ABSTRACT
This chapter starts from a number of genera considerations about the points of affinity and divergence between ethnographic practices in anthropology and those of the curator in the world of contemporary art. It focuses on curating and ethnographic practices in the field of collections and collecting practices, inside and outside museums. Unlike curatorship in the world of contemporary art, which tends to suck the world inwards towards the exhibition space, anthropological ethnography takes the exhibition space out into the world, making of it a space for fieldwork, tracing an unbroken web of cross-references between interior and exterior. In spite of a widespread stereotype that African societies do not preserve material culture, in the Grassfields, the West Cameroon highlands, one can identify several collecting practices animated by different interests, motivations and aims. In fact, the modern Western museum is only one among many different ways of collecting and ‘making worlds’ through the order given by the collection.
