Years ago, when my son was about eight, we noticed that he had some
difficulty adjusting to the very different expectations about
dinner-table manners in the two different households of his
grandparents.  Knowledgeable and inspired by my readings of NOrbert
Elias's The civilizing Process, about the history of manners, and of Mary
Douglas's Purity and Danger, I worked out a game whereby Jonathan was
able to chart the rules for who was served first, how requests for second
helpings were made, how certain parts of the body or topics of
conversation were allowed or tabooed in each of these households.  We
added hilarious conditions to the game, and he became more and more adept
at seeing the rules and tools of each of these "cultures."

It's not surprising that visitors entering a historic house museum
arranged to appear (as many do) like a furniture showroom should be
inclined to test the resilience of the sofa padding, or that visitors
intrigued by an exhibit vitrine that looks a lot like the one in The
Sharper Image should be impelled to handle the "merchandise."

Verisimilitude is an invitation to behavior that transgresses established
boundaries.  It becomes more and more incumbent for us to communicate the
distinct cultural rules by which we want visitors to play, and without
being thoughtlessly condescending to make them feel the inventiveness,
the creativity, the artifice involved in such rule-making as an
interesting phenomenon in itself.  Visitors invited to the
behind-the-scenes areas of museums are invariably led to heighten their
sensitivity to the museum as a rule-dominated place.  For cultural
museums, as some of the postings in this thread suggest, one of the most
important pieces of content to be communicated is the cognitive
anthropology of ordinary life.

So, take a deep breath and learn how to make a wonderful lesson out of
the constraints you confront.

Richard Rabinowitz
American History Workshop
588 Seventh Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215-3707
Phone:  718/499-6500; fax:  718/499-6575
email:  [log in to unmask]