ABSTRACT
In an essay on anthropological museums, James Clifford suggests that one way of understanding ethnography itself is as “a form of culture collecting”. This perspective highlights “the ways that diverse experiences and facts are selected, gathered, detached from their original temporal occasions, and given enduring value in a new arrangement” (1988:231). Like ethnographies, museums construct spaces or slots of meaning inside which other cultures can be made intelligible to the museum visitor, and they give verbal information that answers the visitor's question “What does it mean?” (MacGaffey 2003:255). In these respects ethnographic exhibitions parallel the translation task of written ethnography, and the two also have close institutional and historical links. The ethnographic museum remains an important ‘public face’ of academic anthropology, though it enjoys an audience far larger and more diverse than written ethnography can dream of. Can museum ethnography, though, usefully be studied in terms of translation? Unlike literary translation there is no preceding physical text, and unlike written ethnography the museum's medium is not primarily words. Yet the ethnographic display shares with written ethnographies the task of ‘making sense’, in terms intelligible to the receiving culture, of a mass of cultural practices — it is another form of knowledge-sieve through which other people's lives are filtered for presentation inside the receiving discipline of anthropology, the larger institution of the museum, and the surrounding society.
