Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: In this article I investigate the making of two new museums of Europe—Marseille's Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean and Berlin's Museum of European Cultures—by focusing on the kinds of “Europe” envisioned in their exhibitions. I argue that museums represent an important site where the geopolitical imaginary of a bounded, culturalized Europe is produced, even if by default. I explore how these older national folklore collections were strategically rebranded as museums of Europe to give a second life to their nearly obsolete displays. National projects and geopolitics play a key role in such memorial Europeanization. These insights challenge taken‐for‐granted understandings of scale in memory studies and offer a more nuanced understanding of how Europeanization is playing out within cultural institutions. Amid multiple European crises, “Europe” is increasingly imagined as a diverse but essentially united cultural space—however fuzzy and contested its cultural content may be—while this spatial imaginary is racialized in subtle ways.
Source: Museum Anthropology
DOI: 10.1111/muan.12128
Author: Chiara De Cesari
Institution: University of Amsterdam
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2594919700