Methodological Quests for the Museum’s Image: Culturology VS Cultural Studies

Since the mid-1960s, Russian culturology and Western cultural studies have evolved in parallel, dynamically, seeking points of intersection while also exploring the conceptual and institutional foundations of their respective formations. This process has stimulated self-identification within both academic traditions concerned with the study of culture and the representation of its phenomena. Among the cultural phenomena that have steadily drawn scholarly interest for centuries is the museum — a subject that currently commands particular attention.

This article provides a comparative analysis of museum representations in Russian culturology and Western cultural studies, utilizing the “cross-shaped contradiction scheme” (also known as the “Celtic cross” method, developed by V.I. Razumov with the support of Yu.M. Gorsky, and N.I. Moiseeva). This method rests on studying opposites that contain pairs of contradictions. The pairs examined were “culturology vs cultural studies”, “culture vs power”, and their pairs of contradictions: “high culture vs mass culture”, “official power vs unofficial power”, “activity-based vs behavior-based culturology”, and “culturalist vs structuralist paradigms of cultural studies”.

Given that culturology and cultural studies are not synonymous but rather have different histories, themes, goals, objectives, and methods, it was hypothetically assumed that the study of the museum phenomenon would also differ. The analysis revealed a contrast between two museum images, propagated by Russian culturology and Western cultural studies. Following D. Cameron, these can be described as the “museum as temple” and “museum as forum”. It has been shown that these two images are beginning to “move” toward one another, because the processes of globalization and cultural integration are leading to the blurring of boundaries and causing mutual influence between scholarly traditions. All this may indicate either an expansion of the museum’s conceptual boundaries, a loss of its identity, or a new norm within the cultural situation of metamodernism.

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