After Interpretive Dominance1

Abstract

Since its reopening in 2011, the Museum of Cultures Basel (MKB) has attempted to establish a new approach which aims at leaving behind superseded yet latently still existing practices in ethnographical museums – for example, othering, hierarchisation of cultures and their achievements, various forms of essentialising. Permanent as well as temporary exhibitions at the MKB are consistently oriented along topics rather than regions – for lack of canonisation, the latter seems to have been the only authoritative category in anthropology for a long time. Methodologically, the thematic approach is not based on the principle of comparison but on establishing and highlighting relations and connectivity – between time horizons, between the Here and There. Thus, it is committed to the hic et nunc, with a pledge to account for local relevance: namely, the specific location of the museum itself. Processes of appropriation might again accompany this approach since asymmetrical power relations, economic dependencies and systems of global interconnectedness are prevailing today as they were in colonial times. This essay demonstrates how MKB treats the chosen topics from different angles and provides facets of a theme which offer the visitors a kind of partial collage or assemblage to which they can relate and into which they can inscribe themselves. Thus, in every new exhibition, each ethnographic object bears the possibility of transformation for each person exposed to it; and at the same time, each exhibition creates a new context which adds novel meanings to each object – even if only in nuances – and thus also affects transformations of the object.