Heritage Management and Community Engagement: The Story of the National Museum, Benin City, Nigeria

Austine Emifoniye
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Abstract

Heritage management is essential to the preservation of a people’s tangible and intangible culture. The heritage of a people may change over time or become extinct in the absence of conscious preservation, as is evident with many African cultures. Central to the preservation of heritages, is the engagement of communities in a dynamic process of continuity. The Great Benin kingdom engineered this process with the institution of the guild system, which served the royal court of the Oba (king). Although the guild is no longer practised strictly as court art today, the system is preserved as community art centres run by descendants of the ancient guild. Artisans in Benin City, play an important role as custodians of the culture and system, while the National Museum, Benin City houses some of the important relics of the Benin kingdom. This article looks at the history of the National Museum, and the structure in place for heritage preservation. It also examined the role played by Igun bronze casters who are important custodians of the arts and culture of the Benin kingdom. The study is qualitative research that relied on historical content and ethnographic methods, interviews and online publications for its data. Much of the ethnographic data was collected while the researcher was engaged in fieldwork in Benin City. His observation of the Benin guild workers, informal interviews and visits to the National Museum, Benin City are important parts of the data. Data collected were evaluated from observation assessment, text and interview analysis. The findings are presented within the general content of the essay. The study concludes that, although the National Museum, Benin City is an institutionalized heritage management organ of government, the preservation and continuity of important aspects of the tangible and intangible heritages of the Benin kingdom is been done also by the bronze casters who have continued with the ancient culture of bronze casting. This synergy, though informal, is a significant module, which may be adopted by other museums with similar structures. 
遗产管理和社区参与:国家博物馆的故事,贝宁市,尼日利亚
遗产管理对于保护一个民族的物质和非物质文化至关重要。一个民族的遗产可能会随着时间的推移而改变,或者在没有有意识保护的情况下灭绝,这在许多非洲文化中很明显。遗产保护的核心是社区参与一个动态的连续性过程。大贝宁王国通过行会制度设计了这一过程,行会制度为奥巴(国王)的皇家宫廷服务。虽然行会今天不再严格地作为宫廷艺术来实行,但该系统被保留为由古代行会的后代经营的社区艺术中心。贝宁市的工匠作为文化和制度的守护者发挥着重要作用,而贝宁市的国家博物馆则收藏着贝宁王国的一些重要文物。这篇文章着眼于国家博物馆的历史,以及遗产保护的结构。它还研究了伊贡青铜铸工所起的作用,他们是贝宁王国艺术和文化的重要守护者。这项研究是一项定性研究,其数据依赖于历史内容和人种学方法、访谈和在线出版物。大部分人种学数据是在研究人员在贝宁市进行实地调查时收集的。他对贝宁行会工人的观察、非正式访谈和对贝宁市国家博物馆的参观都是这些数据的重要组成部分。收集的数据通过观察评估、文本分析和访谈分析进行评估。这些发现是在文章的一般内容中提出的。研究得出的结论是,虽然贝宁市国家博物馆是一个制度化的政府遗产管理机构,但贝宁王国物质和非物质遗产的重要方面的保存和延续也是由青铜铸造者完成的,他们继续着古老的青铜铸造文化。这种协同作用虽然是非正式的,但却是一个重要的模块,可以被其他具有类似结构的博物馆采用。
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