The Sources on the History of Museum Work as a Socio-Cultural Phenomenon

Abstract

The article presents the results of a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of museum studies in Ukraine based on the data from humanities and natural sciences: archeology, ethnology, philology, cultural studies, art history, museology, monumentology, anthropology, geology, paleontology. The methodological framework covers a historical approach (to address issues of museology), a comparative-historical method, a historical-chronological method, general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, deduction, induction, methods of museology as a scientific discipline, the principle of objectivity. For a comparative analysis, modern data on museum studies of European, Near and Middle East countries were used; the chronological boundaries were determined by Prehistoric and the Greco-Roman time. The author elaborated on the hypothesis of Yu. A. Omelchenko that pre-museum forms of storage and use of historical and cultural values were known in Primitive Society, which was manifested by constructing sanctuaries and later temples, common in a class society. The views of philosophers, culturologists, archaeologists, ethnographers on the origin of material culture are analyzed. It is shown that the Bible is an invaluable written source that gives an idea of the forms of preservation of values by ancient peoples of the East. Results of the study led to the conclusion that the value-oriented (“museological”) attitude of a human was forming in the following way: “item → item as a pra-value → item as a value (subject to museum significance) → ‘museum object’ → collection → storehouse → museum”. The subject of museum significance has mnemonistical function, i.e. reminding a human about something that is in his/her memory; sacred institutions in the society like cult buildings or temples do not feature museum functions. Ancient humans did not have a well-established understanding of the need to create a secular educational institution, such as a museum. The social culture did not foster an attitude of the “museum-based” perception of items and the awareness of the need to preserve and popularize memorials by creating expositions for a broad range of visitors unless the passage of time, which in European countries fell upon Renaissance and Enlightenment eras. The museum, being a multifunctional system, is an epistemic model of culture, a historical form of collective memory, value-based attitude of a human to the world, support of tradition and a means of mass communication, which manifests by an exposition that informs on abstract by use of concrete.