The title for this post – and the shape of its content – were inspired by the recent Contested Histories conference at the University of York.
The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington DC and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris are two very different museums, but both similarly reflect long, complex histories of Western colonialism and imperialism with all their attendant violence, appropriation, cultural exchange and hybridity – and both have been highly controversial. Having had the chance to visit each within the last year, I was struck by the overlaps and divergences between the two enterprises, and by the possibilities the contrasts between them might offer Western institutions displaying works that were once – and often still are – hived off under the deeply unstable, problematic category of the ‘anthropological artefact’.
