Refugee, Museums, and Material Culture

Abstract

This entry explores museums’ increased interest in the contemporary material culture of forced displacement, with a particular focus on institutions holding ethnographic collections. It argues that contemporary refugee mobilities are of particular concern to the ethnographic museum, as refugees pose a number of challenges to anthropological theorizing on belonging, emplacement, and temporality. The entry maintains that the contemporary material culture of exile is not only important by and for itself, but it can also help to reimagine the ethnographic museum.

The entry begins with the analysis of the relation between subjects and objects on the move, analysing the state of material dispossession determined by refuge flight. In the following sections, the entry explores questions arising from recent ethnographic museums’ collecting in Europe’s contested borderlands and finally considers how the contemporary material culture of exile can be used to disrupt geopolitical borders and temporalities.