St. Fagans Museum near Cardiff, Wales, GB – PERTHYN – BELONGING -DAZUGEHÖREN
The MWL is one of the constituent parts of the National Museum and Galleries of Wales,NMGW, its name changes all the time, and forms part of the Museums DevelopmentDivisions. Furthermore it is one of Wales' most visited heritage attraction.The museum contains over thirty buildings re-erected from all parts of Wales, a Castle andgardens, exhibitions, craft demonstrations, and there are sometimes festivals which illustratemainly how the Welsh people have been living over the last 500 years. There is also a Celticvillage. The collections include the most important groups of re-erected buildings in theUnited Kingdom, furniture, household appliances, costumes and textiles and a collection of craft, agricultural and cultural material. In addition there are research departments,administrative and conservation sections in St. Fagans.Already at the world-fairs visitors had the chance to see and experience ethnographic villages.The world and country fairs dedicated with those villages special interest to vernaculararchitecture for the very first time (Pöttler, 1991, pp. 190 - 191). Different cultures werepresented and household items could be bought there (Köstlin, 1986, p. 14).The first desire for erecting houses of farmers and fishermen that can be found in literature,however, is that of Karl Viktor von Bonstetten of Switzerland on the occasion of a journey toDenmark in 1799 (Pöttler, 1985, p. 11). Although there were isolated examples of housesbeing relocated, it is generally acknowledged that the first true open-air museum was Skansenfounded by Artur Hazelius in Sweden. He was influenced by G. Hylltén-Cavallius whodescribed an old Swedish province in South Småland. The Swedish King Charles XV whoreigned from 1859 - 1872 was interested in old buildings (Rehnberg, 1984, p. 105).But Hazelius actually founded the first open-air museum with Skansen, near Stockholm, inSweden with the aim of scientific research in 1891. Before that, in 1873, he had establishedthe first folk museum, Nordiska Museet, in Stockholm (Zippelius, 1974, p. 23). It differedfrom other museums at that time, because it showed costumes, utensils and furniture of theordinary people (WFM, 1982, p. 8). Interiors were shown there with wax figures. At Skansen,however, the objects were shown in natural surroundings. It was the plan of Hazelius, tocreate a park for all the people which would attract wide population circles and also suchpeople who would never go to a museum (Uldall, 1957, p. 68). In Stockholm an Institute of Ethnology was founded in 1918 (Kavanagh, 1990, p. 19). As research scientist and languageteacher Hazelius knew the traditional culture was changing with industrialisation (Larsson,Westberg, 1991, p. 5). So the open-air museum Skansen began as an annex to the nationalcollection of objects. From the beginning it showed typical wild life of the country(Armstrong, n. d., p. 93).In Britain, between World War One and World War Two, many museums devoted themselvesto folk studies developed (Kavanagh, 1990, p. 22). First in the British countries, the Isle of Man thought of a folk museum.Whereas in the early days of the open-air museum only the dwelling houses were shown asrepresentative single buildings with fittings in park-like grounds without distinct grouping toone another, it changed in the course of the twentieth century. At first, the experts saw thefarm as a living and economic unit. Later, also herb gardens, orchards and fields were added(Kreilinger, 1991, p. 14).I believe that it was probably the raising of national consciousness and the lack of a verystrongly differentiated class structure that the oldest open-air museums are found in Sweden,Denmark, Norway and Finland. Other critics see it in a different way.A ground in the open landscape replaced the fields that used to be mainly situated in theEuropean towns. In the beginning, these parks were thought of as funfairs where the rural
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