Ethnography and exhibition design: Insights from the Moesgaard inaugural

摘要

Exhibition making is a powerful and popular means of engaging audiences. It is also a complex and fascinating form of design activity involving many different actors and stakeholders. In this article we deal with ethnographic exhibitions which have very specific challenges and possibilities, due to the uses of cultural materials generated in different ways through collaborations with diverse consulting groups. Whereas the ethnographic exhibit has a long history as a form of communication about cultural differences, national identities, and human development, recent trends in ethnographic research, exhibition making and design anthropology have markedly changed our understanding and practice of this medium.This article both claims and problematizes the ethnographic museum as a site of cross-cultural aesthetic engagement, cultural critique, and co-creative potential, through the prism of the evolving field of design anthropology. Rather than presuming that collaboration, consultation and community participation solve the critiques of appropriation that ethnographic museums have had to negotiate in recent decades, the article draws attention to the & lsquo;ragged edges & rsquo; that such projects produce in their efforts to & lsquo;transduce & rsquo; cultural meaning and affect. Instead of smoothing over residual frustrations, tensions, and misunderstandings, the authors argue that ragged edges can be conceptually generative from a design anthropological perspective.(c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.