Bienvenue les Gadjé : An Ethnography of Collaborative Exhibition-making and the Politics of Representation at Mucem

In my dissertation, I look at an example of a „contact zone“ (Clifford 1997) concerning the collaboration of Romani and non-Romani museum and representation professionals from a socio-anthropological perspective. While research in and on the postcolonial afterlives of ethnographic museums, their modes of knowing and creating difference, is an ever larger and thriving research field in Europe (most recent publications including Macdonald 2023, Tinius/von Oswald 2020, von Oswald 2022), little ethnographic attention has been devoted to contemporary examples from the European sphere of closer work with minoritized groups, engaging in collaboration in the practices of exhibiting, collecting, or researching.

My case study is a French European-ethnographic museum as a site of production of difference from a perspective of critical, decolonial museology. Through the prism of the „Barvalo“ project, which has involved European communities identifying as Rom, Gitan, Manouche, Sinti, or Voyageurs (French Travellers), and who have fundamentally contributed to the exhibition shifting from a folklorizing approach to an orientation towards discussing the extent t which antigyypsyism is pervasive in our societies,  I examine how the museum engaged in a contemporary effort to renew and build practices of including historically minoritized and Othered voices. 

I have spent three years carrying out part-time observant participation (Moeran 2007) during the preparation process (Sept 2020-2023), of which I myself was a part — as co-curator and previously as research assistant. To address this position of power vis-à-vis research partners to avoid furthering colonial modes of domination inscribed in anthropological research. Through interviews, observation, participation, and informal discussions, collected in and around at least 150 (multi-departmental) meetings, in-person seminars, and webinars, I recorded practices of identifying, challenging, and (re)shaping shared and contested knowledge on and notions of Roma and non-Roma mobile and settled cultures and identities, racism and Whiteness, and how these embodied categories are negotiated when addressing history, memory, ethnography, tradition, art, diversity, and unity. By analyzing the impact and agency of Mucem staff and the exhibition team on process and practices, I show how they address and deal with these notions, as well as with tensions in the structures they are embedded in, with their limits and boundaries. I discuss how the museum teams reproduce and challenge normativities around social hierarchies, power relations, and mechanisms of in- and exclusion. Maintaining that collaboration brings about the possibility of de-centering dominant perspectives and the leveling of representational hierarchies which usually organize the making of exhibitions, I engage in an ethnography of the exhibition’s planning process that goes beyond the curatorial instance, taking equally into account the collaboration among a larger range of professionals and experts inside the museum.

I address participants‘ negotiations around main exhibition elements focused on historical migrations into and across the European continent as a result of persecutions and expulsions, around the orientalist gaze and anthropological exoticization of these groups, or on Romani subjects’ and groups’ practices of resistance and pride, and show how these conflict with but also reproduce dynamics of Whiteness and racism in today's representations. While I analyze conflicting and complementary interpretations of how to represent subjects such as (historical and putative) nomadic lifestyles, I also draw out how in reaction to these negotiations, which have unsettled common preconceptions among museum staff, but also scholarly practices, I could observe professional insecurity, (de)stabilization, and sensitization. In this sense, with my dissertation I seek to contribute to the anthropology of heritage and memory, identity and belonging, of material culture and the arts, and decolonial museology, against the backdrop of the transforming context of contemporary, formally postcolonial, assimilationist France and its national institutions. Though my focus is contemporary, I also explore the history of science in and of museums around the representation of Roma — often portrayed as a nomadic/migrant, deviant, and inferior „Other“ — and as such its colonial entanglements. I focus on the French context of these theories and studies, taking into account their international influences and inflections drawing from critical race theory, critical romani studies, and collaborative anthropology.

The following overarching questions are guiding me in this research: broadly put, in which way do museums act as institutional and discursive spaces, and do they inform about and deal with French and European contemporary society’s issues and conflicts around migration and diversity? Which are the power relations and margins of their renegotiation between so-called majority society and minority groups in these institutions? Specifically, if we consider the genealogy of the institution I focus on - the former National museum of popular arts and traditions - which logics and practices prevail regarding ideas of French and European identity? Do museum staff and activities tackle modes of signification and representation of hierarchies, dominations, and exclusion? From an anthropological point of inquiry, how do they relate to and engage with the contested (im)materializations of these ideas and practices in their daily work?

Towards the aim of answering these questions and testing these hypotheses, I have spent three years carrying out part-time observant participation (Moeran 2007) during the preparation process (Sept 2020-2023), of which I myself was a part — as co-curator and previously as research assistant. To address this position of power vis-à-vis research partners and to avoid furthering colonial modes of domination inscribed in anthropological research, the dissertation will be mindful to include auto-ethnography and reflections on methodologies of self-reflexivity and auto-positioning. Through interviews, observation, participation, and informal discussions, collected in and around at least 150 (multi-departmental) meetings, in-person seminars, and webinars, I recorded practices of identifying, challenging, and (re)shaping shared and contested knowledge on and notions of Roma and non-Roma mobile and settled cultures and identities, racism and Whiteness, and how these embodied categories are negotiated when addressing history, memory, ethnography, tradition, art, diversity, and unity. By analyzing the impact and agency of Mucem staff and the exhibition team on process and practices, I show how they address and deal with these notions, as well as with tensions in the structures they are embedded in, with their limits and boundaries. I discuss how the museum teams reproduce and challenge normativities around social hierarchies, power relations, and mechanisms of in- and exclusion. Maintaining that collaboration brings about the possibility of de-centering dominant perspectives and the leveling of representational hierarchies which usually organize the making of exhibitions, I engage in an ethnography of the exhibition’s planning process that goes beyond the curatorial instance, taking equally into account the collaboration among a larger range of professionals and experts inside the museum.