ABSTRACT
Since November 2016, the Museum without a Home exhibition has travelled the world. As can be seen from Oxfam’s webpage, the exhibition is “dedicated to humanity”, the overall mission being to display, “the new historical contribution of hospitality, humanity and solidarity towards migrants and refugees”. This chapter focuses on different modes of memory work enacted by the volunteers in their reflections on the past events. It presents three modes of memory work enacted through volunteers’ commemorative practices: the melancholy of volunteering; acting for the future; and volunteering as heritage-making. By looking closely at the different modes of memory work among volunteers, the chapter argues that the retrospective ethnographies not only represented the field of study, namely the volunteers’ commemorations, but also enabled a collaborative knowledge production, in which divisions of roles between ethnographers and interlocutors became contorted.
