This message has been bounced back to me, so I've renamed it to evade the Tautology Police. I apologize if it's already been screened. 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]