A human being and an object in contemporary concepts of foreign museology: The change of paradigms?

Abstract

In historiography anthropological turn is considered to be the determining factor of museгum work since the 1970th. It is a human being, not an object, that is the focus of institutional attention, and interaction with communities of all kinds becomes one of the most important directions of museum work. At the same time, a number of concepts have emerged in the English-speaking museology in the latest decade, proposing to review subject-object relations in the museum space. The concepts of relational museum, distributed museum and liquid museum are analyzed in the article. As activities of the museum as a form of culture reflects the laws of “large» culture, these approaches can be productive for the analysis of the general cultural paradigms of the beginning of the 21th century.