Among us and others: the ambivalent history of ethnography museums

Abstract

Any museum aimed at presenting 'other' cultures constitutes an exception to the usual function of a museum: the ambition to portray a world in miniature requires a very specific exhibition approach, in which otherness is in tension with the continuity that museums generally assume exists between the visitors and the objects they have come to see. The ambition to create a microcosm, therefore, raises a problem of legitimacy: who among 'us' has the legitimacy to take on the paradoxical responsibility of staging the 'Other'? More than just an approach to the history of museums, more than a journey through the issues posed by Anthropology, Benoît de l'Estoile's book (2007) allows us to confront this difficulty head-on, a challenge common to all French institutions that followed the colonial exhibition of 1931 (but not only those). By indulging in the pleasures of cinematic intertextuality, beyond simply presenting the fundamental question of legitimacy (good taste versus bad taste), the title of the work brings 'taste' into question: 'by “others’ taste”, I mean the various forms of appropriation of “the things of Others,” understood broadly as manifestations of cultural otherness' (L’Estoile 2007: 20). Taste, therefore, refers to modes of appropriation in all processes of appropriation, whose legitimacy immediately presents itself as problematic. It is from this perspective, considering the problem of legitimacy as a tension running through the entire text, that we approach a work that demonstrates how otherness was constructed over a century, through differentiated modes, highlighting the most fundamental of questions: 'What does the distinction between us and others mean in the world we live in?'