NAMUS

In recent years, the museums of Vestland have developed shared meeting places and collaborative arenas for research. From 2026 and for slightly more than three years thereafter, we will also be running a joint research project aimed at studying and further developing our museums.

The project is a collaboration between the University of Bergen, NAMUS – The Nature of Museums (UiB), Hardanger and Voss Museum, Musea i Sogn og Fjordane, and Museum Vest. The project has been made possible through approximately NOK 6 million in funding from the Research Council of Norway, together with in-kind contributions from the participating museums. The funding will support the employment of a PhD candidate, research activities at the museums, as well as seminars and other professional meeting arenas.

NAMUS aims to develop research competence among museum employees, strengthen collaboration between museums and the higher education sector, and bring some of the most pressing issues of our time into scientific discourse and public debate.

What is the project about?

A key starting point of the project is to gain a better understanding of how museums shape our fundamental perception of the world, that is, our ontology. The division of the world into manageable categories has been a prerequisite for modern science. As part of this process, a sharp distinction has emerged between what is determined by nature and what is created by humans. This distinction has influenced a wide range of academic disciplines, knowledge practices, and institutions, including museums. Within the museum sector, a distinction is commonly made between natural history museums and art and cultural history museums, which in turn affects how collections are managed, interpreted, and researched.

Does taking this distinction for granted cause us to overlook the connections and entanglements between nature and culture? Critics of modern Western science and museum practices argue that it does. They identify this divide as one of the reasons why modern societies struggle to fully comprehend the consequences of biodiversity loss and human-induced climate change. From this perspective, the role of museums has also been subject to justified criticism.

At the same time, museums are highly diverse institutions, and the degree to which nature and culture are separated or intertwined may appear quite different when attention is directed towards small and medium-sized museums, such as those found in Vestland. These institutions encompass a wide range of museum types, each with its own origins and purposes. Using the museums of Vestland County as its point of departure, NAMUS will investigate the alternative ways of thinking and practices that exist within this museum landscape. These include industrial heritage, coastal culture, boatbuilding traditions, and built environments from both before and during the industrial era, among other areas.

On the Nature of Museums: The Museal Between Cultural and Natural Heritage

Sharon Macdonald argues that museum classification systems, which, among other things, distinguish between natural history objects and art and cultural heritage objects, contribute to a hierarchy that helps create destructive relationships between humans and the non-human world. She contends that this classification system is ripe for “revitalising disruption”, whereby museum collections become part of ways of understanding and “making” the world that can foster alternative, and perhaps more hopeful, visions of the future.

Rethinking nature-culture relationships has received growing attention in response to the challenges of the Anthropocene, and Dipesh Chakrabarty advocates a convergence of the natural sciences with the humanities and social sciences. For museums, which are key institutions for “managing time”, such rethinking involves bringing together different temporal understandings that shape how we think about the past, present, and future. Furthermore, it challenges the ontological premises that underpin our understanding of natural and cultural heritage.

Among other things, we will investigate the extent to which the division between nature and culture has contributed to the environmental and ecological crises we face today, the role museums have played in establishing and maintaining such a modernist divide, and the alternative ways of thinking and practices that are present in museums today.

The Research Council of Norway-funded project The Nature of Museums: On the Interweaving of Nature and Culture in Museums (NAMUS) is a collaboration between museums in Vestland County and the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at the University of Bergen. The project examines both the historical development of museums in Vestland and contemporary museum practices within these institutions.

More About NAMUS

Research Questions, Organisation and Work Packages

Research Questions

· How are understandings of time in museums shaped by different disciplinary perspectives, and in what ways are such differences linked to different views of the relationship between nature and culture?

· How are understandings of nature and culture put into practice by museum professionals and researchers of traditional crafts, and how are forms of natural and cultural knowledge interwoven in cultural practices?

· How are different understandings of time expressed in the cultural environments of which museums are a part, and how are perceptions of the past, present and future enacted within the museum institutions connected to them?

· How do museums navigate the tension between raising public awareness of human-induced environmental degradation on the one hand, and presenting the results of human activity as highly valued cultural heritage on the other?

NAMUS aims to strengthen research competence among museum professionals and foster closer collaboration between museums and the higher education sector by bringing some of the most pressing issues of our time into academic forums and public debate.

Project Organisation

The project is a collaboration between the University of Bergen and the museums of Vestland County.

The project leader is Torgeir Rinke Bangstad, University of Bergen (Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion) [Torgeir Rinke Bangstad | UiB].

The museum-based project participants are: Heidi Richardson (HVM) [Tilsette - Hardanger og Voss museum], Årstein Svihus (MV) [Ansatte - Museum Vest] og Thomas Walle (Misf) [Thomas Walle | Musea i Sogn og Fjordane].