Ethnographic museums have come under increasing scrutiny. Now is a good time to explore whether new developments in display and cultural politics provide a viable future for ethnographic museums. Authors in this book grapple with the new complexities facing them as curators in the contemporary world.

Michael Rowlands is Emeritus Professor of Material Culture, UCL Department of Anthropology.

Nick Stanley is an honorary research fellow in the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum.

Graeme Were is Professor of Anthropology at SOAS, London.

List of figures
List of contributors

1 The changing politics of ethnographic display: a review Michael Rowlands, Nick Stanley and Graeme Were

2 Ethnography and art at the British Museum's Museum of Mankind
Ben Burt

3 Success and failure: the life history of Birmingham's Gallery 33 A Meeting Ground of Cultures
Nick Stanley

4 Tervuren remains a place of false memories: on the impossibility of an epistemological rupture at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Belgium)
Boris Wastiau interviewed by Arnaud Lismond-Mertes

5 Ethnographic collections at Queensland Museum: histories and politics of exhibiting in a settler-colony
Chantal Knowles

6 'We hate ethnography...': curating beyond description in a post-colonial museum
Sean Mallon

7 The dawn of Japanese anthropology and the ethnographic museum: reconsideration from a post-colonial perspective
Taku Iida

8 Redefining ethnographic museums and ethnographic displays in China: a century-long debate
Luo Pan

9 Indonesian youth practices in creating a media museum to preserve the sense of nationalism in a digital age
Endah Triastuti

10 Decolonising time: replicas and religious heritage in the ethnographic museum
Ferdinand De Jong

11 Entangled knowledges: re-indigenising biocultural collections at National Museums Scotland
Alison Clark, Shona Coyne, Alistair Paterson and Tiffany Shellam

12 Digital heritage technologies and issues of community and cultural restitution in 'new style' ethnographic museums: a digital update
Graeme Were and Michael Rowlands

Index