Paper short abstract:

The county museum in Bangor, North Wales, presents local, national, and global identities through its collections. This paper outlines the ways in which these multiplicities may be displayed in the museum, including the crucial factor of bilingualism of the institution.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will investigate the ways in which the county museum in Bangor, North Wales presents local, national, and global identities through its collections. The founding collections of the museum came from Bangor University, including items gathered during international expeditions.

This paper will compare two recent exhibitions as case studies to explore the expression of identities through objects. The first of these, entitled "Connections", comprises a variety of objects representing the nine University collections, ranging from fine art to zoological specimens. The other, "Notes from the Past", displays ancient musical instruments from Mexico. In both cases, the objects were brought together through colonial ways of collecting, and this is reflected in the curation of the displays.

This research uses ethnographic methods based on fieldwork in the museum space, and interviews with museum staff and visitors. An additional dimension is the intersection of local identities as expressed through the Welsh and English languages. As a non-Welsh speaker myself, I have compared the results my research with a Welsh-speaking research colleague.

Reflecting the quotation from Peggy Levitt which forms the title of this paper, the museum is both ethnographic and aesthetic, local and global. The strong local identities reside in tension with the cosmopolitanism of the University town. This paper outlines the ways in which these multiplicities can, and cannot, be displayed in the museum.