Paper short abstract:

The current popular, political and economical interest in "heritage" allows for a renewed dialogue between anthropology and museology: what are the possibilities and the consequences of this new context?

Paper long abstract:

Having played a central role in anthropology's early years and being known as its first institutional stronghold, the ethnographic museum has had a less prominent role in the discipline lately. It has been a place of experimentation, but more often as the object of a reflexive questioning of instituted practices than as an instrument of proactive theoretical innovation. And the present life of European ethnographic museums is

oriented by a range of intermingled uncertainties: financial constraints, institutional reorganization, seemingly unavoidable (albeit often expensive, unreliable and distractive) new information technologies, blurred social role, debates about "deaccession", theoretical irresolution, discursive hesitations…

At the same time, the current popular, political and economical interest in "heritage" allows for a renewed dialogue between anthropology and museology. Its conditions and implications are as diverse as ethnographic museums can get in terms of institutional setting, size, social functions, scientific background or goals. But, besides the injunctions to produce "applied" research, the strong expectations that result in, and are fostered by heritagization - and cultural commodification -- undoubtedly bring these two fields to again more closely share common grounds.

A two-year experience away from teaching and as director of a State-sponsored ethnographic museum in North-eastern Portugal provides a standpoint on the predicaments inherent to this new context. It stresses the possibilities and difficulties encountered in an attempt at leading anthropological practice back to the museum and, beyond it, towards more dynamic perplexity, creative disquiet and social relevance.