Museums and youth: between misunderstanding and disappointment. Youth perceptions and arguments about the cultural consumption of museums in Chile

Young people are less explored in museum audience research; this is a paradoxical situation when considering its strategic location in the cultural reproduction and if considering the high performing cultural consumption compared with other sectors. The phenomenon of museums consumption by young Chileans who are self recognized as public and non-public museums is explored from a qualitative approach. It was conducted with focus groups in the three largest cities in Chile (Santiago, Valparaíso and Concepción). They identify the museum as a cultural institution in full force. However, in questioning museums activity youth reveal the specificity of their cultural matrix. This is referred to a social temporality based on the fragment, the discourse of familiarity, proximity and instead of breaking and critical. They claim a museum aesthetic / historical experience based on pleasure and enjoyment. An overview is proposed to further clarify the youth cultural consumption to characterize more precisely the place of the museum in the set, to design more effective policies museums.

Household "ethnoscapes" and rite of passage: meaning and chronicity of the diagnosis in schizophrenia

Based on the results of an ethnographic study with people diagnosed with schizophrenia and their relatives in Barcelona and Tarragona along one year, I problematize the transformation of roles and relationships inside the household from the first burst and the assignation of a diagnosis as rite of passage. I appeal to a cultural interpretation of family, understanding the family group as a specific ethnoscape. I analyze the chronicity meaning, and its consequences in the conformation of the “role of sick person” in the context of parental relationships. I also discuss the paradoxes in terms of autonomy for the affected persons because of the projection of cultural connotation of chronicity.

What is this thing called Historical Archaeology?

Historical archaeology, in its narrow temporal sense -as an archaeology of the emergence and subsequent evolution of the Modern world- is steadily taking pace in Spanish academia. This paper aims at provoking a more robust debate through understanding how Spanish historical archaeology is placed in the international scene and some of its more relevant particularities. In so doing, the paper also stresses the strong links that have united historical and prehistorical archaeology since its inception, both in relation to the ontological, epistemological and methodological definition of the first as to the influence of socio-political issues in the latter. Such reflection is partly a situated reflection from prehistory as one of the paper’s authors has been a prehistorian for most of her professional life.