1
The Public Sphere as Wilderness: Le Musée
du quai Branly
Anthony Alan Shelton
The Musée du quai Branly is a blood-red knife
that rips open the pleasing and repressed story
of Paris.
– Lisa Rochon, ‘‘Thorns in Paris’s Garden’’
T
he public opening of the Musée du quai
Branly on June 23, 2006 polarized critics
and delighted audiences (Brothers 2006;
Wecker 2006). With the launch of the project ten years
earlier, the contestation between two essentially po-
larized views of museums of non-Western objects as
scientific or aesthetic spaces, or more implicitly, given
their particular history, as neo-colonial or post-colo-
nial projects, was moved from the academy and
museum world into the public sphere. Newspapers
and magazines including Le Monde, Le Figaro, Figaro
Magazine, The International Herald Tribune, The
Washington Post, The Guardian, Time Europe, The
Wellington Dominion Post, Newsweek, and the Lon-
don Review of Books ran generally supportive and
even enthusiastic reviews at the time of the Mu-
seum’s opening, while Libération, The Times, The
Independent, The New York Times and the Vancouver
Globe and Mail took more critical positions.
Some reviews were clearly tainted by the political
debacles that accompanied the Museum’s gestation
and merely reiterated previously stated positions
without regard to its planned future development.
Others sidestepped the political and interpretive is-
sues entirely. Of the two articles featured in
Libération on June 21, one by Antoine Guiral (2006)
described the inauguration ceremony at the Elysée
Palace, while the second by Nathalie Bensahel
(2006) reported on the Museum’s small staff and the
short-term contracts that most of them were given.
The International Herald Tribune, focused on the
commission awarded Naoki Takizawa for the Mu-
seum’s curtains (Menkes 2006). Many reviews
& 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1379.2009.01017.x
commented positively on the architecture (Albert
2006; Dickey 2006; Glancey 2006; Le Monde 2006a;
Ouroussoff 2006; Prat 2006; Rochon 2006). The
Times articles on June 17 and 21 raised old rivalries
between the Gallic and Anglo American cultural and
art worlds, but otherwise added little to the debate.
This article is intended generally as a review of
reviews, but primarily it aims to give a provisional
critical evaluation of the Museum’s espoused mis-
sion, its reception, its potential disciplinary and
museological implications, and its position in relation
to France’s changing geo-cultural politics. I conclude
by discussing the potential of the new institution to
radically change the general terms of debate between
art and cultural institutions and in particular be-
tween the disciplines of aesthetics and ethnography.
Architectural Provocation or Jungle Paradise?
The quai Branly, the first new national museum
to be established in Paris since the opening of the
Centre Pompidou in 1977, staged its weeklong
opening, amidst great fanfare, in June 2006. The
inauguration speech and reception given by Jacques
Chirac, in the presence of Kofi Annan, Rigoberta
Menchu Tum, Paul Okalik (the Premier of
Nunavut) and Claude Lévi-Strauss in the Elysée
Palace on June 20, 2006, was followed on the 21 by
a review of experts and museum professionals, and
on the 22 by a reception for the diplomatic corp and
the Parisian elite. Quai Branly opened its doors to
the world on June 23, with an extended weekend
that alone attracted 30,000 people (Brothers 2006).
The public announcement of its impending
opening began six months earlier with an adver-
tising campaign on the Paris metro, though
curiosity and intrigue had already been sown over
the past decade and half by the steady flow of
newspaper reports on the controversies, soaring
2 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1
costs, and the protests and diatribes between its
various supporters and detractors. By June, ban-
ners announcing the Museum’s imminent
unveiling decorated the Charles de Gaulle airport
(figure 1) and the enthusiastic reviews from the
French Press, particularly Le Monde and Le Fig-
aro, backed by extensive television and radio
coverage, contributed to the long cues in which ex-
pectant visitors, in the week that followed, waited
for up to two hours to gain entry. During the first
day of its operation it attracted 8,757 visitors (We-
cker 2006), and although expecting only around
2,000–2,500 after that, it continued to average
4,500 persons per day (Brothers 2006). Six months
later, it still attracted large weekend crowds prov-
ing, if anything, that anthropology museums need
not be dull (Harding 2007). This makes one earlier
official estimate of receiving one million visitors in
its first year of operation, tailing off to around
600,000 thereafter, conservative, to say the least.
The effect of re-organizing the collections of the
Musée de l’Homme and the former Musée National
des arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (MNAAO) to create
the new museum had a dramatic effect on the
whole French museological landscape. The clo-
sure of the MNAAO freed its building in the Porte
Dorée to provide the home for the proposed Musée
National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration. The redis-
tribution of the Musée de l’Homme’s European
collections, to be amalgamated with those of the
Musée National des Arts et Traditions (closed in
2005), will form a new Musée de l’Europe et de la
1. Advertisment for the opening of the Museum at the
airport Charles de’Gaulle, June 2006 (photograph by the
author).
Méditerranée in Marseille due to open in 2011. The
Musée de l’Marine will be refurbished, while the
Museum of French Monuments and the National
Institute of Monuments have become amalgamated
and rebranded the Cité de l’architecture et du pat-
rimoine in the refurbished east wing of the Palais
de Chaillot. Facing the sleek buildings of the quai
Branly on the opposite bank of the Seine, stands
the melancholy corpse of the Musée de l’Homme,
which in the summer of 2006 appeared almost
abandoned, desolate, nearly devoid of visitors and
empty except for an ironic, but disappointing exhi-
bition on birth for which its designers had
misguidedly given its galleries the appearance of
dreary mid century hospital wards (cf. Harding
2007). In the course of time, it too will be refur-
bished and refocused on human biology.
The political importance of the quai Branly is
reflected in its budget and the impressive array of
architects commissioned to submit tenders, Tadao
Ando, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, and Ken
Koolhass. The contract was finally awarded to Jean
Nouvel for a design that has been repeatedly de-
scribed as ‘‘striking’’ without being ‘‘monumental’’
and supposedly more sympathetic towards its
content and purpose than any of the other submis-
sions. A mélange of four architectural styles break
up any monolithic institutional façade, all of which
eventually will partly disappear in the lush gar-
dens, designed by Gilles Clément that will grow to
surround them. The permanent gallery, a long sin-
uous structure, 220 meters in length, studded with
26 boxes that jut out of its north side, is raised 10
meters off the ground allowing the public to walk
underneath, amidst plants, shrubs, and pools, to
the ticketing office (figure 3). The gallery, following
perfectly the curve of the Seine and level with the
treetops, is surmounted by a terrace restaurant
giving panoramic river views. The permanent ex-
hibition gallery is joined to a circular silver
louvered building partly nestled under it, that
houses the ticketing office, the Garden Gallery, a
huge exhibition space intended for temporary and
traveling exhibitions and the auditorium named in
honor of Claude Lévi-Strauss (figure 4). The Gar-
den Gallery is the largest of three temporary
exhibition areas, the other two being irregularly
shaped mezzanine spaces suspended over the main
permanent exhibition hall. A third mezzanine area
contains interactive databases that provide access
 LE MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY 3

to collection-based information. The library of

300,000 volumes from the Musée de l’Homme, a
lecture theater named after Jacques Kerchache, a
cinema and research hub is housed in a more con-
ventional building, while the administration wing
overlooking the Seine is cushioned behind a hydro-
ponic wall designed by Patrick Blanc covered with
over 15,000 plants (figures 2 and 5). The fourth
building with its asymmetric walls flanking the
Rue de l’Université, houses a boutique, bookstore,
and the conservation laboratories. The total built
area amounts to 29,450 square meters with 7,500
square meters given to gardens. The area dedicated
to temporary exhibitions is roughly equal to 6,000
3. Exterior of the permanent exhibition gallery, June
square meters and is indicative of the potentially 2006 (photograph by author).
different foci the Museum is able to choose.
Jonathan Glancey, writing for The Guardian, de-
scribed the visitor experience as ‘‘a walk in the woods, ent forms of arts rather than an example of western
through a flow of buildings set back from the Rue de architecture’’ (Glancey 2006:12). For Marie-Douce
l’Université that nevertheless form a whole’’ (2006:13) Albert, in Le Figaro, the Museum represented a col-
and endorsed Jean Nouvel’s vision for the complex as lection of architectural styles and constitutes more a
‘‘a building nestled in the landscape and awaiting ‘‘territory’’ than a single built structure.
discovery, intended to serve as a home to these differ-

4. Garden gallery with the bookshop and boutique and

2. Exterior of the administration and research buildings, conservation department in the distance, June 2006
June 2006 (photograph by author). (photograph by author).
4 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1
5. Hydroponic wall on the administration building, June
2006 (photograph by author).
Branly, en effet, est un ensemble d’edifices trés
divers. Les façades des annexes sont tatôt
tapissées de verdure, hérissès de brise-soleil ou
sobrement vitrées pour laissser transparaı̂tre
des peintures réalisées par des artistes aborig-
ines. [Branly is indeed composed of a diverse
set of buildings. The facade of one of the an-
nexes is covered with greenery, the other is
protected with blind-like structures, while the
last is plainly glassed in so as to let Australian
Aboriginal paintings show through.] [Albert
2006]
A 12-meter high glass wall along the embank-
ment shielding the Museum from the sound of
traffic and doubling as a billboard announcing its
varied programs completes the illusion of an exclu-
sionary reserve.
Some Museum staff remarked that Nouvel
designed the building to fulfill an established cura-
torial program but emphasized subsequent
consultation with them was minimum, while oth-
ers have said he worked closely with its President,
Stéphane Martin. Nouvel, sidestepping the issue,
told Richard Lacayo and James Graff: ‘‘This is the
first time I’ve been able to work like this, around a
collection, and it has been formidable to create
harmony between the nature of the place and the
objects’’ (in Lacayo and Graff 2006). The complex
has been referred to as a collective work involving
25 collaborators working with Nouvel, including
landscape architects, museologists, conservators,
curators and Aboriginal and African artists (Le
Monde 2006a), though how much autonomy any of
these had is questionable. Sally Price reported the
strong-arm tactics used to ensure the Aboriginal
artists complied with the architectural vision of the
project and some employees complained of coercion
(2007:147). Whatever the case, disregarding dis-
persions on the hydroponic wall, which supposedly
causes excessive humidity in the offices behind it;
the underground collection storage areas that are
claimed to be susceptible to flooding due to their
proximity to the Seine (Dupaigne 2006:189); and
the controversy over disabled access (Roger 2006),
the building’s public spaces achieve a high degree
of functionality.
Externally and internally, the building uses
subtle colorings, rusts, sand-like orange, pale blues,
earthen ochre and brown and aubergine, while the
glazing on the south side of the exhibition hall,
protected by rust colored brises-soleil, has plant
motifs that echo the garden surrounding it and the
vegetation growing off its walls. The effect that this
achieves for the architectural critic of the New York
Times, ‘‘evokes an abandoned city, sprinkled with
French modernist landmarks, that has been taken
over and transformed into a wondrous collage’’
(Ouroussoff 2006). The ‘‘building’’ he goes on to
say: ‘‘Creates a Kaleidoscopic montage of urban
impressions’’ (Ouroussoff 2006). Lisa Rochon con-
curred referring to it as ‘‘a rare architectural
provocation,’’ ‘‘a sketch of the impulses of urbanity,’’
and ‘‘a factory in the Garden of Eden’’ (2006:R3).
For most reviewers the most unsettling part of
the permanent gallery was the ‘‘serpent,’’ a twisting
low walled structure that marks out a path, ‘‘la
rivière,’’ that funnels visitors from one area of the
hall to another (Clifford 2007:10; Harding 2007;
Kimmelman 2006; Lacayo and Graff 2006; Rochon
2006). Although described as a ‘‘tactile area,’’ spe-
cially adapted for handicapped visitors, this brown
molded leather structure conjured for me the Dog-
on’s Bandiagara Mountains, and echoed perhaps
the most famed of the former Musée de l’Homme’s
collecting expeditions (Africa is the strongest area
represented in the collection with approximately
90,000 objects) (de Roux 2006a). Apart from em-
bedded texts in brail the ‘‘serpent’’ also discreetly
houses film monitors and, in the pre-Columbian
area, a series of decidedly low tech but effective
viewing scopes that open out on Mayan archaeo-
logical sites. Critics (Clifford 2007:12; Price
2007:146) have rightly noted that this strange
structure separates contextual information from
 LE MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY 5

the exhibits, maintaining an unbreechable aes-

thetic halo around the artifacts themselves. James
Clifford worries that if the virtual tools for con-
textualizing the exhibits are ignored or go unused
the whole spectacle could become like a ‘‘magical
theme park’’ that at best might be thought exciting,
but at worst, superficial and confusing (2007:12).
For Jeremy Harding the serpent is kitsch, an aes-
thetic embarrassment that ‘‘simply elevates a
clunky failure of taste into an error of judgment’’
(2007:32).
Rochon found ‘‘the museum offered an aesthetic
experience that is by turns exhilarating and jar-
ring. Pathos and disjointed narratives are its chief
preoccupations’’ (2006:R3). Molly Moore, in The
Washington Post, advised visitors to ‘‘toss out all
preconceptions’’ (Moore 2006) of what museums are
supposed to be like. The quai Branly has no corri-
dors or hallways and deliberately breaks away
from traditional codes governing the way internal
spaces are supposed to work. The permanent exhi-
bition hall is entered via a twisting ramp way
alternating between areas of light and dark, that
first curves around a glass cylinder that projects
6. Interior. Beginning of oceanic displays, June 2006
from the basement to the top floor and serves as (photograph by author).
a visible storage area for the musical instrument
collection. The cylinder holds five floors of racks
containing 9,500 instruments divided by type. minimized to fade into the gallery, are either un-
Although closed to the public, it has outward facing usually high or placed side by side at eye level to
video screens illustrating different types of instru- allow better viewing of smaller objects. These
ments accompanied by sound clips. frameless cases house the majority of the gallery’s
Naoki Takizawa, the creative director of Issey 3,500 objects, which despite being described as a
Miyake, was commissioned to design the Museum’s ‘‘reference collection’’ were chosen by aesthetic
curtains, which were intended to be an extension of qualities. Lit by a combination of internal fiber
the architecture. The ground plan of the Museum, optic and LED lights together with external spots,
he recalled, reminded him of the silhouette of a the overall look of the permanent exhibition hall is
pregnant woman bringing life and water to bear on of a dark dramatic space that despite high levels of
his creation. The texture of the cloth was intended reflection, allow the objects to pop out in remark-
to represent the surface of water while the curtain able singularity (figure 6). The box-like projections
in the auditorium, volcanic lava. ‘‘The brown color off one side of the permanent exhibition hall were
of the auditorium curtain represents the red soil of envisaged as ‘‘sanctuaries’’ for artifacts either
the earth, and the printed copper foil on the sur- made of or containing human remains or endowed
face, the life force lurking in the lava’’ (Menkes with extraordinary spiritual powers according to
2006). Nouvel’s ‘‘obsession of death and forgetting’’ Germain Viatte, the museologist responsible for the
(Bremner 2006) is therefore tempered by Takiza- installation (Musée du quai Branly 2006:8).
wa’s inclusion of themes of life and rebirth, Véronique Prat (2006) described them as contain-
completing the cycle of creation. ing exceptional pieces or objects related by a
As in his other buildings, Nouvel designed the common theme. Notwithstanding the architect’s
Museum’s display cases and interpretive plat- intention, Christopher Dickey interprets the cubes
forms. The glass cases, whose structure has been as resembling ‘‘darkened huts from the inside’’
6 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1
(2006). This is the opposite effect of the white cube
of the art gallery and detracts from its desired im-
pact through being too dark, having too much
glare, and by making it difficult to see where the
case glass ends and the glazed walls begin. Overall,
most reviewers suspended judgment on the success
of the building’s interiors. Harding, however, com-
mented: ‘‘As for exoticism, it’s hard to say how the
new museum scores until some of the grotto effects
are taken away. The silly leather partitions should
go and the Tarzan décor should be washed off the
windows’’ (2007:33). Clifford provides what is
probably the most succinct summary when he
writes ‘‘[in the] quai Branly, ‘illusion’ and the ‘work
of art’ coexist uneasily with the realism of ethno-
graphy and history’’ (2007:5).
Interpretation: Gauguin and the Two
Rousseaus Meet Aristotle
Michael Kimmelman, one of the quai Branly’s
strongest critics, writing in the New York Times, is
unequivocal: ‘‘If the Marx Brothers designed a mu-
seum for dark people, they might have come up
with the permanent-collections galleries; devised
as a spooky jungle, red and black and murky, the
objects in it chosen and arranged with hardly any
discernible logic, the place is briefly thrilling, as
spectacle, but brow-slapping wrongheaded’’ (2006).
On the contrary, according to the Museum’s
functionaries, objects are meaningfully placed but
are also intended to encourage visitors to feel the
thrill of deciding their own journey through the
hall. The main exhibition gallery is divided into four
continental areas each flowing into one another, but
demarcated by different colored vinyl floors. Objects
were grouped by type. According to Viatte:
The itinerary has been designed to instill a
sense of wonder in the visitors, and a desire to
deepen their knowledge. Their wonderings are
punctuated by thematic sequences in which
objects illustrating a given subject throw fur-
ther light upon the cultures that produced
them. The presentation as a whole is crossed by
transversal sequences highlighting cultural
relationships and influences present in worlds
more interdependent upon one another than
might be imagined. [Musée du quai Branly
2006:8–11]
If there is any failure, it lies not with the archi-
tecture or technical display of the art, but with the
interpretation of the collections. This is difficult to
assess and has made most non-academic critics fo-
cus on the architecture and the rhetoric around the
new Museum. During the press call on the 21 of
June, floor finishes were still being laid, vitrines
still awaited cleaning, lighting had not been ad-
justed and a few areas and cases were devoid of
objects. Even when these had been nearly remedied
by the following day, parts of the permanent gallery
lacked text panels and labels and most of the mon-
itors were still not working making it easy for
critics, like Kimmelman to dismiss the exhibition
as a decontextualized, over-aestheticised spectacle.
Tom Dyckhoff described it as a ‘‘blot,’’ an ‘‘epitaph
for a botched President’’ (2006), which he further
clarified by comparing the buildingF‘‘eccentric,
incoherent and full of unresolved doubts’’ (2006)F
to Chirac’s own character. Bernard Dupaigne
(2006:212), the former head of the Musée de l’Ho-
mme’s Laboratoire d’Ethnologie, dismissed it as a
new formulation of a colonial museum; while oth-
ers mused about whether it is still defensible for
the West to continue to hold the art they ‘‘took’’
from their subjected dominions. Marina Bradbury
reiterated the critics charge of it being ‘‘patronising
and racist’’ (2006). ‘‘Its very existence is an assault
on aboriginal peoples around the world’’ according
to Rochon (2006:R3). Concerns like this had al-
ready been voiced in 2001, when Benoit de l’Estoile
argued that to prevent the Museum from becoming
analogous to former colonial exhibitions, it needed
to solely focus on historical cultures or ensure a
dynamic coverage of their present and future
(Amato 2006:60). As Harding observed however:
When the Republic extends the courtesy of
‘‘identity’’ to other cultures, it is rebuffed as a
condescending, assimilationist ogre acting in
bad faith; when it grits its teeth and prepares to
celebrate ‘‘difference,’’ it is accused of exoticism
or thought to be in the grip of a cultural hallu-
cination brought on by the return of jungle
fever. [2007:32]
Such impassioned attacks were, therefore, proba-
bly unavoidable.
There are undeniable disquieting effects in
the quai Branly’s presentation. The overall dark-
ness surrounding the brilliantly lit jewel-like cases
conjures fantasy images of the ‘‘Dark Continent’’
that reference discredited notions of primitive
 LE MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY 7

mentality, primordial origins and pre-Enlighten- chitect that resonates with James Frazer’s The
ment worlds, what Jean-Loup Amselle referred to Golden Bough (1890). Enlightenment philosophy,
as conjuring ‘‘delicious fright’’ (2005). For Harding Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti, and the Douanier Rous-
the overall effect of the gallery is to evoke ‘‘a fan- seau’s Parisian junglescapes seem to collide with
tasy of pre-contact worlds adrift in benign and Aristotelian theories on the determinacy of nature
fertile obscurity’’ (2007:32) before noting, ‘‘. . . on character, or Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas on
vitrines are beautifully illuminated, like sacred ob- primitive mentality being a response to intimidat-
jects in a series of clearings’’ (2007:32). Kimmelman ing and fearful environments. These contradictions
referred to the Museum as ‘‘a heart of darkness in are never resolved and appear to proclaim a new
the city of light’’ (2006). The famous Fon anthropo- hagiography superseding the latent surrealization
morphic figures from King Glélé’s Royal Palace of ‘‘primitive art’’ championed by André Breton,
(Republic of Benin) look out from a darkened an- Max Ernst, Wolfgang Paalen, and other artists who
gular recess. In another cube, Congo minkisi had become romantically attached to the galleries
figures, formerly acclaimed as ‘‘fetishes,’’ are of the Musée de l’Homme.
displayed on a barely lit series of surrounding ped- On the positive side, the sheer amount of tem-
estals, while elsewhere an impressive group porary exhibition space indicates the institution’s
of Vanuatu mummies stand facing the onlooker commitment to greater and more in-depth coverage
who is pressed close to the vitrine by surrounding of world cultures; its disavowal of terms like
isle cases (figure 7). ‘‘primitive,’’ ‘‘primordial,’’ or ‘‘tribal’’ arts, and even
While highlighting the objects, the darkness de- its suggested post colonial designate, ‘‘arts pre-
fines an absence radiant with older prejudices and miers’’ (a term proposed by Pierre Gaudibert, a
presuppositions about these objects that is quite at former curator of the Musée d’Arte Moderne and
odds with the institution’s commitment toward
vanquishing any hierarchy between the world’s
artistic traditions and aesthetic sensibilities.
Moreover, the lush gardens with which Clément
has surrounded the Museum and the etched bo-
tanical illustrations on its glazed walls reference
Jean Jacques Rousseau’s visions of original nature.
Even the pillars supporting the raised section of
the permanent gallery are intended to evoke trees
prompting Dickey to suggest the jungle motif to be
overdone and bordering on condescension. The
same issue was raised by Gilles Manceron, an his-
torian and civil rights proponent who likewise
accused the jungle theme as perpetuating tradi-
tional stereotypes of non-Western people living in a
state of savagery (Bremner 2006). The winding
pathways, meant to encourage visitors to experi-
ence their sojourn as a kind of expedition, do little
but add to this impression. For Kimmelman the
main gallery is ‘‘an enormous, rambling, crepus-
cular cavern that tries to evoke a journey into the
jungle downriver . . .’’ (2006). In contrary fashion it
has been described as a giant hammock hanging
above a garden (Le Monde 2006a). The jungle motif
when it was first proposed, prompted Geneviève
Welcomme, writing in Le Croix in 2000 (in Du-
7. Interior. Mummies, Vanuatu, June 2006 (photograph
paigne 2006:98), to compare the grounds to a by author).
‘‘sacred grove,’’ a phrase repeatedly used by its ar-
8 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1
preferred by Chirac and Kerchache) points to the
possibility of a new kind of engagement. While the
term has been heavily criticized as a new foil for
‘‘primitive’’ art, Dominique Michelet, director of
research at CNRS, has argued that the concept be-
hind it, ‘‘arts des premières nations,’’ distinguishes
it as derived from ‘‘autochtone,’’ native, an appella-
tion that supposedly avoids connotations of the
primitive (Amato 2006:61).
Many reviewers reiterate that the Museum
has been called Chirac’s greatest legacy for Paris
(Bradbury 2006; Bremner 2006; Glancey 2006;
Harding 2007) and may soon bear his name. In
Chirac’s eyes at least the quai Branly is a post-
colonial museum, an aspiration also supported by
Jean-Yves Marin, Director of the Musée Norman-
die in Caen (Le Monde 2006b). The Museum’s
collections will be liberated from their interdepen-
dence on other French national narratives. No
longer will they be seen as tools used by painters
like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Wilfredo Lam,
Max Ernst, or Joan Miro, nor as muses as they were
for writers like Henry Roussel or Antonin Artaud,
nor even as inspirations for new philosophical
views of the world as with the Orientalists and the
Surrealists (the relationship was only picked up by
Dickey), but as original and unique creative ex-
pressions in their own right.
Chirac repeatedly claimed there is no hierarchy
between the arts just as there is none between
peoples and voiced his desire that the young, dis-
affected population of Parisian immigrants will
warmly embrace the Museum. His inauguration
speech emphasized French recognition of cultural
plurality, the importance of dialogue between cul-
tures and the country’s openness to the wider
world; ideals that were also intended to subtly crit-
icize United States political belief in the supremacy
of its own culture (Bremner 2006). For Chirac the
quai Branly is intended to dispel ignorance and ar-
rogance and promote a more open and respectful
public view of the cultures and arts it represents. In
his inauguration speech he observed:
Au Coeur de notre demarche, il y a le refus de
l’ethnocentrisme, de cette prétention dérai-
sonnable de l’Occident à porter, en lui seul, le
destin de l’humanité. Il y a le rejet de ce faux
évolutionnisme qui pretend que certains peo-
ples seraient comme figés á un stade antérieur
de l’évolution humaine, que leurs cultures dites
‘‘primitives’’ ne vaudraient que comme objets
d’étude por l’ethnologue ou, au mieux, sources
de’inspiration pour l’artiste occidental. [At the
heart of our approach is the rejection of et-
hnocentrism, of this unreasonable pretension
of the West to hold within itself the destiny of
‘‘Humanity.’’ Our approach is centered around
the rejection of the false evolutionism that
claims that some peoples remain in an anterior
stage of human evolution and that their so-
called ‘‘primitive’’ cultures are merely worth
serving as objects of study for the anthropolo-
gist, or, at best, as an inspiration for the
Western artist.] [Le Monde 2006b]
Furthermore, the Museum is a form of homage
rendered by France:
[D]es peuples auxquels, au fil des âges, l’histo-
ire a trop souvent fait violence. Peuples
brutalisés, exterminés par des conquérants av-
ides et brutaux. Peuples humiliés et méprisés,
auxquels on allait jusqu’à denier qu’ils eussent
une histoire. Peuples aujourd’hui encore sou-
vent marginalisés, fragilisés, menacés par
l’avancée inexorable de la modernité. Peuples
qui veulent néanmoins voir leur dignité res-
taurée et reconnue. [Peoples who have been
brutalized, exterminated by harsh and instable
conquerors: people humiliated and scorned,
of whom it was even denied that they had a
history: people often still marginalized, enfee-
bled, threatened by the inexorable advance of
modernity; people who nonetheless want rec-
ognition and a restoration of their dignity.]
[Chirac 2006]
The Museum’s President, Stéphane Martin,
concurs:
Quai Branly is less a museum than a cultural
complex. The arts hold top billing, no doubt, but
so do music, dance and civilization. In addition,
the museum is also a campus for students, and
researchers who can study the collections in
exceptional conditions. It is this coexistence
between scientists and the public that will
make Branly such a unique place. [Bure
2006:68]
For Martin, it is a new kind of institution, empow-
ered by the fracture between ethnography and
aesthetics and conservation and research that will
fulfill both a popular public function as well as pro-
vide a research and teaching institution for
national and foreign investigators. In a conversa-
tion with Charles Bremner, Martin stated, ‘‘We

want to be a portal, an interface between Western
and non-European societies’’ (Bremner 2006). This
seems part of a more general rethinking of what
constitutes the essence of Francophone culture.
Moving away from purist and essentialist catego-
ries France may be embracing a more intercultural
perspective that allows it to point to some of the
positive effects of its colonial post. According to
Martin: ‘‘We eat Thai, our tattoos are Polynesian,
we dress African and do our hair in Antillais
[Caribbean] style. All that means that the notion of
cultural purity on which many former ethnological
museums rested makes no sense today’’ (Brothers
2006).
Jacques Friedmann, the Museum’s Honorary
President, expressed his hope that the Museum
will also include contemporary art, an important
area in which to trace the workings of intercultur-
alism (de Roux 2006d). Though, with the exception
of a number of Aboriginal acrylics, contemporary
art was largely missing from the current reference
collection, it promises to be an important thread
running through future temporary exhibitions.
Furthermore, because the ministries of education
and culture and communication both fund the
Museum, there is huge potential, far from obliter-
ating the memory of the defunct Laboratoire d’Et-
hnologie of the Musée de l’Homme, as Dupaigne
(2006:198) claims to be the objective of the new
museum, to build on its enviable reputation while
encouraging new lines of research. The success of
the Museum in the end will depend on whether the
rhetoric informs the practices that the new infra-
structure can so evidently support (cf. Marin 2006).
Put another way, as Clifford astutely notes, it
remains to be seen whether the inherent con-
tradictions between the different agendas repre-
sented within the quai Branly will bring into being
a very different kind of institution than Chirac and
Kerchache ever intended (2007:22).
‘‘Glacial Responses:’’ Two World-Views, Two
Museums, and Two Auditoriums
Amselle (2005) noted that the quai Branly pro-
ject seemed to have been trapped from its
inception. How, he asks, will it demarcate and le-
gitimate the borderline between art and non-art?
Are the arts of the rest of the world less primal than
those represented in the quai Branly? Does it not
reproduce the old dichotomy between Western and
LE MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY 9
non-Western art museums? And what are the im-
plications of excluding European and Islamic art?
Ambiguity around the Museum has inevitably been
provoked by the often-unrestrained cultural poli-
tics that date to the inception of the ideas
underlying it in 1990 (cf. de Roux 2006b, 2006c; Le
Monde 2006c). These have pitted anthropologists
against politicians and aesthetes in a battle that
was seen as a struggle between popularism and
elitism, scholarship and emotion, science and com-
merce, colonialism and post-colonialism and
provincialism and universalism. Neither the Mu-
seum as it stands today, or its future potential can
be gauged without first understanding the painful
period of its gestation.
The driving force and fundamental idea behind
the quai Branly was first aired by the much vilified
art collector, dealer and adventurer, Kerchache.
Ignored by François Mitterand (in 1984 he wrote
him advocating the inclusion of arts premiers in the
Louvre), a chance meeting with Chirac in 1990 led
to a close friendship based on their shared passions
for non-Western art. The idea of curating a 1994
quincentenary exhibition in Paris that instead of
celebrating Columbus’ discovery of America, was
focused on the civilization of the Taino was quickly
endorsed and supported by Chirac and constituted
the first of three bold projects that would bring the
two men increasingly close together. Kerchache
played a crucial role in shaping the aesthetic and
what for him was a radical anti-ethnographic
agenda. While his refusal to acknowledges the ex-
istence of any essential hierarchy between the
world’s art was opportune, his acerbic personality
and his vehement opposition to anthropology and
ignorance of the substantial contribution genera-
tions of curators at the Musée de l’Homme had
made to the understanding of comparative aes-
thetics was vastly detrimental to the whole project.
The archaeologist Michel Colardelle, writing in
1998 about the acrimonious split between ‘‘aes-
thetic’’ and ‘‘scientific’’ camps of curators, charac-
terized their relationship as one of ‘‘reciprocal
contempt’’ (Price 2007:107).
As early as 1962 when André Malraux, then
Minister of Culture, re-designated the Musée de la
France d’Outre-Mer at the Porte Dorée, as the
MNAAO and placed it under the administration of
the Musées de France, the idea of recognizing the
universal aesthetic supposedly common to all ar-
10 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1
tistic creativity had become an important pillar of
Gaullist cultural politics. For Kerchache the fulfill-
ment of such a view could only be realized once the
Louvre had extended its coverage to the art of
the whole of humanity. Later, he saw this as only
the first step in a wider presentation of arts pre-
miers to be housed in a reformed Musée de
l’Homme. Claude Lévi-Strauss had put a similar
position forward in the 1940s (Corby 2000:6).
Although now criticized by many anthropologists,
including Maurice Godelier, Chirac readily adopted
the first part of Kerchache’s crusade, which he eas-
ily imposed over the objections of the Louvre’s
director, Pierre Rosenberg and his curators, after
becoming President.
This was not the first time that non-Western art
had breeched the walls of the Louvre. As Price
(2007:30) reiterated, the Museum’s forerunner, the
Musée Dauphin, as early as 1830 included ethno-
graphic works that were not removed until the
1870s when they were re-housed in the newly con-
structed Palais du Trocadero. Calls for replacing
such collections in the Louvre were never entirely
silenced and were made by, among others, the poet,
Guillaume Apollonaire, the anarchist, Félix Fénéon
and the art dealer Paul Guillaume (Price 2007:35).
Organized by Kerchache and the architect,
Jean-Michel Willmotte, between 1998 and 2000,
117 ‘‘master works’’ of non-Western art were placed
on ‘‘permanent’’ exhibition in the Louvre’s Pavillon
de Sessions. Using items taken from the collections
of the Musée de l’Homme and the MNAAO, the ex-
hibition not surprisingly was arranged solely on
aesthetic criteria that emphasized the individual
creativity of their makers over the works’ social or
functional context. A prominent advertising cam-
paign using images that illustrated various non-
Western art pieces, including two extraordinary
Inuit masks acquired in 1999 from the Breton col-
lection, polemically proclaiming ‘‘we too are the
Musée du Louvre,’’ succeeded not only in attracting
three million visitors between 2000 and 2006, but
also helped win support for a future museum based
on Kerchache’s aesthetic viewpoint. Kerchache
and Willmotte’s strategy further alarmed anthro-
pologists and ethnographic curators alike who
predictably accused them of decontextualizing ob-
jects and reappropriating them within European
narrative traditions, based on Western individual-
ism. The Louvre exhibition was accused of attempt-
ing to incorporate non-Western art and culture
within a French hegemonic cultural politic. The
well-orchestrated public criticism of Kerchache led
some independent observers to believe he was be-
ing unfairly vilified (Corby 2000:4), and his
questionable escapades and adventurous past led
to others identifying him as a French Indiana
Jones, or more benignly, Tin Tin (Price 2007:15–
17). Kerchache had anticipated his critics. In an
October 9, 1999 article by Prat in Le Figaro Maga-
zine (quoted in Dupaigne 2006:104), repeating his
view of the inability of anthropologists to recognize
the formal aesthetic qualities of art, he tauntingly
challenged them that if they were to arrange an
exhibit of the Venus de Milo, it would undoubtedly
be contextualized by positioning the sculpture be-
tween two mannequins, the one playing a flute and
the other dressed as a shepherdess holding goat
cheese.
This gulf between most anthropologists and
Gaullist cultural politics began to widen in 1995
when Chirac voiced his view that ethnology and art
were two quite separate things and the following
year when he established a commission, under
Friedmann, to examine the future of arts premiers
in Paris. The commission reported that the distinc-
tion between ethnographic and art museums was
no longer intellectually justifiable and recom-
mended that the ethnographic collections of the
Musée de l’Homme and MNAAO should be brought
together. In October of 1996 Chirac announced the
creation of a new Museum of Civilizations and Arts
Premiers. Initially, the intention had been to es-
tablish a new department of Africa, America,
Oceania and the Arctic in the Louvre by 2002 and
to enlarge, renovate and transform the space occu-
pied by the Musée de l’Homme in the Palais
de Chaillot by removing the naval museum to the
building occupied formerly by the MNAAO at the
Porte Dorée. Germain Viatte, the former Director of
the Musée de Arte Moderne, and the Musées de
Ville de Marseilles, along with Kerchache as his
advisor, were appointed to direct the establish-
ment of the new institution in 1997, joined at
the end of 1998 by Martin as President. These
appointments exacerbated the rift between the
supporters of the new Museum and anthropologists
including Louis Dumont, Daniel de Coppet, and
Philippe Laburthe-Tolra, along with members of
the Ethnology section of the CNRS, who supported

the approach of the Musée de l’Homme. The Labo-
ratoire d’Ethnologie of the Musée de l’Homme
established a Committee of Defense that by using
the Internet organized a public petition against
‘‘the destruction of the museum,’’ which by 1997
had attracted 10,000 signatures. The same year the
Musée de Marine organized its own defense com-
mittee and with the support of the Ministry of
Defense, defeated plans to re-locate it. In February
1998, Chirac announced that the new home for the
future Musée des Arts et des Civilisations, would
be built at 29-55 quai Branly. The director of the
MNAAO, Jean-Paul Martin, added his own voice
against the plans for a museum of arts premiers
and in 1999 was supported by André Langaney,
Director of the Musée de l’Homme’s Laboratoire
d’Anthropologie biologique, who decried the lack of
intellectual credibility around the project.
In an attempt to placate anthropological furor
and to better represent the Ministry of Education
that had been responsible for the Musée de l’Ho-
mme’s collections, in 1997 Maurice Godelier was
appointed scientific advisor with a mandate to de-
velop a research and teaching agenda and advise
on more anthropological type presentations. He
began by successfully contextualizing the arts pre-
miers that Kerchache had installed in the Louvre,
before advocating more geographically based and
thematic exhibition strategies in the quai Branly
itself. His suggestion that exhibitions be based
on great universal themes that tied humanity
togetherFsexuality, death, exchange, the repre-
sentation of power, heterosexual and homosexual
rituals, religion, gods, spirits and ancestors, the
body, the life cycle, the production of riches, ways of
understanding the environment and human im-
pact on it, and craft and technologyFhowever,
were ultimately unacceptable to Viatte and Kerch-
ache and, with unexpected reductions in the
research and teaching budget, in 2002, he with-
drew from the project. While Godelier’s vision that
visitors to the quai Branly should be able to ‘‘pass
from the joy of seeing to the joy of knowing’’ (in
Price 2007:50) may have been at least partly ful-
filled, his championship of it being a post-colonial
museum can be seen by the lack of history in the
permanent gallery to have been firmly rejected.
With the Museum seeming to abandon its promised
research and teaching functions and the retrench-
ment of the aesthetic camp, despite Kerchache’s
LE MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY 11
death the same year, the desperation of the Musée
de l’Homme’s staff was exacerbated and in Novem-
ber 2001 they went on strike. Staff withdrew their
reluctant collaboration completely from the Pro-
ject, and by 2002 were organized to prevent the
removal of the Museum’s collections. While the
holdings of the MNAAO were relocated at its clo-
sure in 2003, not until the next year were they
finally amalgamated with those of the Musée de
l’Homme, when the Easter Island figure collected
by Pierre Loti that had graced its foyer was finally
carried away.
There were other well publicized debacles that
the Musée du quai Branly had created for itself (de
Roux 2006b, 2006c; Price 2007:67–80); the acquisi-
tion of looted or illegally exported artifacts, its
extravagant acquisitions, the loss of the Pimpan-
eau Collection (Chirac authorized the expenditure
of $28.7 million acquiring around 8,500 new works,
while refusing to purchase this important Asian
popular culture collection), the escalation in cost
from 167 m in 1998 to 235 m in 2006 (Prat 2006),
and rumors of corruption, but the antagonisms be-
tween Chirac, Kerchache and their emissaries
against their ethnographic detractors and the
dehistoricization of the permanent gallery will
mark the development of the institution for years
to come. Symptomatic of the conflict was that few
former employees of the Musée de l’Homme, unlike
those of the MNAAO, were transferred to quai
Branly. Whether such antagonism masked more
fundamental conflicts growing out of ‘‘power plays
and interpersonal rivalries’’ as Viatte claimed
(Price 2007:56), or outdated understandings of an-
thropology and art, remains to be ascertained.
Paradoxically, because it has been so public, so bit-
ter and so protracted the conflict between
ethnographic and aesthetic interpretation may be
one of the Museums enduring legacies. This funda-
mental antagonism is not only represented in the
origin of its collections, derived from two funda-
mentally different institutions, the one an art
museum and the other ethnographic, but was com-
memorated in the quai Branly’s very fabric by
naming its two auditoriums after the aesthete
Kerchache and the chief anthropologist to support
the project, Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Regardless of the intellectual accomplishments
of the staff of the Musée de l’Homme, it is indis-
putable that its permanent exhibition galleries
12 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1

were old and out of date. For the most part badly lit
and crammed into outdated metallic cases ar-
ranged in serried lines, collections appeared
unused, uncared for, and incapable of engaging
most of their visitors. Conditions were worse still in
the stores where meager budgets had prevented
the adequate conservation and care of the collec-
tion. The institution had been racked by internal
conflicts at least since the 1970s. Between 1985 and
1995 attendance fell from 350,000 to 175,000 (Price
2007:85), and after Emile Biasini failed to get
Mitterand to honor his 1992 promise of two hun-
dred million francs to renovate it, the Museum
stumbled from crisis to crisis (de Roux 2006c).
8. Temporary exhibition on the body, June 2006 (photo-
graph by author).
The Political Culture of Aesthetic
Universalism
The first temporary exhibitions at the quai tation, and ambitious interpretive texts, were
Branly indicated a different approach than that in acclaimed as having fulfilled the Museum’s ‘‘double
the permanent gallery. The exhibition, Qu’est-ce vision.’’
qu’un corps?, curated by Stéphane Breton, was re- These three exhibitions went behind the old and
markably interrogative, concerned with using immensely futile contrasts between anthropologi-
ethnographic examples from the West and else- cal contextualization and aesthetic approaches to
where to raise questions about concepts of the body recognize both as valid methodologies, but meth-
(figures 8 and 9). Using multimedia presentations, odologies that are themselves implicated within
photographs, an installation, and African masks, modernist discourses and themselves reconstitu-
the exhibition took a fertile approach resonant of tive of any idealized originating context. Godelier’s
the Année Sociologique a century ago, treating an- ethnographic exhibition criteria were as predict-
thropology as a comparative study of ideas, a kind able and well established as those of Kerchache,
of empirical philosophy that seeks to dislodge cul- but the interstices between the epistemologies on
tural prejudices by juxtaposing them with which they are predicated and between these and
alternative held beliefs. Emmanuel de Roux’s other narratives are redolent with promise. Viatte
(2006e) review described it as a conceptual exhibi- sees the quai Branly as ‘‘an ever changing forum for
tion, that followed a different approach from the
mainstream but that was eminently anthropologi-
cal. The second exhibition revolved around the
French anthropologist Georges Condominas, au-
thor of the acclaimed monograph Nous avons
mangé la forêt (1957) and a critic of the American
Government’s use of ethnographic research during
the Vietnam War. Curated by Christine Hemmet,
this was an historical, ethnographic, and bio-
graphical exhibition that included Condominus’s
notebooks, publications, and photographs. The
third exhibition, curated by Jean-Paul Colleyn,
centered on the Museum’s collection of Bambara
ciwara, Ciwara: Chimères Africaines, combined et-
hnographic, historical and stylistic perspectives.
9. Temporary exhibition on the body, June 2006 (photo-
All three were reviewed by de Roux (2006f) and, by graph by author).
integrating visual seductiveness, aesthetic presen-

discussion’’ that will encourage debate through its
theatre and cinema, as well as through teaching
and research to enrich ‘‘the links that should be
developed between the various networks that ani-
mate modern-day intellectual and artistic life’’
(Musée du quai Branly 2006:11). Martin agrees
that in addition to recognizing the formal qualities
of non-Western art, it is ‘‘equally important to
highlight their social, historical, sociological and
sometimes even psychoanalytic diversity’’ (Musée
du quai Branly 2006:5). Later exhibitions on the
Benin artist Romuaid Azoulay and the London
based Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare as well as
another on the photographic collections of the 19th
century explorer Désiré Charnay seem to fulfill this
wider mandate (de Roux 2006d). In September
2006, the Museum opened its first large scale exhi-
bition, D’un regard l’autre, comprising of over 1,400
paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture, and
weapons, about changing European perceptions of
African, American, and Pacific cultures from the
15th to the mid–20th century. Here at last was an
historical show that, beginning with European de-
pictions of anthropomorphic creatures and wild
men, advanced to de Bry’s prints of Native Ameri-
can savagery (c. 1590), to an impressive
assemblage of Albert Eckhout’s paintings of native
Brazilians (1640s). The show continued with draw-
ings made on Cook’s voyages, and a presentation of
the documents and collections made by diplomats,
soldiers, and traders. The exhibition also included
thematic presentations, on the modeling of 17th
century maps, for example, on the human body, and
the impact of non-Western art on 20th century
European artists. The exhibition finished with a
trophy display of miscellaneous weapons, and a se-
lection of anatomical heads modeled on diverse
ethnic groups, which were intended to illustrate
supposed differences in brain size. The exhibition
was notable for its size and comprehensiveness and
the deconstructive gaze it placed on past European
concepts of the ‘‘Other.’’ It was, however, regretta-
ble that it did not continue its disquisition into the
present.
There are many more important debates than
that between scientific ethnology and aesthetics
that have too often been ignored, but which with
race riots exploding across France in 2005 and de-
bates about tougher new immigration policies,
need be given greater prominence. The efficacy and
LE MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY 13
constitution of the quai Branly’s public sphere ap-
pear initially to differ little to that of most
majoritarian museums of the 19th and 20th centu-
ries. The debates they host remain stuck between
similar agencies and publics, blind to the dimin-
ishing possibilities for reconciliation and consensus
building between different segments of their popu-
lation. It is still possible that the danger of further
social ruptures may encourage more radical re-in-
stitutionalizations of public narratives by the state
itself, such as in the recent opening of the Islamic
Gallery within the Louvre.
Despite the widely felt misgivings among aca-
demic commentators on the permanent exhibitions,
quai Branly’s temporary exhibition program al-
ready shows a new critical slant that has been
notably absent from other ethnographic museums
in Europe and North America. In the main such
museums have failed to question the fundamental
categories on which they are based or contribute to
the development of a new dialogue between the
world’s cultures and aesthetic sensibilities (Shelton
2001a:145, 2001b:227). Moreover, they have shied
away from redressing the fracture that divides
them from the communities and nations they claim
to represent. To paraphrase Clifford, exhibits need
to reflect ‘‘excluded experiences, colonial pasts and
current struggles’’ (1997:122); they need to subvert
the art culture dichotomy; local and community
histories need to be inscribed into gallery interpre-
tations; and collections need to be presented
‘‘inscribed within different traditions and prac-
tices, free of national, cosmopolitan patrimonies’’
(1997:122).
There are no native voices or colonial histories in
the quai Branly. To cut colonial history from art (or
anthropology) and institutionalize them sepa-
rately, the one in the center of Paris, the other on its
periphery in the Porte Dorée, represents the kind of
depoliticized Kantian rationalism that has become
only too transparent as ruling ideology. Both aes-
thetics and ethnography gain their legitimacy from
the same epistemological program and represent
different but no less problematic recontextualisat-
ions of cultures geographically and/or historically
removed from their sites of origin. Martin and Vi-
atte acknowledge that the quai Branly may at the
very least change the terms of the public gaze away
from looking at an object as standing for a society or
race humiliated by western colonial science to rep-
14 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1
resenting an expression of aesthetic genius (in
Amato 2006:55). This change of terms appears to be
at the heart of a wider reorientation of French cul-
tural politics. Amselle (2005) has drawn attention
to the growing cultural and artistic engagement
between France and her former African colonies
that are producing an increasingly integrated in-
tercontinental cultural landscape. Amselle
(2005:52) referred to this as ‘‘Françafriche’’ and
identified writers, choreographers and festival or-
ganizers who see the future vitality of French
culture being dependent on renewal from the pe-
riphery. Price (2005:138–139) reported similar
processes in Guyana where painters, carvers, and
performers are encouraged with state and Euro-
pean Union subsidies to develop their talents and
interpret their work through western discourses
that favor symbolic exegeses, thereby amalgamat-
ing their French citizenship with their exotic
cultural inheritance. If the quai Branly sees itself
as part of this new project of cultural (and political)
renewal, it is not surprising why so few contempo-
rary indigenous artists have been critical of it.
Maori artist Fiona Pardington referred to muse-
ums as ‘‘Western receptacles at their worst’’ and
admitted to being impressed by the Museum’s en-
gagement on critical issues (Venter 2006:8). Her
support appears to be reiterated by many of the
Museum’s immigrant visitors who, we are told,
have overwhelmingly expressed their appreciation
at seeing their cultural heritage exhibited in such a
prominent Parisian location. Provisional visitor
statistics seem to indicate only about a third of vis-
itors are tourists, with 60% of the remainder made
up of habitual museum goers and the remaining
40% comprising ‘‘a new museum-going public’’ at-
tracted by the links the Museum provides between
them and their cultures of origin (Brothers 2006). If
the Musée du quai Branly is part of this cultural
and political re-alignment of the French state, it is
not alone. Since the appointment of Henri Loyrette
as its director, the Louvre has taken an increas-
ingly globalized path. It has instituted joint
archaeological, museological and exhibition pro-
jects with Iran, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia,
Turkmenistan, and Sudan, increasing visitor num-
bers from 5 to 7.5 million in five years and shedding
some of its elite pretensions (Melikian 2006).
As part of its opening ceremonies the quai Bran-
ly invited Bruno Latour to organize a series of eight
roundtable discussions between distinguished
scholars of non-Western art, visual culture, and
museology to debate the central problems that af-
fect contemporary museums. Panels discussed the
implications of the ethnographic/aesthetic dichot-
omy on exhibitions, the differences between
modern, contemporary and traditional art, issues
over ownership, whether museums are secular, rit-
ual, or multipurpose spaces, the preservation and
collection of intangible cultural property, the pur-
poses of museums in urban areas, international
cooperation, and the meaning of the concept of au-
thenticity. However, a museum with the resources
of the quai Branly can do better than reiterate well-
trodden ground. There is ample room to explore the
nature of the epistemologies underlying Kantian
and Hegelian aesthetics, to compare them with
those of other societies, a kind of comparative epi-
stemological and aesthetic exercise, which directly
leads to questions of the gaze and their relation to
indigenous forms of knowledge. There is the little
developed branch of philosophical anthropology
that through the work of Ernst Cassirer and Su-
sanne Langer again returns us to questions of the
nature of aesthetics, the efficacy of objects, and our
perception of the world. Linguistic and phenome-
nological studies of the language and experience of
connoisseurship has hardly been examined. An-
thropology is rich with avenues prematurely closed
to research, many bordering on adjacent disci-
plines, that interdisciplinary discussion can
reinvigorate. Such discussions need to include in-
digenous peoples along with this international
intellectual elite. While the opening of the Louvre to
the public in 1793 represented the emergence of the
museum as part of a new bourgeois public sphere
that was to become characteristic of capitalist soci-
eties, it is conceivable that the Musée du quai
Branly, at the beginning of the 21st century, could
either come to be regarded as merely heralding the
last painful gasps of the old museum model, or be-
come representative of a new direction for
refocusing such institutions. The coexistence of
radical and contradictory agendas underlying the
foundation and operation of the quai Branly, with
their complex political, cultural, and intellectual
interactions may produce, as their temporary ex-
hibition program seems to imply, a very unique
institution that might yet challenge some of our
most dearly held museological presuppositions.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Sarah Carr-Locke for assisting in edit-
ing the final draft of this paper and Solen Roth for her expert
translations of French texts into English. I am also grateful
to Hadrien Laroche, cultural attache at the French Consul-
ate in Vancouver and the French Embassy in Ottawa for
kindly funding my trip to attend the remarkable opening of
the Musee du quai Branly.
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16 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1
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Anthony Alan Shelton is the Director of the Museum of
Anthropology and a Professor in the Department of
Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. He
is the author of numerous essays and the editor of
Collectors: Expressions of Self and Other (Horniman
Museum and Gardens, 2001), Collectors: Individuals
and Institutions (Horniman Museum and Gardens,
2001), and with Jeremy Coote, Anthropology, Art and
Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1995).
Abstract
This article has the dual purpose of first describing the Musée
du quai Branly and secondly critically evaluating its espoused
intentions, its reception and its potential disciplinary, politi-
cal and museological implications. The first part of the essay
is approached through the analysis of a selection of newspa-
per reviews, and a comparison between these and
institutionally sanctioned views of the Museum as expressed
by some of its principal functionaries and instigators. The es-
say concludes by discussing whether the function and
organization of the museum as a public space significantly
differs from earlier projects undertaken on the eve of the 21st
century. [Keywords: Musée du quai Branly, museum exhibi-
tion, display, representation]