From a museum to an artifact

Abstract

Today, many ethnographic collections are facing the faith of silent existence and are denied a possibility of displaying the social practice within which they were made. They are rather (un)comfortably placed in the continues re-questioning of their meaning, solely analyzed from the perspective of the contemporary Zeitgeist. This process of re-contextualization can be equaled with the process of musealization itself. The ethnographic museums assume a new role in the process of musealization. They become its object. Now they are the artifact, either to be accessioned and thoroughly re-contextualized by the new collection, or to be deaccessioned from it. The paper investigates the ethnographic museums as spaces of contemporarily contested narratives, and re-thinks their future, as spaces on the ''other'' side of political correctness. The focus is placed on one case study, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam through its institutional mission, one of its recent temporary exhibitions, the Encounters, and its current faith, of being collected by another institution.