for learning, folklorists have played
critical roles in re-creating everyday life and the historical processes that make a
particular culture. The use of oral-history fieldwork, the involvement of informants as
presenters, and the attention to the complexity of communitybased culture are critical
elements in providing an effective and accurate learning environment.
An extension of the folk museum has been the emergence of the folk festival as a
short-term living museum. The Smithsonian Institution’s annual Festival of American
Folklife in Washington, DC, has established a model in which folk arts, occupational
traditions, and regional culture are presented with exhibit-like sets to evoke the original
context. Professional ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and other cultural specialists are
engaged as researchers and presenters to enhance the educational presentations. This
approach has been adapted by other museums and cultural organizations in the creation
of state and local folklife festivals.
In the later 20th century, folklife exhibits (continuing and temporary) and folklife
collections have been developed by many art museums, history museums, and natural
cultural history museums. Early open-air museums such as Colonial Williamsburg and
Old Sturbridge Village have been followed by, among others, the Museum of
International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Museum of American Folk Art in
New York City; and the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa, Canada—as well as museums
devoted to specific cultural groups—all featuring folk traditions and emphasizing the folk
process as well as the products of folk culture.
Folklife-museum interpretation has made a substantial contribution to museum
interpretive theory as it is practiced today. The contextual approach to folklife stresses the
expressive behaviors of tradition bearers. This approach has influenced the interpredve
educational approach of history museums, leading to more hands-on activities, special
demonstrations, and a wide array of museum-sponsored festivals and creative restagings
of special cultural events and activities.
The growth of folk museums has been truly extraordinary over die past century. The
Association of European Open Air Museums produces a guide to more than 350 open-air
museums in twenty-one European countries. Communitybased folk museums are also
being established at a rapid rate. Legislation such as the federal Native American Grave
Protection and Repatriation Act has led to an explosion of tribal museums in the United
States. Meanwhile, major history, natural history, and art museums are recognizing folk
arts as valued materials to collect and present. This development has enabled museums to achieve more representative collections of their communities and thus attract broader
audiences. The folk museum movement continues to thrive as the basis of independent
freestanding museums as well as a scholarly force diat has shaped museology in Europe,
North America, and now in other parts of the world.
C.Kurt Dewhurst
References
Anderson, Jay. 1984. Time Machines: The World of Living History. Nashville: American
Association for State and Local History.
Bronner, Simon J., ed. 1982. American Material Culture and Folklife: A Prologue and Dialogue.
Logan: Utah State University Press.
——, ed. 1987. Folklife Studies from the GildedAge: Objecty Rite, and Custom in Victorian
America. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.
Hall, Patricia, and Charlie Seemann, eds. 1987. Folklifi and Museums: Selected Readings.
Nashville: American Association for State and Local History.
Higgs, J.W.Y. 1963. Folklife Collection and Classification. London: Museums Association.
Jenkins. J.Geraint. 1972. The Use of Artifacts and Folk Art in the Folk Museum. In Folklore and
Folklife: An Introduction, ed. Richard M.Dorson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Loomis, Ormond. 1977. Sources on Folk Museums and Living History Farms. Bloomington, IN:
Folklore Forum Bibliographic and Special Series.