Exhibiting the countryside: A post-colonial study of museums in North Yorkshire

This dissertation aims to understand the images and stories of the countryside exhibited in two local museums in North Yorkshire – the Ryedale Folk Museum, Hutton le Hole and the Beck Isle Museum of Rural Life, Pickering. The study was conducted through qualitative methods mainly based on multi-sited museography, documentary and visual archives, and interviews. Using a postcolonial framework, this research’s findings relate to three main arguments.
First, museums and modernity: the research explores both museums as theatres of memory rather than as a consequence of the heritage industry. The emergence of these museums involves practices that responded to industrialisation and modernity, which led to massive and rapid changes in the Ryedale countryside and nearby rural ways of life.
Second, museums and the marginal: “the countryside” exhibited in both museums can be seen as the margins negotiating with English nationalism and its dominant narratives of homogeneity, unity and irresistible progress. Three key aspects involved with this process are space, time, and people.
The first part of the research findings considers how both museums negotiated with English nationalism and the use of the countryside as a national narrative through images of the countryside “idyll” and the north-south divide. The second part illustrates how local folk museums exhibited “folklife” as the “chronotopes of everyday life” in contrast with the “typologies of folk objects”. The third part focuses on forgotten histories and domestic remembering of space, time and people based on the “local and marginal” rather than the “universal and national”.
The final argument is about limitations in museum studies related to the definition of museums and the distinction between western and non-western museums. This limitation may relate to the influences of Eurocentrism and colonialism which remain entangled with elitism and nationalism, and also to a lack of concern with cultural hybridity, differences, and complexity.