ABSTRACT
Since the end of the colonial era, museums displaying artefacts from the developing world have been coming to terms with new conditions affecting the way they exhibit other cultures and document them with new collections. Changes in museum practice have usually been made ad hoc rather than thought through strategically. There has been a marked, if unsurprising, reluctance to anticipate further shifts of context so that museums might plan appropriate responses. As a result, ethnographic museums face the twenty-first century ill-equipped to deal with reality, and risk substituting antiquarian interests for the concern with contemporary cultures that has guaranteed their vitality in the past. In this chapter I shall review some of the challenges confronting ethnographic museums, and argue for new approaches to research and public work as the best and perhaps the only way to realize their potential in changed conditions.
