The Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac (MQBJC) in Paris includes a commissioned ceiling mural by Australian artist John Mawurndjul. Neither the identity of the artist nor the cultural meaning of the work features strongly as part of the visitor experience for this work. Such interpretation is, in general, pushed to the margins in the museum's permanent exhibits. Paradoxically, the temporary exhibits

In the past few decades, the literature in museum anthropology has advocated efforts to be more transparent about its colonial origins, address the historical injustices of imperial collecting, and rethink display narratives in collaboration with source communities. In this paper, however, we question the extent to which the epistemic and political predicaments underlying ethnographic representations

This article describes the “Dialogues with Africa” project of the Barcelona Museum of World Cultures, which consisted of workshops using personal objects of African guests residing in Catalonia, and objects from the museum's African collections. The dialogues revealed the existence of both a migrant memory connected with objects chosen for their capacity to evoke origins and a museum memory linked

Studies focusing on the history of collections generally emphasize what is estimable about them, but how should we make sense of collections that, once held in high regard, have subsequently been judged worthless? Such is the case for eoliths, stone objects resembling early artifacts, which held a pivotal position in arguments concerning the origins of human tool-making, but which are now largely considered

Miami's sizeable Cuban diaspora has long used museums and galleries to produce and preserve their sense of community, united through the loss inherent to exile. Recent influxes of migration from Cuba (and beyond) are increasingly interpreted as a threat to the cultural forms many consider an “authentic” preservation of something now lost to Castro's Revolution. Drawing upon fifteen months of ethnographic

A widespread link between the process of nation-building and the rise of museums is evident in late-nineteenth-century Latin America. The Chilean National Historical Museum (MHN) was founded in 1873 with the purpose of exhibiting the nation's heritage, beginning with the Spanish colonization. This article focuses on examining the narrative displayed in the MHN, particularly the silences surrounding

Nwadjahane, a small village in southern Mozambique, is set apart from other settlements as the birthplace of Eduardo Mondlane, one of the nation's founding fathers. Declared a national heritage site and made into an open-air museum, Nwadjahane has become a landscape where national and local memories are negotiated. Mondlane is at once a national hero celebrated with statues, exhibitions, and commemorations

This article examines debates between Greeks and Turks about how to preserve the architectural heritage left behind by the Greek Orthodox population exiled from Sinasos in the 1923 Greek-Turkish Compulsory Population Exchange. The restoration of Sinasos as a kind of residential and commercial open-air museum, through the transformation of ancestral homes into hotels, engendered new cooperative and

There has been wonderful work animating vectors of relatedness, negotiation, and collaboration between museums and “source communities”; foregrounding the significance of objects, what they can/might do, and how they act in and through museums; and highlighting the particularity of the photographic archive (and especially photographs as things in need of specific kinds of attention and care) in contemporary

This afterword to the special issue “Materiality, Belonging, and the Activation of Difference” begins and ends with Kim TallBear's notion of kin-making as a frame for understanding the relations between objects, peoples, places, heritage regimes, and museums that allows us to keep different ontological perspectives in view. More specifically, “making kin” allows us to unsettle still-dominant settler-colonial

This paper explores how one type of traditional Moroccan cloth comes to be known through different epistemological frameworks or “knowledge ideologies.” The case in question involves a rural women’s weaving cooperative and Moroccan state strategies to rationalize cloth production, which here takes the form of technical training and product development workshops. A struggle over the right to determine

The ethnological collecting expeditions conducted by museums in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have had impacts on source communities and on the composition and interpretation of museum collections that have been critically examined from a number of perspectives. Although categories such as ethnicity and tribal affiliation are now understood to be situational, relational, and contingent, systems

Classification schemes for collecting, studying, and displaying objects in museum contexts are power-filled forms of knowledge in Foucauldian senses. When such typologies are imprecise or, more harmfully, misleading or forthrightly mistaken, a museum’s collecting practices, curatorial interpretations, and exhibition display decisions can go astray and obscure the social structural and ideological processes

Refugees are often mischaracterized as either “threats” to their new nations of resettlement or as remarkably virtuous, resilient “survivors” of harsh expulsions from their home countries and difficult years in refugee camps. Both imageries fall short of forced migrants’ actual lives and stories. Museums’ display practices and their interpretations of “refugee arts” can easily fall into stereotypes

The Tasmanian Aboriginal people have historically been defined by their visible lack of stereotypical “Aboriginal” characteristics and their supposed nonexistence. This article examines how Tasmanian Aboriginal individuals are bridging such gaps through material cultural production. In thinking about how communities mobilize the past to produce themselves in the present, I argue that canoes, kelp water

Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were iconic figures whose contributions to visual anthropology are well documented, but what is less well known is their role as collectors and curators of Indonesian objects. The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) houses a large Balinese collection with numerous textiles, paintings, carvings, and puppets. Some of these objects were housed in permanent exhibits

Choices that admit things to, or omit things from, museum collections rely on institutional and individual assumptions about value, ownership, skill, history, and people. Historical decisions about what was worth collecting, how collections should be organized, who would oversee collections care, and what uses collections could serve reverberate through the years, affecting museums’ abilities to research

How does a museum shape the experience of memory? Focusing on the Chilean Museum of Memory and Human Rights (MMHR), this article develops this question through the analysis of the entanglement of sensations, values, affects, and the museum forms of addressing the beholder. The paper deepens on three critical phenomena that contribute to the shaping of the experience of memory among a heterogeneous

Curators and gallerists are constantly in search of exciting, new contemporary art from around the globe. Yet in order for “emerging” art markets to become visible to the contemporary art elite, they must adopt infrastructures and criteria from that world. In so doing, they often standardize and lose the very novelty for which they are sought. These infrastructures, such as biennials and commercial

As conservators of heritage and protectors of patrimony, museums are key players in public discourse about national identity and collective memory. The cultural roles and meanings of the museum as an institution are changing in relationship to local and global currents. Factors include the adoption of digital technologies, the repatriation of cultural artifacts, and the opening of new blockbuster museums

The valuation and display of African art in museum contexts entails contrasting strategies of objectification. In this process, objects may be used as material evidence for larger cultural trends and new movements. This essay examines the role of curatorial networks in creating discourses about African art objects that reframe their cultural significance and economic value. These curatorial networks

This paper examines how node three national museums in Germany are dealing with colonial objects in their spaces. It also explores the German government’s recent rapprochement with scholars in its ex‐colonies on how to deal with its colonial past within a discourse of evidence and sankofatization. Sankofatization is defined as a Ghanaian‐Akan ideology that signifies the selection of past ideas for

The “museum boom” is a global phenomenon with various local manifestations and wide‐ranging antecedents. The recent museum boom in Poland, in which a number of national museum complexes have either opened or undergone significant remodeling, is related to changing evidential discourses about collective identity. These discourses are part of the national narratives surrounding the Polish state. This

Between April 2016 and February 2017, indelible images of police violence against protestors on tribal reservation and unceded lands in Standing Rock, North Dakota, circulated on the national news and social media. The American public bore witness to law enforcement using tear gas, rubber bullets, concussion grenades, and water cannons against protestors as winter temperatures in the region plunged