Paper short abstract:

Based on case studies of the ethnographic collections at the Danish National Museum in the first half of the twentieth century, I wish to reflect upon curatorial strategies in the production and dissemination of ethnographic knowledge through objects.

Paper long abstract:

As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) has pointed out, museum exhibitions are never just passive carriers of content but in themselves powerful meaning making motors conveying specific messages. Through case studies of different strategies of collection and display I wish to analyse what museologist Wera Grahn (2006) with inspiration from Donna Haraway has called material-semiotic nodes - i.e. material objects through which meaning is (re)presented and negotiated - in the ethnographic collections at the Danish National Museum which in the first part of the twentieth century underwent processes of professionalization as well as a major reorganisation. At the centre of attention will be the design of the museal meaning making motors in the production and dissemination of knowledge of the world outside Europe - including collection processes and theoretical and political framework of the curatorial practice.