Encoding and Decoding the People

Abstract

This article notes the `vernacular aesthetic' at work in the new breed of experience-centred heritage museums, which foreground and celebrate the ordinary lives of `the people'. It seeks to understand how constructs of `the people' are produced at such museums. Many existing treatments of heritage museums have analysed them as symptoms of totalizing trends, rather than coming to terms with how they work as sites of cultural communication. By drawing on Stuart Hall's theory of encoding/decoding, the article presents a linked analysis of the encoding and decoding of `the people' at a heritage museum in South Wales. It discusses how this museum was set up, through particular relations of production and frameworks of knowledge, and shows how the heritage texts are the negotiated and hybrid outcome of the conflicts that shaped encoding. It then traces the circuit of communication through to a visitor study, which asked visitors what impressions of `the people then' they had formed during their visit. A particular concern was to explore how visitors positioned their present lives in relation to the past, and how popular mythologies of `community' are deployed in this process.