From ethnology to heritage: The role of the museum

During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was a close fit between ethnology as a knowledge formation, collections, and museums, whether museums of natural history, museums of ethnology or Völkerkunde or Volkskunde or les arts et traditions populaires. The museum was the home for these fields, indeed for any field whose research produces and requires collections, including archaeology, biology, and geology, among others. During the twentieth century and especially after World War II, the situation changed, as the knowledge formations, in our case ethnology, moved into the university, leaving their collections behind. Museum became custodians of the collections of outmoded scientific disciplines. In reinventing themselves, museums have become agents of “heritage.”