Implications for the development

Ethnography and the Future of Ethnography. 
As I mentioned, I find TPM a provocative 
case for considering the relations between memory, heritage, and museums for a second rea-
son. This second reason is because TPM puts into clear question whether “ethnography”, in the 
museum context, is (still) an effective form for mediating the cultural heritage and memories of 
living communities. When it reopens in 2021, TPM will no longer recognize itself as an “eth-
nographic” museum. This decision was reached, as I understand from communication with the 
and popular media, similarly noticed a disproportionate attention to women’s dress and jewelry, as 
well as dishes, and the relative invisibility of men. She concluded that the over-focus on women is 
related to the “problematic” nature of Peranakan men’s collaboration with British authorities and 
adoption of British dress and education.
13
Ira Jacknis, 
Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museum Method of Anthropology
, in: 
George Stocking (ed.), 
Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture
, 1985, p. 75-111. 
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
14
The website of the National Library refers to TPM as the most authoritative source of information 
on Peranakans. However, it suggests as a second-choice resource a book published in 1879, and re-
printed in 1971 and 1974, by Jonas Daniel Vaughan, 
The Manners and Customs of the Chinese of the 
Straits Settlements
. Though it is not clear how the original publication was received, its century-later 
reprinting was treated as an important, if not wholly reliable, resource for academic study with re-
views appearing in the 
American Anthropologist
and the 
Journal of Asian Studies
(Fortier D.H. (1974, 
September). Review. 
American Anthropologist
, 
76
(3), p. 611; Kaufman H.K. (1972, November). Re-
view. 
The Journal of Asian Studies
, 32(1), p. 215-216). A century after original publication, Vaughan 
was criticized for presenting overly homogenous views of the “Chinese” (presumably including the 
Peranakans themselves), but appreciated for his detailed accounts of gambling and of the organization 
of secret societies (Triads) and their rivalries. His book was considered “significant for providing a 
baseline from which researchers can compare festivals, domestic habits and rites of passage with those 
practiced by the Chinese in Malaya as well as other areas of Southeast Asia at the time” (http://www.
nlb.gov.sg/biblioasia/2016/01/26/about-babas-and-the-chinese/). This book would seem to present a 
rather different picture from the museums. 
15
M. Herzfeld, 
As in your own house: Hospitality, ethnography, and the stereotype of Mediterranean 
society’,
in: 
Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean
, ed. D. Gilmore, American Anthro-
pological Association, Washington, D.C. 1987.

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Conferință științifică internațională, Chișinău, 22-23 septembrie 2020, ediția a II-a
~ 613 ~
General Manager, Senior Curator of Asian Export Art, and Assistant Curator of TPM, from 
careful consideration of a variety of factors. Among these were the strengths of the existing col-
lection (i.e. material objects) and what they had learned (through “ethnographic”-type research 
and conversations) about the relations that living Peranakan communities and their individual 
members have with these material objects. Importantly, they had learned that the “ethnographic 
museum” concept carried too many associations of a distant past, and a fixed tradition, that was 
not recognizable to the living. The reasons were many: some objects or the practices associated 
with them were unknown at the community level (particularly in non-Chinese Peranakan com-
munities; see below); others were unknown within family lines; in other cases the meaning of an 
object had changed (e.g. old everyday dishes had become special objects of display); some objects 
(like elaborate ancestral altars) had become (almost) meaningless in terms of identity, even when 
the use was known. Even more important to note is that this assessment applies well beyond the 
Peranakan community, as the Asian Civilisations Museum has been shifting generally away from 
ethnography and towards decorative art. As I understand it, by de-emphasizing (the holistic 
vision of) ethnography, it becomes more possible to highlight cultural exchange (networks of 
trade), cross-culturalism, and hybridity as expressions of identity. 
In contrast to the tendency of anthropologists and ethnographers to sense that the impulse 
for change within their disciplines signals a “crisis”, TPM’s curatorial staff explained the shift 
from ethnography to me as a completely normal development. As per international standards, 
they noted that a museum should expect to undergo “refreshing” every 5–10 years; thus, from 
its very opening, TPM had been planning a renovation. From the outset, the curatorial staff 
knew a great deal about the strengths and weaknesses of the objects it had collected, in terms of 
the stories that they told about who Peranakans were and are,
16
and they devoted resources in 
the intervening years to reaching out steadily to Peranakan communities throughout Southeast 
Asia, collecting new objects, stories about the museum’s existing collected/displayed objects, and 
stories about being Peranakan.
Although the plans for the new exhibit were not finalized when we spoke in January 2020, it 
seems that almost all the points where I had felt the urge for more information, more ethnogra-
phy, and more engagement are among those to be addressed. (But it is also important to point out 
that my hypotheses of a likely remedy were definitely not the ones taken up!). For example, the 
disjuncture between the first-floor presentation of a broad Peranakan identity that became much 
more Chinese throughout the exhibit is to be tackled; one of the focal points for this change will 
be in the floor devoted to the 12-day wedding celebration of Chinese Peranakans which was not 
shared by other Peranakan communities which had, instead, other wedding traditions. 
The current plan for the new exhibit to open in 2021 is that it will have three sections: 1) Ori-
gins; 2) the concept of “Home”; 3) and “Style”. This means that the heavy emphases on religion 
and rituals will drop out as an explicit focus. Many of the objects featured in the former exhibit 
will re-appear, but they will be used to tell a story about Perankan identity that is more universal 
(every visitor can relate to “home”) and more open to the diverse stories of being Peranakan. 
Some objects, of course, would have been in use by non-Peranakans, too, even being in use and 
shared by Europeans; the point of drawing attention to “style”, then is to further deflect attention 
away from the object itself and to the meanings it holds – though the difficulty remains of locat-
ing collective meanings out of individual ones. Indeed, this overall approach is in contrast to the 
“ethnographic” use of ritual objects and practices to circumscribe the boundaries of community 
16
For example, though the vision of TPM was always to be a museum of Peranakan culture and com-
munities across the Southeast Asian region, the Chinese Peranakans were more heavily represented. 
This conceptual over-representation could be justified (a majority of Singapore’s Peranakans were 
Chinese Peranakans), but the representational strategies of the exhibits had to do with the totality 
of the objects in the collection: most had simply been collected from Chinese Peranakans, and even 
more specifically from those communities in Singapore and the former Chinese Straits settlements 
(Malacca and Penang). 

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