ABSTRACT
Some years ago I was a participant at an event ostensibly set up to interrogate the relation between anthropological fieldwork and muscology, organized by the CNRS in Paris. I remember it as a productive international gathering between curators and anthropologists from locations as geographically distant as Mexico and Iran. Most of the speakers professed an interest in critically reassessing some of the more challenging aspects of anthropological practice and the process of translating the multiple dialogues of the fieldwork encounter, the ‘travellers’ tales’, into a multilayered experience in the metropolitan museum. One speaker more than any other unwittingly dramatized for me the difficulties and complexities of this principled position and the curatorial strategies that mark its translation into a museological language.
