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.