From Representing a Culture to Sharing it: Ethnic Museums at the Fissures of Traditions and Modernity

Abstract

I work in a Native American museum where authentic cultural representation is taken very seriously. As a non-Native anthropologist, I remain in the background in most of the museum’s public or academic exposures. Reclaimed sovereignty has successfully led to a strong post-colonial representation awareness that charges native museums with difficult tasks such as identity quests, overcoming historical trauma, collection conundrums, and nation building. Not considered a solution, anthropology here is often correctly identified as a collaborator of colonialism and its aftermath. How can anthropology be meaningful before such backdrops? And, should it keep a low profile until discipline catharsis has been completed? In my view, applied anthropology in museums can take on a crucial role to empower people to strive for native-led professional institutions, to advocate for their museum, to engage a museum-carrying community, to brace for sustainability challenges on a warming planet, and to build a native research base that lends a new indigenous relevance to maintain cultural continuity visa-vis meeting the needs for cultural change. To satisfy my personal academic interests, I’m analyzing museum data collected in South Korea. There, my ethnographic interests were legitimized by funding agencies and by invitations from Korean museum anthropologists. They were curious how foreign expertise would perceive the Korean museum scene and what outsider observations could possibly bring to their table. One project was about the role of museums in an interesting process of national democratization. Queries included investigations into top-down official concepts for a large national museum complex to be shaped into a brand name for an aspiring global society. At the same time, I observed a bottom-up, counter-hegemonic culture that displays social injustices, cultural dilution, political betrayal, and environmental disruption. FROM REPRESENTING A CULTURE TO SHARING IT: ETHNIC MUSEUMS AT THE FISSURES OF TRADITIONS AND MODERNITY