The Serdang Folk Museum and the performance of heritage: community museums as an alternative to National Heritage"

Community Museums as Counter to National Heritage: The Serdang Folk Museum, Identity and the Performance of Heritage

The community museum is a new type of institution that we have seen emerge in the past few decades, gaining momentum in the 1990s as a strategy for community empowerment, and by 2010 a community-based approach had been recognized by agencies such as United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), as vital for sustainable development and for the realization and enactment of cultural diversity. In tandem with these global developments, we see in Malaysia the emergence since the 2000s of community-based cultural initiatives with heritage at their core. This essay approaches the concept of ‘heritage’ as going beyond notions of property and inheritance in a material sense; neither is it understood within the parameters of UNESCO categories of tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Drawing on Critical Heritage Studies, heritage is viewed as an embodied cultural performative practice that individuals, communities and societies engage in to negotiate the meaning of the past, and the way that past is used to legitimize cultural and political values and narratives in, and for, the needs of the present (Smith 2017). Heritage is also viewed as a processand as being embedded within local specificity and significance.

This essay focuses on the Serdang Folk Museum in the New Village of Serdang, Selangor, as a study of a community museum and an example of the performance of heritage by a community with a specific history and location, asserting a narrative of history parallel to and distinct from the official historical narrative presented by museums of the state, upholders and propagators of National Heritage. The exhibitions of the Serdang Folk Museum and its particular history will be discussed against a backdrop of National Heritage via the institutions of the National Museum, Muzium Negara, and the state museum of Selangor, the Sultan Alam Shah Museum. It is also discussed within a framework of global community museum discourse and critiques of National Heritage.