“Mon Cher Ami”

This chapter challenges the conventional view of national museums of archaeology and ethnography as quintessential and exclusively nationalist institutions by investigating cosmopolitan connections among their curators in nineteenth-century Europe. It develops the first substantial assessment of the Congrès International d’Anthropologie et d’Archéologie Préhistoriques, an international learned congress founded by curators of archaeological and anthropological collections in 1865. By exploring interactions among curators in an age of hyper-nationalism, this chapter adds complexity to our understanding of museums as social and intellectual sites, and reinforces the need to view cosmopolitan connections among curators as an important and overlooked aspect of the history of one of the key sites where national communities were formed, glorified and transmitted to future generations—the museum.