Paper short abstract

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Paper long abstract

Let us first agree to consider the so-called "crisis of identity" as a good rather than a bad thing. A good thing because it simultaneously exposes and offers to deliberation the longstanding anthropological conclusion about identities being transient and subject to change. So, far from accepting museums as troubled by their possession of an essential identity -- having to do with "an imperial science of collecting and curating," let us instead argue that this besieged identity provides us with a much-desired opportunity to re-present museums as new shared signs of existence. This paper will be arguing for such new meanings from the ontological rather than epistemological position of humanistic anthropology. It will propose that the new identities be reformed with and be about the creative expression of felt human experience on a par with (and certainly not less than) human knowledge.