ABSTRACT
It is commonly supposed that other people’s artefacts conserved in ethnographic museums are objective data that can provide reliable knowledge. However, recent anthropological work has analysed the act of collecting and display as a cultural practice, historically determined, questioning the representative systems that have been used to transmit knowledge (Clifford 1988; Karp and Lavine 1991). It is my aim here to take nineteenth-century ethnographic displays as the basis for an examination of the connections between vision, memory and knowledge. What kind of knowledge do ethnographic museums transmit? What does it really mean to see a culture and to understand it by looking at objects?
