Photo 1: The Musée de l’Homme, Paris

"It is the end of an era, a glorious era, for the Musée de l’Homme and for our library…"

A member of the staff addressed a group of the Musée de l’Homme library faithful gathered in a large circle filling the entrance hall of the museum. We had just observed a minute of silence to mark the closing of the library, the latest in a series of closings and collections transfers involved in the creation of France’s new museum of arts and civilizations, the Musée du Quai Branly. For the past few weeks I and many of the others assembled in the entrance hall had been frantically trying to take advantage of the library’s resources before it shut its doors "définitivement" this summer. With the most comprehensive collection of works on anthropology and world cultures, and perhaps the fewest bureaucratic obstacles to getting your hands on a book in Paris, the Musée de l’Homme library was sure to be missed. The main collections were being transferred to the new médiathèque at the Musée du Quai Branly, but it was still unclear when they would be available to the public again. For myself and other researchers working with the Musée de l’Homme archives, there was even more uncertainty – nobody seemed to know where those archives would eventually be housed, or how we might be able to access them. The library staff was, of course, even more directly impacted than the patrons. As the speaker at the moment of silence made clear, the closing of the library had been "an administrative decision, one in which the personnel did not take part." Many of them were bitter and despondent – their efforts to keep the library open had proved futile and they were now forced to relinquish their collections and face transfers to new jobs.

A minute of silence might seem a somewhat melodramatic way to mark the closing of a library, but then many things surrounding the creation of the Musée du Quai Branly are tinged with melodrama. The new museum will house the ethnographic collections of both the Musée de l’Homme in western Paris and the former Museum of African and Oceanic Art on the other side of the city at Porte Dorée. That museum began its life as the Museum of the Colonies, opened during the International Colonial Exhibition of 1931. It went through many changes of name and direction, and was eventually reconceptualized as a museum of non-Western arts, but it never lost its colonial feel. The galleries were closed in the summer of 2003, and the building, with its elaborate bas-relief and interior frescoes celebrating France’s colonial glory, is now, somewhat ironically, being converted into a museum of immigration.

Photo 2: Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie building at Porte Dorée

These two museums were home to vast state-owned ethnographic collections, most of them gathered in the former French colonies in Africa and Oceania. My research has focused on the North African collections of these museums, a small portion of which will be featured in the permanent exhibit of the Musée du Quai Branly. Despite their impressive collections, both museums suffered from a lack of public interest and were in need of major refurbishments and revitalization. Various commissions were convened to study the problem, and the final recommendation was the creation of a museum that would breathe new life into the collections by exhibiting them in a new space and context. Although a certain amount of consultation went into the decision, there is a general impression that the museum was created by presidential fiat. Many call it Chirac’s legacy for Paris, much like the new National Library built under Mitterrand. Unlike that building, the new museum will not bear Chirac’s name. After using and then discarding the names "Museum of Primitive Art" and "Museum of First Arts," the organizers finally seem to have settled on naming it after its location on the Quai Branly near the Eiffel Tower.

The creation of the Musée du Quai Branly has been fiercely opposed by many "partisans" of the Musée de l’Homme, who insist that the valuable collections of France’s main ethnographic museum should not be placed in what was originally conceived of as a "primitive art" museum. The directors of the Musée du Quai Branly now claim that they will not be taking a purely aesthetic approach to the display of these objects, but that has not placated those who argue that ethnographic objects cannot be understood without the contextualization provided in a true museum of anthropology. Despite the opposition of parts of the scientific community, all the non-European ethnographic collections of the Musée de l’Homme were transferred to the Musée du Quai Branly in 2003. The library collections were the last to be moved to their new home, making them the last battleground in the struggle for the old Musée de l’Homme, a museum of mankind from our origins to the present day.

Photo 3: The Palais de Chaillot at Trocadéro. The Musée de l’Homme is on the left hand side.

This summer I spent many hours in the sunny reading room of the Musée de l’Homme library, immersed in documents related to the beginnings of the "glorious era" that has now drawn to a close. The Musée de l’Homme was officially opened in the newly constructed Palais de Chaillot at Trocadéro in 1938, but the transformations that led to its creation had begun 10 years earlier when Paul Rivet and his assistant Georges-Henri Rivière took over the administration of the original Museum of Ethnography at Trocadéro. As part of their efforts to transform the museum from a dusty repository for exotic objects into an exemplar of modern ethnographic practice, they organized what would today be called a "blockbuster exhibit," the Exposition du Sahara. By marshalling the support of the Governor General of Algeria, and through him a number of colonial officers serving in the Sahara, Rivet and Rivière were able to gather an impressive collection of ethnographic objects from the Tuareg and other Saharan peoples that served as the centerpiece of the exhibit. They also collaborated with retired colonial officers, explorers, and other French "Sahariens" who had played a part in the history of France’s exploration and colonization of North Africa. The exhibit attracted a large public with stories of these well-known heroes and images from popular books and films about the region. It also presented scientific information about the climate, geography and animal life of the desert, as well as the latest discoveries about the ancient and the more recent history of the populations of the Sahara. The Exposition du Sahara was the embodiment of the principles that were at the heart of the Musée de l’Homme – it applied Rivet and Rivière's ideas for more scientific collection and display practices, it used the French colonial presence in North Africa to gather information about distant peoples and cultures, and it served to spread knowledge about those peoples to a broad public. It is Rivet and Rivière’s conception of scientific ethnographic museum practice that is now being called into question at the Musée du Quai Branly.

Photo 4: Musée du Quai Branly, June 2005

Once the Musée de l’Homme library had closed, I turned my attention to the new era beginning just across the river on the Quai Branly. The museum building, now in the final stages of construction, was designed by French architect Jean Nouvel. Nouvel is perhaps best known for his design of the Arab World Institute in Paris, where he took elements of Middle Eastern architecture – most notably mashrabiya latticework windows – and incorporated them into an ultra-modern steel and glass building. He seems to have done much the same with the design of the Musée du Quai Branly, drawing on (fairly objectionable) notions of the "primitive," "natural" or "sacred" world from which the collections supposedly originated. The building will be surrounded by a garden of wild grasses, creating a separation between the busy Parisian streets and the museum itself, whose wood and glass walls should allow it to almost disappear into its surroundings. At one end of the building parts of the exterior wall have been made into a living "vegetal wall," further emphasizing the idea of a wild, overgrown natural habitat as the proper home for these collections from exotic parts of the world.

Photo 5: The “mur vegetal” at the Musée du Quai Branly, June 2005

When I visited the curator in charge of the North African collections this summer, she showed me around their recently completed offices, and pointed out the places where the "vegetal wall," which forms an inside wall in some of the offices as well, was leaking and creating a somewhat unpleasant hothouse feel (and smell). She and the other curators are now making the final decisions about objects, texts and images to be used in the main part of the exhibit. Space for texts and images is limited, and the emphasis in the permanent exhibit will be on the objects themselves rather than on the cultures they are part of. A team of "scientifiques," anthropologists or other specialists, are putting together CD-ROMs and other information on general topics like language, kinship, or tribal structure that will be provided to the more curious visitors in mezzanines above the main exhibit space.

This stratification of information sets the Musée du Quai Branly apart from its predecessors and from much contemporary museum practice. Depending on who you ask, it means that the visitors will be less encumbered with context and more able to appreciate the beauty of the object itself, or that they will be missing essential information that will prevent them from understanding the true importance of that object to its creators and users. The impact of this design decision and the larger project to reconceptualize these older, mainly colonial, ethnographic collections will only be fully realized when the museum opens its doors in the spring of 2006.

Lisa Bernasek's research was made possible by a Summer Travel Grant from the Center for Middle Eastern Studies