Nostalgia and Post-Nostalgia in Heritage Sites

Abstract

Nostalgia can take many forms in the museum landscape: war museums can deliberately invoke nostalgia for a country’s ‘glorious’ past, its heroic resistance or its stiff upper lip attitude in times of adversity; folk museums evoke a time that allegedly allowed for a simpler yet more fulfilled life, embedded in a community and in touch with nature; industrial heritage sites invite visitors to revel in the ruins of urban modernity that nevertheless speak of the skills of artisans and workers and inspire pride in the engineers and entrepreneurs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But as well as presenting a past which instils nostalgic longing, museums can become objects of nostalgia in their own right: The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, for example, is perceived by many visitors to be a portal to the past. As a seemingly unchanged Victorian institution, its anthropological exhibition conveys the impression of being stuck in a time warp, a perception that is positively encouraged while nevertheless being deceptive.