The art and nature of health: a study of therapeutic practice in museums

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews at a major metropolitan art museum and botanic garden, this article considers the practical accomplishment of American museums’ ‘health turn’ by tracing how museum staff develop therapeutic programmes for visitors with disabilities. In doing so, it considers one of medical sociology's fundamental theoretical questions – how ideologies of health order social life – in an unconventional empirical setting. Acknowledging contemporary arguments for both the relative merits and unintended consequences of this policy trend, I focus instead on the particular institutional arrangements, professional norms, and material cultures of art and nature that shape museums’ therapeutic work, so as to reveal its effects. Data reveals ideological similarities, but practical differences, between museological and medical understandings of wellness. Extending a ‘medical sociology of practice’ to new contexts ultimately foregrounds the contingencies, and diversity, of therapeutic mechanisms and meanings, thereby broadening sociological research on healing and healthism.