Tainted heritage? The case of the Branly museum

Abstract

The paper argues that, although the musée du quai Branly in Paris, inaugurated in 2006, may be tainted through the history of its collections as well as the political imperatives that brought it into existence in the Chirac era, it has the potential to make a radical break with its genre history. The paper takes up a metaphor adopted by one of the museum’s curators that sees it as infected but not incurably stricken by the virus common to all ethnological museums. Through an examination of the predominant themes of some of the temporary exhibitions created since its inception, the paper argues that curators at the musée du quai Branly are conscious of the ethnological ‘malaise’ and have attempted, in novel and politically sensitive ways to break with what Tony Bennett described as the ‘stigmatic othering’, symptomatic of nineteenth and early twentieth century museums.

Keywords:

• ethnographic museums
• Branly museum
• Paris museums
• Chirac

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Alan Mabin for encouraging me in this work and for many careful readings; to the Memory and the City seminar in the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits University for hosting a preliminary draft of this paper; to the Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust for financial support that contributed to my stay in Paris over five months of sabbatical leave, to the curators I mention in the paper who generously gave me more assistance and direction than is reflected here and who were indulgent of my less then perfect French and to the extremely generous provisions of the Rockefeller Foundation’s spousal policy that enabled me to revise the paper amid the splendour of the villa at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy.