museum anthropology

return to the quai branly

Sally Price
college of william and mary
abstract e du quai Branly, built in the shadow of the Eiffel The Muse Tower, opened to great fanfare in 2006. Since then it has sponsored a wide variety of exhibitions and conjoint activities and fueled rich debates about museology in the postcolonial worldFfrom collecting practices in the eld and issues concerning cultural property to the politics of display and the distribution of power among collectors, dealers, curators, anthropologists, and art historians. This article follows on the book in which Price (2007) chronicled events leading up to the museums inauguration. It lays out developments over the past three years and engages the literature, in France and elsewhere, that has swirled around e the museums undertaking. [Keywords: museology, Muse du quai Branly, collectors, exhibitions, art vs. ethnography]

Jacques Chirac inaugurated the Quai Branly museum in June 2006, and my study of the project was submitted to the publisher just three months later (Price 2007).1 Too soon, the museums president chided me when I saw him a year later at a celebration of the museums rst anniversary. He clearly thought it was unfair not to give such a big project time to mature before making it the focus of critical analysis.2 Well, three years have now passed,3 and the MQB, as it is known, has become an established xture of the Parisian landscape, boasting (for example) 730,000 e du quai Branly 2009) paying visitors in 2008 (Muse and a prominent presence in countless blogs posted by tourists to the City of Light. Time for an update. There have been both continuities and adjustments. Outside, saplings have grown into trees, and the isolated plantings of 2006 have ourished in profusion, allowing us to empathize with architect Jean Nouvels dream of a Parisian garden evolving into a sacred grove. The video installation for the entry to the exhibitions has been dismantled, and visitors now trek up the 520-foot ramp in unbroken white silence. Inside, a signicant number of new lightbulbs have been introduced in response to widespread com-

plaints about poorly lit objects, and plans are afoot to replace the labels on transversal transformations in the Americas with less impenetrable texts.4 The presence of two magnicent statues seized during the French conquest of Abomey (King Glele as the lion hanzin as the shark king) is still king and King Gbe credited to the conquering general, but the name of the famous sculptor who created them, Sosa Adede, has now been added to the exhibit label.5 And an online search for the names of the eight Aboriginal artists who contributed their creativity to many of the museums walls and ceilings no longer comes up completely dry.6 Practical matters have also been rened. For example, a policy of free admission to the permanent galleries for young people (under 26) and for teachers is now in effect. Unfortunately, visitors from the very populations that Chiracs project was intended to honor (what he referred to as three-quarters of humanityFAfrica, Oceania, and the Americas, joined later by Asia) are explicitly excluded from this privilege, which applies only to those living in the European Union.7 Areas outside of the permanent exhibition space have been actively exploited, hosting an impressive range of scheduled events. These have kept up the museums presence in the media, from magazine articles and billboards in the metro to a steady stream of announcements on the Internet. Ads have not been limited to France; for example, the museum took out a whole page in the New York Times on March 19, 2009. International seminars, debates, and lecture series have allowed the museum to explore a wide range of issues, from disciplinary perspectives (Histoire de lArt et tissage (Plane ` te Me tisse: To Anthropologie)8 and me Mix or Not to Mix?) to colonialism (Une Histoire ographiMondiale de la Colonisation: Des Nuds Ge ques) and the idea of universality (Les Grandes ). The Claude Le viControverses sur lUniversalite Strauss Theater has hosted a rich variety of concerts, dance performances, and dramatic productions; it also viprovided a central venue for the celebration of Le Strausss 100th birthday.9 Temporary exhibitions have been put on at the rate of ten per year,10 exploring a wide diversity of subjectsFthe work of Georges Condominas in Vietnam, the creativity of Nigerianborn artist Yinka Shonibare, arts of Berber women, archaeological treasures from Peru, ties between jazz

Museum Anthropology, Vol. 33, Issue 1, pp. 1121 & 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1379.2010.01071.x

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and graphic arts, European visions of non-Western cultures, African techniques for repairing objects, and much, much more. The museum has not shied away from piggybacking its offerings on current happenings in popular culture, catching waves in the hopes of attracting those segments of the population that are not accustomed to spending time in museums. In September and October 2007, when France was hosting the Rugby World Cup, the museum converted its roof into a rugby eld and offered two full months of rugby-related lms, talks, televised matches, roundtable discussions, guided tours, childrens activities, workshops, and master classes under the title of La le e des Cultures (The Scrum of Cultures). Just Me weeks later, a decision by the city of Rouen to return a mummied Maori head to New Zealand, followed by legal action by the minister of culture to override that decision, sent the MQB scrambling to put together an international debate on the status of human remains in museum collections: Des Collections Anatomiques aux Objets de Culte: Conservation et Exposition es was held in des Restes Humains dans les Muse 11 February 2008. And in the spring of 2008, when the entire city of Paris was plastered with larger-than-life images of Harrison Ford in the just-released movie ne de Cristal, the Indiana Jones et le Royaume du Cra MQB was quick to take advantage of the frenzy. From the MQB web site: To mark the imminent release of the movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull e du quai Branly will be unin May, the Muse veiling the crystal skull, an important item from its collections. Since the 19th century, the origin of this exceptional piece and how it was made has been entrenched in mystery, and has fascinated the public as a vestige of an ancient and e du quai Branly mysterious civilisation. [Muse 2008b] The summer of 2009 brought Tarzan to the MQB in the form of lm clips, books and comic books, a stuffed crocodile, and multiple attempts to cast Edgar Rice Burroughss story as a lesson in ecological responsibility for young museumgoers.12 Few reviewers were persuaded that the latter message came across very forcefully, locating the central attraction of the exhibit instead in its torrid eroticism. As the news12

ration put it, You can embroider whatever paper Libe scholarly discourse you like around this universal, mythical hero, but the bottom line is that it is about a guy who traipses around half-naked, saving young white women in evening gowns lost in the jungle from the claws of lecherous gorillas (Girard and Launet 2009). And as the New York Times reviewer noted, several boys glued to a video monitor playing a clip that had originally been censored on grounds of raciness didnt seem to be rapt by the concept of environmental preservation; watching the skinnydipping scene from Tarzan and His Mate (1934), they stared with great scientic interest (Kimmelman 2009). Despite the museums impressive record over the past three or so years in terms of attendance, outreach programs, temporary exhibitions, performances, and other conjoint activities, many of the basic problems pointed out by critics from various parts of the world, which have tended to center on the permanent exhibition spaces, continue to resonate. Early commentators had not always been kind.13 A review from England declared that the museum was presenting its collections in what felt like a dark, confused jungle echoing with the sound of distant tribal drums like the worst malarial European nightmare of the dark conti s we should be nent (incorporating) all the cliche running headlong from . . . a catastrophe sunk in a swamp of hubris (that) makes you want to cry (Gibbons 2006). From Geneva, the director of the ethnographic museum asserted that the disappointment is total, pointing to, a disagreeable, closed-in museography worthy of the nineteenth century. Presenting us an ethnography with 3500 objects without giving them a context leaves us distraught. It would be possible to give voice back to the societies that Western anthropology has studied. The pieces are excellent in themselves but they represent nothing more than a kind of beauty of our own construction. [Jacques Hainard in Chardon 2006] ration seconded forIn Paris, a journalist for Libe eign critics in an article called The Branly Museum Ripped Apart by the Foreign Press, and enumerated his own list of the most egregious botched features:

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Dirty display windows. Dangerous places (insufcient guardrails in the upper areas). Major problems of lighting in the darkness of the galleries. Inadequate or illegible labels. A lack of logic . . . an abstruse exhibition with luminous texts on the oor that led the curator to go after the visitors, in exasperation, for showing a lack of respect by walking on his exhibit. [Noce 2006] As the gardens ourished outside, the criticisms of interior spaces continued. Two years after the museum opened, an article in Le Monde entitled The Specialists Are Still Critical cited the well-founded complaint by collectors that the architects design for the interior spaces was stiing and pointed to the charge by anthropologists that the museum had made no attempt to engage in real dialog with distant cultures (de Roux 2008). But over the past three years, the MQB has also provided fuel for a more serious, fast-growing body of literature on art, ethnography, and museums in the postcolonial era. Just a few examples: in 2007, Pierre bat, which had been covering Noras journal, Le De relevant issues since the early 1990s,14 devoted issue #147 to le moment du Quai Branly, with 17 essays phane Martin, Catherine Cle ment, James (by Ste lia Dias, Germain Viatte, Philippe DesClifford, Ne cola, Susan Vogel, and others), assigning the overow (by Anthony Kwame Appiah, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, and Sally Price) to the subsequent issue. In 2008 a series of essays in Ethnologie Franc aise under the title e: Un De bat en Cours included Ethnologie et Muse articles by many of the people originally involved (as players or commentators) in the game of musical chairs that culminated in the establishment of the MQB, for example, Martine Segalen, Bernard Dut de lEstoile, Annepaigne, Zeev Gourarier, Beno Christine Taylor, and Marc-Olivier Gonseth. A 2009 exchange among leading Africanist voices (Okwui Enwezor, Elizabeth Harney, Dominique Malaquais, Ikem Stanley Okoye, John Picton, Peter Probst, Colin Richards, and others) in an online roundtable linked to Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art offers important reections on art, identity, nationalism, museums, and related matters (including Sidney Kasrs remark that If the Louvre can only digest African art by making it appear exquisite and the Quai Branly

by frightening people with it, both nonetheless rely on the celebration of French cultural nationalism and its heroes to explain how it got there15). And the July 2009 issue of African and Black Diaspora, entitled Museums in Postcolonial Europe, carried contributions by (among others) Dominic Thomas, Robert Aldrich, Fassil Demissie, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, and Herman Lebovics.16 Lebovics, one of the earliest voices in this discussion (Lebovics 2004), has continued to provide insights on where the MQB has gone right and (more often) where its gone wrong. He makes an important argument, for example, about the role of tourismFwe must not forget tourism. This topic is rarely raised in the stormy intellectual debates about the new museum, although it is certainly a major cause of its creation (2009:234)17; his bon mot on the architects vision is right on target: This snake of a building bites no colonial administrators (2009:238); and his overall conclusion is worth repeating here: A Presidents pride to monumentalize himself as someone who values the art of the peoples of the developing world, the need for tourists dollars, a strategy of French foreign policy to court the South in the face of the threat of USdriven globalization, and the cultural ignorance of a world-famous architect, as well as his embrace of a doubtful aesthetic maneuver which once again links modernism with the primitive to represent visually Frances relationship with its formerly colonized in the old paternalistic wayFnone of these forces shaping the MQB bring France any closer to postcoloniality. [Lebovics 2009:241] Desvalle es (2008), a long-time participant Andre in the world of French museums, addresses a rich series of issues surrounding the MQB project in Quai Branly: Un Miroir aux Alouettes?, pulling in reections by virtually everyone, past and present, whos had anything to say on them. His arguments cover ample ground in terms of debates about anthropology, art history, and the role of museums, with special attention to the ways in which France has remained at arms length from major interdisciplinary developments of the 1980s and 1990s elsewhere in the world.
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Tamara Levitz (2008) provides a particularly insightful analysis of the estheticization of ethnographic materials in France, tracing display practices at the MQB back to some remarkable precedents in the 1930s. Focusing on a rabbit mask that was brought to Paris for use in a performance at the Exposition Coloniale of 1931, she points to the cognitive rupture and painful silence created [at the MQB] when an objects history is suppressed in favor of its symbolic meaning within a conceptual framework based on constructions of difference (2008:601). Her amply documented reections on Frances century-long love affair with the Dogon provide poignant historical contextualization for the museums treatment of objects on display throughout the permanent galleries. A recent essay by Geoffrey White (N.d.) entitled Civilizations on the Seine points to another fundamental conceptual problem at the MQB: tting indigenous or native cultures into the discourse of civilizationsFa conguration that normally calls for large-scale, integrated cultural formations that reect some degree of common identication. Drawing on his experience as an Oceanianist, White cites the Western practice of lumping together numerous cultures and language groups under such homogenizing terms as Melanesian or Polynesian, for example, condensing the identities of people from nearly 30 distinct language groups under the single term Kanak. For popular audiences, he concludes, the likely lesson from a visit to the Quai Branlys permanent exhibitions is that nonwestern others live within essentialized blocs of cultural space. The museum itself has kept up a steady stream of publications, many in the form of glossy coffee table books displayed in great numbers in the museum shop. Some are well worth reading for the clarity with which they dene the museums position on the value of anthropological input. For example, in a review of Germain Viattes (2006) book on the MQBs acquisition policies, anthropologist Jean-Pierre Digard notes Viattes approval of the museum staff s hostility toward any attempt to reconstitute context [which is] always fallacious and his preference, rather, for underscoring the intelligence and beauty of the technical solutions (cited in Digard 2008:451). The books diatribe against anthropologists, Digard goes on,
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includes the charge that they are prone to simplistic exoticism, that they neglect the collections by focusing exclusively on social or anthropological interpretation, and that they are either blind or indifferent to the consequences of globalization, particularly in terms of the ways it has affected collections. Viattes preference, then, is to focus almost exclusively on the history of objects as they pass through collectors hands and art auctions with virtually no attention to the meanings and values of the objects in their original societies and cultures (Digard 2008:451). On the MQB website, the museums president, phane Martin, lends support to this position in his Ste two-minute video introductions to each of the four geographical areas.18 For example, the object he features from the African collection is one he nds amazing, rst because it demonstrates a quite unique creativity, as well as amazing technical skill and freedom of expression. And also . . . because it belonged to Jacques Kerchache who inspired this project. Or again, in the Americas section, he focuses on the fabulous collections known as Royal Hides, buckskin and buffalo hides offered by the rst French colonists to Louis XV and to the Regent. . . . You can vialso see objects brought back by Claude Le Strauss.19 While assessments of the museum by members of the staff tend to adopt a rather triumphalist discourse (see, e.g., Martin 2008), Anne-Christine Taylor (director of education and research) has maintained greater balance between recognition of shortcomings and defense of the way in which the museum has carried out its underlying mission. Her 2008 essay in Ethnologie Franc aise captures the essence of many of the museums nagging problems (concentrated in the permanent exhibition spaces) and outlines discussions underway at the museum about how to deal with them before going on to argue for the importance of positive aspects of the project, especially those involving outreach programs (performances, temporary exhibitions, seminars, and the like). One feature of the MQB that continues to limit its possibilities for moving past the original problems is the tight control wielded by the architect, whose contract guarantees him authority over the use of space through 2012. Jean Nouvels famous sartorial preference for black (said to be the only color in his

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wardrobe) has been imposed on the museums interior spaces, creating an unfortunately restricted playing eld for those involved in the design of exhi sie: bitions.20 At the June 2008 opening of Polyne s 17601860, the exhibition curator Arts et Divinite Steven Cooper told me how his esthetic goal for the exhibition design had centered on light and openness, and how, toward that end, he had planned to paint a large column white. But Nouvel had designed the column in black, and black, said Nouvel, it had to remain.21 An exception to this dark esthetic is the groundlevel exhibition space adjoining the reception area, where many of the temporary exhibitions take place. In October 2008, this area hosted a stunning presentation of Arctic artifacts inspired by Edmund Carpenter, a scholar with long-term ties to these cultures who has stressed the whiteness of their world, where snow and cloud blend together, creating a landscape in which the horizon is unmarked, and land and sky become one blankness.22 Upside Down: Les Arctiques23 conveyed an unfamiliar world without recourse to didactic label copy, simply by utilizing a series of innovative design ideasF whole areas of stark icy atness, lms projected both upside down and right side up, hand-held magnifying glasses for viewing miniature archaeological objects, and more. Esthetic beauty and cultural difference were conveyed in one and the same space to a degree that, in my mind, few museum exhibitions are able to pull off as successfully as this one. As I followed plans for creating this new museum of non-European arts, one aspect that seemed particularly questionable was the amount of authority entrusted to big-time collectors and dealers. Other issues concerning the museum (architectural choices, the balance between art and ethnography, the role of native peoples, and so forth) gured into discussions wherever in the world ethnographic objects were being put on display. But the heavy reliance on people whose professional lives dealt with buying and selling the arts in question struck me as particularly important in lending a unique avor to the conceptualization of the MQB. cole Normale Supe rieure In a lecture given at the E in 2006, Anne-Christine Taylor acknowledged that the museums ties with major collectors and dealers (who you know, she said, are rather strange

birds) represented a central point of controversy at the quai Branly. It must be said that collectors are not only totally ignorant of the local context in which the objects that they collect are produced, utilized, and so forth, but that moreover, they assume a rather militant posture of refusal toward any ethnographic or scientic discussion about the objects that they covet. . . . [At the same time,] they are very good connoisseurs of the history of the objects once they leave their local contexts, and very expert concerning values on the art market. They completely outdo almost all curators in terms of retracing the history of any object after it leaves its home. On that, collectors are unbeatable. And because they are very knowledgeable about the market value of the objects, the museum is essentially obliged to have them as partners. When it comes to buying objects, we have to turn to them to make sure were not being taken. So there are dealers and collectors on the acquisition committees for that reason. In addition, collectors play another important role because of the fact that theyre very closely tied in with museum patrons, which means that they can serve as procurers,24 if I may call it that, for the museum in that they feel an obligation to offset the purely egotistical nature of their collecting practices via gestures in the direction of the public good. [Taylor 2006] Taylor concluded that the presence of collectors in the museum project was at once obstructing, even burdening, for the museum and protable, even necessary. Given that collectors are unbeatable when it comes to retracing the history of an object after it leaves its original setting, its particularly interesting to listen to them when they recount the pasts of objects from their own collections. Take, for example, the most precious jewel in the museums crown, the androgynous statue that greets visitors at the entrance to the permanent exhibition space, and the very rst object to benet from a new law passed under Chirac that accorded a 90 percent tax credit for objects of national interest donated to a state museum.25 What we learn from published re15

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search on this object (e.g., in the journal of Frances prestigious Centre de Recherche et Restauration des es de France, a large state-of-the-art laboratory Muse in the basement of the Louvre Museum) is that it was le ` ne Leloup, a sold in 2004 for four million euros by He Parisian gallery owner, who had purchased it from a Malian trader in Paris in 1969 (Richardin et al. 2006:74; see also de Roux 2004). (Leloup served simultaneously as expert for the 2004 sale, providing its dating, provenience, and symbolic interpretation.) Taylors lecture at the ENS went a bit further, explaining that this centerpiece of the museum was offered to the museum by a donor who had obtained it from a major Parisian dealer who had, in turn, obtained it in conditions that were . . . well, well call them not exactly clean, and which today might cause the museum some embarrassment in Mali (Taylor 2006). My attempts to dig further into the past of this statue turned up no information. The museums documentalist admitted defeat in her search for records on the objects whereabouts before 1969, and my subsequent e-mail exchange with Leloup was cordial but totally unrevealing on this particular question.26 Later on, however, Leloup allowed her imagination to travel back in time, disengaging the discovery of the statue from her Paris gallery and relocating it to an isolated cave in the cliffs of Bandiagara, in Mali. I was fascinated by this voyage, she declares on a DVD sold in the museums bookstore (A. Viatte 2006).27 It was so much better to go there and buy in the country itself! There, she continues, the regions altarmaster led her, crawling on hands and knees, past an entrance guarded by killer bees and into the cavernous darkness to discover the spot where the Djennenke had remained hidden for centuries. As the darkness of the cave gives way to subdued lighting on the wooden statue, we see Leloup leaning forward, anked by her African guides, to gain a better view of this remarkable nd, and we are given to understand that we are witnessing the moment when, aided by relationships of condence she had forged in the eld, she was privileged to discover the existence of this exceptional statue, untouched and hidden from view since the 10th or 11th century. The inspired script writing responsible for this dramatic episode goes far, it seems to me, toward helping us appreciate the negotiable nature of transparency in museum documentation.
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As Taylor noted, the MQB has viewed collectors and dealers as reliable sources of information about the collecting history of objects, and as trusted advisors regarding the monetary value of those objects on the market. From that perspective, it made a certain kind of sense to give them voice on the committees responsible for selecting new objects for the museums growing collection. According to members of the acquisitions committee who spoke with me, big-time collectors such as Jacques Kerchache, Jean Paul Barbier, and John Friede were frequently allowed to override the advice of scientic experts (whether art historians, archaeologists, or anthropologists) on art objects proposed for sale, and that on the idea that esthetic sensitivity should, for the purposes then at hand, trump academic erudition. The glitch in this logic, of course, is the assumption that collectors and dealers are disinterested players. Yes, their knowledge of the collection pedigree of art objects is very impressive. Yes, they are supremely well informed about values on the market. But the world of primitive art collectors deals with large sums of money and includes some very tight friendships (not to mention large-scale egos), and the temptation to take advantage of ones position to provide nancial favors, either for oneself or for ones friends, is not hard to understand. Selecting particular objects to acquire, authorizing the prices to be paid for them, choosing which ones to privilege in the exhibition space, inuencing the kinds of contextualization provided for them, and even making quiet decisions about what aspects of their history to sweep under the rug (or replace with more exciting scenarios) are all part of the power that can so easily be abused when personal involvement in buying and selling is part of the equation. This problem, it should be added, is far from unique to museums in France, but it seems particularly severe on the quai Branly. Once the museum got off the ground, however, the structural dynamic shifted and the collectors and dealers, who had wielded such unusual power in terms of acquisitions, were moved gently toward the sidelines. Today, decisions about what happens (or does not happen) at the MQB are largely in the nartight grip of technocrats, most notably the e quesFgraduates of Frances prestigious Ecole Nationale dAdministration.28 This new structural

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dynamic continues to leave the folks known as scientiques [roughly, academics] marginalized to a degree that seems quite unusual compared with 21st-century museums in the United States. Since my book on the MQB was published, I have been hearing more and more about the extent to which even senior curators at the museum work under conning restrictions reminiscent of the infamous Secretary Generals reign (see Price 2007:5657; and, for an update, Evin 2009; Noce 2008). As one high-level member of the original team noted (and others still there have conrmed to me), the curators are appalling prisoners of the system, declaring to anyone who will listen that they can no longer express themselves about anything other than temporary exhibitions and that they no longer have any direct au access to objects or museum storerooms (Fe 2007). One member of the museum staff asserted to me that the directors have become managers of an operation in which scientiques and curators have no place, showing total disdain for literary, artistic, or es alludes to a scientic production. And Desvalle wrestling match between architects and curators in which the latter rarely have the last word (2008:128). Its indisputable that presidential visions are politically powerful starting points for museum projects, opening doors and providing resources that would be hard (or impossible) to come by without their support. But a museum project that systematically fails to question or complicate such a vision carries serious potential dangers as wellFespecially if it centers on the theme of cultural difference. Highranking politicians are obviously well trained to handle foreign affairs that concern economic and diplomatic relations and the like. But neither they, nor the people who happen to be their close friends and political allies, are necessarily the best source for sensitivities about distant cultures. Listen, for example, to Nicolas Sarkozy, Chiracs successor in the e Palace, speaking to a university audience in Elyse Dakar, Senegal, and explaining the difference between European civilization and that of his listeners: The tragedy of Africa is that the African (lhomme africain) has not sufciently entered into History. The African peasant, who has for centuries been living according to the seasons and whose ideal in life is to remain in harmony with

nature, knows only the eternal renewal of a temporal rhythm that depends on an endless repetition of the same acts and the same words. In such a vision where everything is always repeating, there is no place for the human adventure and no place for the idea of progress.29 Clearly, the dialog of cultures still has some issues to resolve.

Notes 1. For a sampling of reviews, see Duncan (2008), Grognet (2009), Harney (2009), Kasr (2009), Rosbottom (2008), Straus (2008), and Volkert (2008). A ditions Denoe l) is in French edition of the book (E press for 2010. 2. People on the inside showed no reticence, however, in writing about the museum from the very beginning. See below for discussion of the book on acquisition policy by Germain Viatte (the MQBs museological director until his retirement in 2006), which was published a full year before mine (G. Viatte 2006). 3. The word now in this article is pegged to August 2, 2009, and September 21, 2009, my most recent visits to the MQB before submitting this article to Museum Anthropology. Delpuech, the current curator of the Amer4. Andre icas department, is implementing new exhibits in which the neo-structuralist labels on such pan-American abstractions as metaphors of the fringe and svitality of the object authored by Emmanuel De veaux (see Price 2007:166167) will be replaced with more straightforward area-centered labeling. 5. It is still absent, however, from the museum guide. 6. A distinction is made in France between works that are displayed in museum galleries (which are registered in the TMS inventory) and works that are incorporated in museum buildings (which are not). At the MQB, the latter category includes the work of the eight Australian Aborigines and the audiovisual installation for the long ramp leading to the exhibition space that was created by Trinh Minh-ha in collaboration with Jean-Paul Bourdier. The distinction might explain, but in my mind does not justify, the absence of full online biographies for these artists
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who have made such a signicant contribution to the overall project. 7. In April 2009, France established a policy of free admission to all French museums for people under 26 who were citizens of the EU. On July 31, 2009, that policy was extended to include young people with e (long-term) residence status. This longue-dure policy is interpreted in variable ways by different French museums. Admission policy at the immigration museum (for example) offers free entry to all permanent and temporary exhibitions for anyone under 26, whether or not they are from the European Union, but at the MQB free access does not include the temporary exhibitions and is granted only to 1825-year-old residents of the European Union. See http://www.culture.gouv.fr/mcc/Espace-Presse/Commu niques/Frederic-Mitterrand-etend-la-gratuite-des-mus ees-et-des-monuments-nationaux-a-tous-les-jeunesqui-resident-dans-l-Union-Europeenne-quelle-quesoit-leur-nationalite, http://www.quaibranly.fr/fr/ musee/venir-au-musee/tarifs.html, and http:// www.histoire-immigration.fr/phpdig/search.php, all accessed October 12, 2009. e du quai Branly (2007). 8. See Muse vi-Strausss relationship to the 9. For an analysis of Le MQB, see Pagani (2009). Although Herman Lebovics vi-Strauss put his considerable symasserts that Le bolic capital behind the museum (2009:243), AnneChristine Taylor (interviewed in Pagani 2009:131 136) points out that, in contrast to the role he played as advisor and member of the acquisitions committee e des arts dAfrique et dOce anie when it for the Muse Malraux, Le viwas being put together under Andre Strauss had already retired from the public scene due to his advanced age during the planning of the MQB and played no active role in the way it was put Desvalle es argues that Le vi-Strauss together. Andre ge (tricked) into lending his comwas in a sense pie plicity to the ruination of the discipline to which he had contributed so much (2008:30). 10. As of the museums third anniversary, it had hosted 30 temporary exhibitions. For a full listing (in French, English, and Spanish) of all the temporary exhibitions (past, present, and future), see the MQB website (http://www.quaibranly.fr/fr/programmat ion/expositions.html), which provides practical information (dates, sponsorship, catalogs, guided tours, childrens activities, etc.), lists related events
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(lectures, lms, debates, artists appearances, etc.), offers often-detailed summaries of the objects on display, and introduces the intended messages. 11. The full transcript is available on the MQB web e du quai Branly 2008a). A law is currently site (Muse (since July 2009) under consideration that would allow the restitution of Maori heads, including eight owned by the MQB, to New Zealand (Guerrin 2009). 12. The museums attempt to turn the Tarzan story in a moralizing, politically correct direction may be partly explained by the exceptionally demanding restrictions imposed by the Edgar Rice Burroughs Society, which holds the rights to Tarzan imagery. The MQB was required to present Tarzan as a model of virtue, a symbol of traditional American values, attentive to the well being of women and children, physically t and clean-shaven, and never shown dying, suffering (physically or mentally), exhibiting egotistical, greedy or cruel behavior, mocking the physically or mentally handicapped, or encouraging illicit sexual activity (Girard and Launet 2009). 13. James Cliffords review in October acknowledged that there were problems, but adopted an explicitly sympathetic, wait and see approach to the mu e du Quai Branly seum. Time will tell how the Muse eventually looks and how its ambitious program is realized. Opened to great fanfare and widespread grumbling, it is a work in processFdynamic, pretentious, and raw. . . . Critics of neoprimitivism and estheticism nd much to deplore. And they are not wrong. . . . Yet such a critical focus is in its own way ahistorical; for it is all too easy to discover a completed, already familiar text (Clifford 2007:9, 3). 14. For references, see the bibliography in Price (2007). 15. http://dukeupress.typepad.com/dukeupresslog/ 2009/09/nka-roundtable-sidney-kasrs-response. html, accessed September 10, 2009. The roundtable is scheduled for publication in Nka, no. 26, Spring 2010. 16. This paragraph barely scratches the surface of the literature on issues relevant to the MQB. For a useful overview of early reactions and commentary, see Shelton (2009), which includes a bibliography of some fty references through 2007. 17. I question, however, his implication that this ex on plains why Chiracs minister of tourism, Le Bertrand, was placed front and center at the mu-

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seums inaugural conference. Might it not also have been that Bertrand, a Guyanais of color and mayor of a largely Maroon-populated town on the border with Suriname, was in some sense representing native peoples (or, as Bertrand himself put it, les peuples premiers)? What is a peuple premier? he asked in his opening remarks. It refers to peoples whose lives are in harmony with their environment, as close as possible to the origins. For the development of Bertrands ideas on the vestiges that continually push back the origins of man, see the full text in Latour (2007:15). 18. Quotes in this paragraph and the note below are from http://www.quaibranly.fr/fr/musee/le-museeen-video.html, accessed September 6, 2009. 19. When Martin does get into anthropological interpretation, it tends toward the speculative. On a 2,000-year-old drum from Asia, made by a people about whom we know very little, the frog gures that adorn it were obviously associated with rain, so these drums were used in rain producing rituals and are therefore linked to farming. 20. As a review in the Wall Street Journal put it, The Branly has banished whiteness from its main space for both metaphorical and occasionally practical reasons. Everything is dark: There is only a little natural light. . . . Low ceilings increase a sense of claustrophobia. Some fragile items, like a 19th-century Omaha buffalo hide, decorated with delicate geometric patterns, and embroidery, appear in such low light as to be virtually invisible (Spiegelman 2006). 21. Ive been told by a member of the staff that the color is not a true black, but rather a very deep brown. Given the lighting in the museum, its hard to tell the difference. 22. See Carpenters (1973) book, Eskimo Realities, whose horizontal form, largely blank pages, and dominant whiteness seems to have served as a model for the MQBs exhibition design. 23. September 30, 2008January 11, 2009. 24. The term she used was rabatteur, translated in dictionaries as procurer and pimp, but also a hunting allusion to people who beat the bushes for game. In the context of museum acquisitions, it implies an active role in scouting out and facilitating new purchases. 25. The donation was made by the AXA corporation, whose former CEO, a lifelong friend of Chiracs,

headed the planning commission that explored options for creating the museum. The 2003 law nearly doubled the previous amount of tax credits for donations, from 30 percent to 60 percent, and increased it to 90 percent for objects of national interest (see Price 2007:141, 214). 26. For more on my attempts to learn about this statue, see Price (2007:215 n. 17). It will be interesting to see what, if anything, is said about its provenience when Leloup serves as guest curator for an MQB exhibition of Dogon art, planned for 201011. 27. The DVD was written and produced by Germain Viattes son. Adjustments in Leloups story about this statue (between her 1994 book on Dogon sculpture and the 2006 DVD) include an increase both in the statues age (from 14th century to 10th11th century) and in the amount of time it had remained hidden in a forgotten cave (from decades to centuries) (Leloup 1994:plate 2; A. Viatte 2006). 28. This assessment comes directly from a senior member of the museum staff who requested anonymity. It has been conrmed by a former MQB employee who has been following the museums developments closely. 29. http://www.elysee.fr/webtv/discours-monde/al locution-a-l-universite-de-dakar-senegal-video-1528.html, accessed September 11, 2009.

References Cited Carpenter, Edmund 1973 Eskimo Realities. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Chardon, Elisabeth des objets ne suft pas [The 2006 La beaute beauty of objects is not enough]. Le Temps, September 15. Clifford, James 2007 Quai Branly in Process. October 120:323. de Roux, Emmanuel cialistes toujours critiques [The spe2008 Des spe cialists still critical]. Le Monde, June 27. es, Andre Desvalle 2008 Quai Branly: un miroir aux alouettes? A propos dethnographie et darts Premiers [Quai Branly: A Decoy? Reections on Ethnography and Primitive Art]. Paris: Harmattan.
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e du quai Branly: Dialogue des cultures Muse ou monologue? LHomme 185186:449454. Digard, Jean-Pierre e du quai Branly: Dialogue des cul2008 Muse tures ou monologue? LHomme 185-186: 449454. Duncan, Kate 2008 Review of Paris Primitive: Jacques Chiracs Museum on the Quai Branly. Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 2(2):268272. Evin, Florence sidente des monuments nationaux 2009 Cette pre qui provoque la fronde [This president of the ofce of national monuments who provokes insurrection]. Le Monde, February 10. Feau, Etienne ` Giovanna Parodi da Passano au 2007 Lettre a e du Quai Branly [Letter to sujet du muse Giovanna Parodi da Passano concerning the Quai Branly Museum]. Africa e Med` 62:2231. iterraneo cultura e societa Gibbons, Fiachra 2006 Musee des bogus arts [Museum of bogus arts]. The Guardian, July 3. douard Launet , and E Girard, Bartholome 2009 Singe comme une image [Monkeying with ration, June 18. an image]. Libe Grognet, Fabrice 2009 Review of Paris Primitive: Jacques Chiracs Museum on the Quai Branly. LHomme 189:280282. Guerrin, Michel ` restituer des 2009 Une proposition de loi visant a tes maori inquie ` te les muse es [A proposed te law concerning the restitution of Maori heads worries museums]. Le Monde, July 2. Harney, Elizabeth 2009 Review of Paris Primitive: Jacques Chiracs Museum on the Quai Branly. African Arts 42(3):8990. Kasr, Sidney 2009 Review of Paris Primitive: Jacques Chiracs Museum on the Quai Branly. American Ethnologist 36(1):181206. Kimmelman, Michael 2009 A Loincloth to Set Parisians Autter. New York Times, August 6. 2008
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Latour, Bruno, ed. 2007 Le Dialogue des cultures: Actes des rencon e du quai Branly tres inaugurales du muse [The Dialogue of Cultures: Proceedings of the Inaugural Meetings of the Quai Branly e du Museum] (21 Juin 2006). Paris: Muse Quai Branly. Lebovics, Herman 2004 Dance of the Museums. In Bringing the Empire Back Home: France in the Global Age. Herman Lebovics, ed. Pp. 143177. Durham: Duke University Press. e du Quai Branly Show France 2009 Will the Muse the Way to Postcoloniality? African and Black Diaspora 2(2):231244. le ` ne Leloup, He 1994 Statuaire Dogon [Dogon Statuary]. Paris: ` le Amez. Danie Levitz, Tamara 2008 The Aestheticization of Ethnicity: Imagining e du quai the Dogon at the Muse Branly. The Musical Quarterly 89:600 642. phane Martin, Ste 2007 2008 Avant-propos. In Rapport dactivite [Foreword. In Annual Report for 2007]. http://www.quaibranly.fr/uploads/media/ RA2007-BRANLY.pdf, accessed September 7, 2009. e du quai Branly Muse 2007 Colloque international: Histoire de lart et anthropologie. Paris: Institut national e du quai dhistoire de lart [and] Muse Branly [International colloquium: History of art and anthropology], 2123 June. http://actesbranly.revues.org/352 [put online July 28, 2009], accessed November 19, 2009. 2008a International Symposium: From Anatomic Collections to Objects of Worship: Conservation and Exhibition of Human Remains in e du quai Branly, Museums. Paris: Muse 2223 February. http://www.quaibranly.fr/ leadmin/user_upload/pdf/Original_Version_ Symposium_Human_Remains.pdf, accessed September 6, 2009.

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2008b Exceptional presentation of the Crystal e du quai Branly col Skull from the muse lections. http://www.quaibranly.fr/uploads/ media/CP_Cristal_Skull_musee_du_quai_ Branly_01.pdf, accessed September 6, 2009. s 2008 [Key gures 2008]. http:// 2009 Chiffres Cle www.quaibranly.fr/fr/l-etablissement-public/ chiffres-cles/index.html, accessed September 6, 2009. Noce, Vincent e Branly e trille par la presse e tran2006 Le muse ` re [The Branly Museum ripped apart by ge ration, July 25. the foreign press]. Libe ne va jouer a ` la cha telaine 2008 Madame Sans-Ge [Madame Who-Cares will play at being ration, June 25. mistress of the manor]. Libe Pagani, Camilla e du quai 2009 Genealogia del Primitivo: Il muse vi-Strauss e la scrittura etBranly, Le nograca [Genealogy of the Primitive: The vi-Strauss, and Quai Branly Museum, Le Ethnographic Writing]. Castel dArio Mantova: Negretto Editore. Price, Sally 2007 Paris Primitive: Jacques Chiracs Museum on the Quai Branly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (French-language edition in ditions Denoe l). press for 2010: Paris, E le ` ne Joubert, Vincent Mazel, Richardin, Pascale, He ` s Lefebvre, Thierry Borel, and Daniel Vigears Agne ` cle 2006 Art et croyances de la falaise au X-XIe sie ` travers des analyses de laboratoire: Ena tre [Laboratory tretien avec un ance analysis of art and belief in a 20th-to-21stcentury cliff: interview with an ancestor]. ` 23:7478. Techne Rosbottom, Ronald C. 2008 Review of Paris Primitive: Jacques Chiracs Museum on the Quai Branly. French Review 82(2):414415.

Shelton, Anthony Alan e 2009 The Public Sphere as Wilderness: Le Muse du quai Branly. Museum Anthropology 32(1):116. Spiegelman, Willard 2006 An Illuminating New Museum? Well, Not Literally. Wall Street Journal, December 28. Straus, Lawrence 2008 Review of Paris Primitive. Journal of Anthropological Research 64(4):597599. Taylor, Anne-Christine e du Quai Branly: Pour une ant2006 Le Muse hropologie de lart [The Quai Branly Museum: Toward an anthropology of art]. Lecture presented in Paris at the Ecole rieure, January 18. http:// Normale Supe www.diffusion.ens.fr/index.php?res=conf& idconf=1068, accessed September 30, 2009. e du quai Branly: la place de let2008 Au muse hnologie [At the Quai Branly Museum: The Place of Ethnology]. Ethnologie Franc aise 38(4):679684. Viatte, Augustin e [Quai Branly: 2006 Quai Branly: LAutre Muse de on The other museum]. Paris: Ge Programmes. http://www.vodeo.tv/18-223676-quai-branly-l-autre-musee.html, accessed November 19, 2009. Viatte, Germain merveilles: muse e du quai 2006 Tu fais peur tu e Branly acquisitions 1998/2005 [You frighten, you amaze: Acquisitions at the Quai e Branly Museum, 1998/2005]. Paris: Muse du quai Branly. Volkert, James 2008 A Tale of Two Jacques. Museum July August, pp. 2324, 82. White, Geoffrey N.d. Civilizations on the Seine. MS in preparation.

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