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Thread: how do visitors really experience their trips to heritage sites? Laurajane Smith, head @ANU_CHMS, spent a decade interviewing 4,502 visitors to 45 museums and heritage sites in America, Australia and England to investigate that question and write https://www.routledge.com/Emotional-Heritage-Visitor-Engagement-at-Museums-and-Heritage-Sites/Smith/p/book/9781138888654
Smith found that visitors rarely take away what curators and interpreters think they are giving them. Instead, visitors’ reactions mostly depend on who they are and what they think about the history of the site before they even arrive.
Smith’s book provides crucial insights into current debates about public monuments. Her research is especially valuable for understanding why counter-protestors show so much anger and fear about toppling statues to which they had seemingly previously paid little attention.
Instead of quantitative or written surveys, which she believes allow people to present a more polished version of what they think should be experiencing during a heritage visit, Smith and some of her students conducted quantitative interviews with visitors.
They asked them to respond as they wished to open-ended questions including “Is there anything you’ve seen/read/heard today that has changed your views about the past or the present?” and “Whose history are you visiting here?”
Smith noted respondents’ body language, including signs of discomfort or annoyance, so she could correlate this with what respondents said, leading to interesting analysis, e.g., why visitors who spoke about patriotic pride and gratitude so often did so in flat tones.
Smith characterized the heritage sites she studied as either “national” or “dissonant”: those that present a consensus narrative of national history, like a president’s home, or those that challenge this narrative, like a museum about the lives of immigrants.
To simplify a set of debates discussed at length by Smith, national sites in the United States uphold the idea of the “American Dream” by providing examples of histories where someone achieved happiness and social power regardless of the circumstances of their birth.
America’s dissonate sites, on the other hand, provide examples of the ways in which discrimination on the basis of race, class, gender, and so on hinders some people’s ability to live the lives they want.
The demographic variable with the most consistent influence on visitor response was whether a visitor identified as a member of the ethnic group currently holding dominant political power in their nation (“dominant visitors”).
Dominant visitors expect to feel comfortable during their visits, which they undertake to reinforce what they already think and feel about national history.
The main emotions of this reinforcing visit are comfortable self-assurance about the visitor’s own social privilege and indifference to the experiences of fellow, less privileged nationals.
These twinned emotions reinforce the political status quo. The dominant visitor, comfortable in that dominance, draws no inspiration to change either themself or the nation.
They use the idea of the American Dream to give the credit for their privilege to their own hard work rather than their race or class, while attributing the lack of privilege of others to their lack of hard work, rather than seeing any systematic effect of past or present bias.
Smith is especially forceful in her argument that visits to grand historical homes are undertaken to feel comfort and pride in the nation, and thus render “safe” visitors’ uncertainties about the unfairness they see in contemporary life.
In most historic homes, visitors’ wish to celebrate a rosy vision of history is catered to by the fact that the living and working spaces of servants or enslaved people are generally not available for viewing. They have disintegrated over time, been turned into...
...office or storage space, or are simply roped off. By contrast, well-maintained “bucolic aesthetics” of luxurious interiors and sweeping gardens supports the sense of well-being and comfort engendered in dominant visitors.
Less than 3% of visitors told Smith they had learned something substantial from their visit to a heritage site (as opposed to minor information or nothing at all). LESS THAN THREE PERCENT.
This is even more surprising, since many of the visitors Smith surveyed had just toured national sites with new displays aimed at educating visitors about painful, previously ignored parts of their history.
For example, she interviewed visitors to “Paradox of Liberty: Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello,” an exhibition whose curators wanted to make visitors think about how the man who wrote “all men are created equal” could have enslaved more than 600 people during his life.
Smith found visitors didn't learn anything if they didn't want to. Dominant visitors used a variety of strategies to deal with the cognitive dissonance of encountering information that interrupted their ritual of comfortable reinforcement.
Most found ways to discount unwanted information. One visitor told Smith that the “Paradox of Liberty” exhibition demonstrated that Jefferson “‘gave the slaves a chance, and that is what this country is about, giving people a chance and creating equality.’”
Meanwhile, at the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s plantation home, visitors who passed through an introductory display about the enslaved people who also lived there often brought up the “amazing story” of Jackson, whose life proved that someone who “started from nothing”...
...could become wealthy and powerful thanks to his “work ethic,” despite the evidence that the people he owned did not achieve these goals regardless of how hard they worked.
Many others claimed Jackson treated enslaved people ‘well.’ Smith notes that the trope of the well-treated enslaved person was “pervasive” in responses of visitors to house museums, and that the more a site attempted to challenge it, the more frequently visitors brought it up.
In this trope, the enslaved person is understood as benefitting from their enslavement, and thus having nothing to complain about... just as a non-dominant American should be grateful to be an American, even if they have little political power.
Thinking of a slave-owner as benevolent means not challenging one’s own benevolence as a member of a politically dominant middle class.
Few explicitly defended slavery. Most slid into “thought-ending clichés” like "I feel sad" or "we need to learn from history" - “socially accepted non-committal response[s] a visitor gave because they thought they should care… [and] hides the fact that they did not care.”
Visitors who spoke about needing to learn from the past tellingly did not specify anything that they might themselves be learning. These clichés shut down rather than initiate debate.
Only 6% of visitors to American national sites said they had felt confronted during their visits, suggesting most visitors don't even register new info as potentially discomfiting. They deflect it before it could begin to trouble their view of the past or the present.
I think this strong defensive reaction to displays about slavery might help us understand the lengths some counter-protestors have gone to recently to defend public monuments, particularly Confederate ones, against protests that are not as easy to ignore as museum signage.
Smith found that only 7% of surveyed visitors at national sites identified as belonging to non-dominant ethnicities. This was only 4% at planation homes – where the only African American visitor she interviewed had toured it simply to kill time during his wife's job interview.
Smith’s findings suggest that the visitors who might respond best to national sites’ introduction of dissonant information are precisely those who do not visit, assuming the sites will not speak to them.
We see our nation's imagined community at heritage sites. But while they are places for remembering, they are also places for forgetting. If visitors are able to ignore injustice there, in the past, they are strengthened in their determination to ignore it in the present.
Heritage sites present invaluable opportunities for helping people come to new understandings – if only they can help people break their habits of using visits to reinforce the status quo.
Smith asks heritage sites to work on acknowledging and addressing the painful emotions, like guilt and shame, that will be felt by dominant visitors coming to an understanding of their own dominance.
So: if you're someone who wants to change the way people think about the past, whether at a museum, heritage site, monument, school, or etc.: read this research! https://www.routledge.com/Emotional-Heritage-Visitor-Engagement-at-Museums-and-Heritage-Sites/Smith/p/book/9781138888654
Here's my recent attempt to apply Smith's findings and theory to current wishful thinking about recontextualizing monuments through adding signage: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-just-adding-context-controversial-monument-may-not-change-minds-180976583/
