Implications for the development

After Colonialism and Nationalism: The Future of Ethnographic Museums. 
To bring this 
paper to a conclusion, I want to put very clearly into discussion the question: What is the future 
of ethnography in museums? Should “ethnography” be limited to a research methodology that is 
practiced behind-the-scenes by curators as they expand museum collections and interface with 
publics and stakeholders? Or can “ethnography” remains a museological form – that is, is the 
“ethnographic museum” still a useful, desirable, affective institution for mediating memory and 
heritage? In Singapore, at least, the public – and certainly Peranakan communities – seem pres-
ently in accord with the anthropological literature on ethnographic museums: they sense that 
representational strategies are at an impasse. Too many studies now show how the ethnographic 
museum has been a master at promoting colonial and national narratives. It is other kinds of 
museums that have succeeded in using material objects to tell other human stories.
18
17
Miles Richardson, 
The Anthropologist as Myth Teller
, in: American Ethnologist 1975, vol. 2, no. 3, 
p. 517-533. 
18
A cursory examination of the more than 800 entries under “museums” for items held by the library 
at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, as of July 2019, indicates that there has been little 
conceptual advance in the anthropology of ethnographic museums since the 1990s. During the 1990s 
and early 2000s, anthropologists took wide note of works like those by George Stocking (George 
Stocking. 1985. “Essays on Museums and Material Culture”. In: George Stocking (ed.), Objects and 
Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, p. 3-14. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press) 
and James Clifford (James Clifford. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnog-
raphy, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press) that drew attention to the legacies 
of colonialism and nationalism in anthropology and, specifically, to the ways in which power and 

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Conferință științifică internațională, Chișinău, 22-23 septembrie 2020, ediția a II-a
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But is the ethnographic museum really so limited? Can the ethnographic museum really not 
tell stories that are beyond the limitations of the political conditions in which the museum is 
founded and operates? As even the curatorial staff at TPM is not quite ready to give up on the 
ethnographic approach altogether even as they move away from the ethnographic label, these 
questions demand more than a yes/no answer.
Further, it is my hope that these questions can and will be explored in a South-east/South-
east conversation. Beyond TPM, and other Peranakan-focused museums, South-east Asia has 
recently witnessed the growth of “folk museums” and small “museums” in people’s houses. Their 
popularity draws from the juncture of cultural heritage and tourism, but at least one region-
al specialist has opined that they are “often better than national and commercial museums in 
terms of being able to tell stories”.
19
South-east Europe has not experimented with the museum 
form perhaps quite as much in relation to expanding the economic capacity of the heritage and 
tourism sectors, however local/village museums, often created through voluntary efforts, have a 
long-standing tradition. Perhaps it is time to bring these two regional traditions into more di-
rect communication, and to explore the future of ethnography in museums from a multilateral 
perspective.
representation were conveyed through museum displays through the establishment of subject-object 
relations. Whether the fault lies with ethnographic museums themselves, or with the analytical lens 
of the anthropologists who study them, the two paradigms of colonialism and nationalism, expressed 
through subject-object relations of representation, continue to dominate European-based research on 
ethnographic museums. It is also possible that imperial/national questions continue to dominate the 
agenda because little attention is given to museums in many parts of the world that do not fit neatly 
into a metropole/colony framework. Museums from the Balkans, South America, most of Asia, and 
the Middle East are largely absent from the record. The main reported development in the MPI col-
lections concerns collaborations between European museums and African ones. Moreover, the issues 
of representation remain paramount to the exclusion of nearly all other considerations of the actual 
technical and administrative problems faced by museums. Budget limitations, visitors, events and 
programing, physical space, and legal issues are hardly covered as relevant to the “anthropology of the 
ethnographic museum”, even though museum curators always mention them. 
19
John Miksic, 
What is Seasia? Talk at Nanyang Technological University
, 25 March, 2019.

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Patrimoniul cultural de ieri: implicații în dezvoltarea societății durabile de mâine