Implications for the development

Patrimoniul cultural de ieri: implicații în dezvoltarea societății durabile de mâine
~ 614 ~
and define its cultural content. Some of the stories about being Peranakan (e.g. related to food 
and eating) remain difficult to incorporate into museum displays, and will be worked into mu-
seum programming. (The “museum” is conceptualized as both exhibit and program).
When we think of the burgeoning literature on identity, we recognize the subtlety and sophis-
tication of TPM’s curatorial approach: the intent is (still) to display the cultural stuff of identity 
and to provide a view on the emic experience of being Peranakan, but it is also to downplay the 
variety of boundary-making processes that otherwise distinguish sub-varieties of Peranakans as 
well as Peranakans from Others. The viewer should not perceive, at least as the primary view, a 
social world riddled and riven by boundaries, whether cultural or temporal. As I see it, it is a kind 
of strategy that foregrounds the desirable aspects of identity and community, the beautiful things 
that people have achieved – the kinds of things that make people proud of who they are and where 
they came from. My assessment here is buttressed by how TPM’s assistant curator responded to 
my question about the overwhelming impression from the old exhibit about the restrictions of 
women’s life; if I had imagined that the response might be to re-focus on the kinds of networks and 
activities that put women into greater connection with the public, there was another tack available: 
a life restricted largely to the domestic sphere, I was reminded, was normal for women (not only 
Peranakan women) at the turn of the twentieth century, and the important aspect of the exhibit is 
that it shows the (beautiful) results of that life: the beaded slippers, the needlework, (the cooking). 
Such an insistence on recognizing the achievements of humans, regardless of other limitations, is, 
of course, one of the heroic aims that ethnography has claimed
17
, and one on which ethnographers 
in Moldova have insisted, especially with me. Once again, I was reminded that my singular criti-
cal engagement with a museum may help me to develop questions for my ethnographic research, 
but it is hardly authoritative relative to the more multifaceted and ongoing “critical” engagement 
of the museum’s curatorial staff. It is important to recognize that the museum’s internal approach 
does not culminate in “critique” per se, but uses critique to produce a memory that is 
more true
than the alternatives, and 
more true 
than one that would be created merely by assembling a factual, 
sociologically, ethnographically accurate account of the past.
Can ethnography yet claim a role in the mediation of memory, heritage, and communities?