Museum Metamorphosis. Cultural Heritage, Anthropology and Art in France (博物馆的转型: 法国的文化遗产、人类学与艺术)

This book aims to articulate a pressing issue for our field of study: What are the relationships between anthropology and museums today? The ‘museum metamorphosis’ in France offers a privileged case to reflect on the meaning of collections, on communication and museum practices, at a time that we may refer to as ‘post-ethnographic’. The paradigm shifts from anthropological to post-ethnographic museums enables us to understand the redefinition of ethnographic artefacts as works of art and heritage treasures, their numerous successive and parallel lives, the links between artefacts and people holding or claiming them, the relationships between collections, national cultural policies and global dimension. The French case is thus a striking instance of a wider global process: the transformation of artefacts initially collected for their alleged ‘scientific’ value into works of art and, more generally, ‘heritage’. We have written this book to help non-European readers (students, scholars and the general public), especially in Asia, to understand this process of change.