Manikin‐Ship: Value‐added relatedness in Vietnamese museums, 1996–2005

Abstract

Objects are telling of identity and difference, through possession, exchange, and display, but this dynamic must be historicised and socially situated. In this article, I focus on the signification of ethnicity in Vietnamese museums, particularly on an apparent distinction between historically ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ matter. The earliest displays responded to the previous hegemony of French colonial significations. Subsequent national exhibits consistently enable Vietnam through assemblies of objects and images, but suggest—when examined over time—fundamentally different configurations of the nation, ethnicity, gender, and historicity. Object assemblies, where a centrepiece signifies the surrounding objects, indicate repeated prospecting for new social assemblages, most recently situating Vietnam in post‐Cold War networks through the Southeast Asian kinship implied in the nation’s ethnic diversity.

Visiting history, witnessing memory: A study of a Holocaust Exhibition in Paris in 2012

“…It is now possible to address the issue of the ‘transmission of values’ which is at the core of the political expectations but also present in the scholarly literature linking human rights and memory (Levy and Sznaider, 2010). The issue of values in museums is not new but has not given way to studies of their actual appropriations (Huistra and al, 2014; Jonsson, 2012). As was said previously, few of the visitors ultimately make reference to particular artefacts of the exhibition, and the historical narrations in themselves are rarely assimilated.…”