Museum-making as serious leisure

Abstract

Amateur museums are independent museums made as leisure projects outside professional frameworks. This paper attempts to distinguish museum making as a leisure activity from professional museums and from collecting and to broadly identify some implications arising from their relations as questions of interest for future research. To do so, I rely on Stebbins theory of serious leisure (1992) and on some literature on institutionalism, collecting and museology, specially Martin’s research on popular collecting and its relation to professional museums (1999).