Museums and the public representation of other cultures: the ethnic exhibitions

In the last two decades, museums have been theorised as «sites in which socially and culturally embedded theories are performed» (Macdonald), as «contested sites of remembrance» (Zolberg), as space and place «where symbolic boundaries are created and inequalities in society are reinforced» (Lamont and Fournier), as «texts where gendered relations of representation are displayed» (Porter). Studies concerned with issues of museums generally tend to focus on documenting their communicative nature: exhibitions are analysed as communicative media. This is particularly the case among the studies examining the role and the impact of new technologies, the shift between museums on-line and off-line. In this context a relevant contribute derives from the post-colonial debate which focuses, among others, on the distance between the culture to be displayed and the representation constructed by the cultural institution which displays it. Following this perspective, museums are questioned about their commitment to represent differences, about their role as institutional forms of cultural mediation. In this paper most issues posed by the post-colonial are declined into the art museums case. Are there museum displays more reliable and valid than others in representing ethnic cultures? How can we study the process of cultural translation which occurs when cultural artefacts are displayed into an exhibition? Moreover, which are the strategies adopted by the art museums to sustain the fiction that the set of objects displayed somehow constitutes a coherent representational universe?