The Aestheticization of Ethnicity: Imagining the Dogon at the Musée du quai Branly

Abstract

On 23 June 2006 the Musée du quai Branly opened in Paris. The brainchild of then French President Jacques Chirac and art dealer Jacques Kerchache, Branly stood out in the Parisian landscape as the first national museum to display African, Asian, and Oceanic objects together in a new framework as “art,” rather than within a traditional ethnographic context.1 Kerchache had prepared the terrain for this curatorial shift for almost a decade, first by having African and other objects brought into the Pavillon des Sessions of the Louvre as what he called “arts premiers” or “primary arts,” and then by critically dismantling French ethnographic collections and the scholarly communities behind them.2 In spite of outraged critical response to these maneuvers in France, the president of the republic and his favorite art dealer had prevailed.3 Collections from both the historic Musée de l'Homme and André Malraux's Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens had been moved to Branly, their research teams in part disbanded, their archives temporarily obscured.4 With this action, Chirac had appeared to respond to France's postcolonial troubles, contemporary racism, and the demonstrations in the banlieues that had rocked the French capital in fall 2005. Branly, he had pronounced in his inaugural speech, would “restore the dignity” of violated peoples, serve as an acknowledgment of diversity, and ensure “a dialogue of cultures and civilizations.”5