Drifting Ethnographic Installations: How to Recognize Them, How to Disseminate Them

I would like to answer affirmatively to the conference’s question Do Ethnography museums need ethnography? by praising ethnography: a marvelous prospect for imagining and launching public documentation and cultural criticism processes. The museum provides a public art dimension to such processes, a broad arena for discussion and sharing and, thus, a greater subversive power. However – to do this – we anthropologists need to domesticate the languages of museum communication so that at least they resemble us a little. Today, we attribute centrality to the contemporary, collaborative and reflexive ethnography. That is to say so that these languages cease to evoke impersonal authorities and peremptory truths, meta-historical frames, transparent objectivity, themes and styles that have long disappeared from our conversations. Our museums show that they are able to convene varied expressive resources to account for the making of dense, contemporary ethnography: polyphonic relationships and scenarios, contextual knowledge, other aesthetics, the complex and often uncertain and conflicting interpretations of others, sharing and/or criticizing heritage-making processes.