Building Cases with Buildings: Physical Evidence on Trial at Museums of Poor People’s Housing

• In Event: 365 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 03. Cultural Production

Abstract

This paper shows how museums of poor people’s housing deploy seemingly "hard," material evidence (architecture) toward specific ends, making some things more legible than others; how museums build cases with buildings. Although existing literature has documented how reputational entrepreneurs construct “authentic” narratives, this paper focuses on a specific type of material evidence relevant to a particular social category: how museums use domestic architecture to make claims about poor people’s housing. To do so, this paper uses participant observation and archival research at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (LESTM) to examine the way housing museums deploy domestic space to interpret and represent the lives of the people they depict. Using participant observation at the National Museum of Public Housing (NMPH) as an illustrative comparison, the paper deploys a legal metaphor in order to deconstruct evidentiary processes and museums’ reliance on and misconstruction of domestic architecture. This paper shows that LESTM relies on circular, tautological claims in which museum researchers put together the story of the tenement residents from various documentary sources, build a domestic display to suit the story, and then offer the domestic setting as evidence for the story.

Author

• Robin Bartram, Northwestern University