Ethnography and exhibition design: Insights from the Moesgaard inaugural

Abstract

This article both claims and problematizes the ethnographic museum as a site of cross-cultural aesthetic engagement, cultural critique, and co-creative potential, through the prism of the evolving field of design anthropology. Rather than presuming that collaboration, consultation and community participation solve the critiques of appropriation that ethnographic museums have had to negotiate in recent decades, the article draws attention to the ‘ragged edges’ that such projects produce in their efforts to ‘transduce’ cultural meaning and affect. Instead of smoothing over residual frustrations, tensions, and misunderstandings, the authors argue that ragged edges can be conceptually generative from a design anthropological perspective. • Design anthropology crucially depends on the ethnographic observer’s eye and sensitivity as well as mediation. • Ethnographic exhibitions can be used as powerful means of design-anthropological intervention. • Ethnographic exhibitions afford the transduction of cultural meaning and affect across cultural worlds. • The collaboration between designers, anthropologists and consulting groups in ethnographic exhibitions produces ‘ragged edges’. • ‘Ragged edges’ in interpretation and collaborative relations are productive for ongoing ethnographic research as well as design.