Using the Local to Tell a Global Story: How the Peabody Essex Museum Became a World Class Museum

Abstract

According to the World Bank, one out of every seven people in the world today is an internal or international, voluntary or involuntary migrant. Learning to live with diversity next door or across the globe is the challenge of the day. What role are contemporary museums playing in imparting cosmopolitan values and skills to their visitors? What helps explain how they present the nation in relation to the world? In this article, we use the case of the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts to explore these questions. In 1993, the Peabody Museum and the Essex Institute were poised to close. Despite their long histories and important collections, they were operating at the far frontier of the regional cultural map. In the ensuing years, the new PEM rewrote that cartography. By telling new global stories about very local objects, and by showcasing its global institutional roots, the museum dramatically transformed visitors’ experiences. It broadened and diversified the possible messages they might take away from their visits and sought to connect them to other times and places. Excavating pieces of Salem’s cultural armature enabled the PEM to display cosmopolitan ideas and to cultivate cosmopolitan skills while rescaling itself and its city in the process.

Key words: museums, cosmopolitanism, global, culture, scale