This book documents and interprets the trajectory of ethnographic museums in Tunisia from the colonial to the post-revolutionary period, demonstrating changes and continuities in role, setting and architecture across shifting ideological landscapes. The display of everyday culture in museums is generally looked down upon as being kitsch and old-fashioned. This research shows that, in Tunisia, ethnographic museums have been highly significant sites in the definition of social identities. They have worked as sites that diffuse social, economic and political tensions through a vast array of means, such as the exhibition itself, architecture, activities, tourism, and consumerism. The book excavates the evolution of paradigms in which Tunisian popular identity has been expressed through the ethnographic museum, from the modernist notion of 'indigenous authenticity' under colonial time, to efforts at developing a Tunisian ethnography after Independence, and more recent conceptions of cultural diversity since the revolution. Based on a combination of archival research in Tunisia and in France, participant observation and interviews with past and present protagonists in the Tunisian museum field, this research brings to light new material on an understudied area.
Virginie Rey holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include cultural representations in museums in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as Islamic visual culture in the West. She is currently a research affiliate in the Department of Anthropology and the Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies, at the University of California, Irvine.
[...] 'Overall, Mediating Museums is a timely contribution to museum studies in general and research on museums in Arab-majority societies in particular, which overwhelmingly focus on archaeological museums. Rey offers an impressively detailed and interdisciplinary history of the shifting social and political-economic roles of Tunisian ethnographic museums in mediating peoples’ relationships to colonialism, independence, NGOs and international development, emerging tourism economies, and revolution'.
Kyle Craig, Northwestern University, in H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, published on H-AMCA (March, 2023).
Contents
Acknowledgments List of Figures Abbreviations Notes on Transliteration
Introduction
Part 1: Mapping Tunisian Material Culture (1881-1956)
Introduction to Part 1 1 Artisanship Revival in the Maghreb 2 The Tunisian Arts
Part 2: Ethnographic Objects (1957-1980)
Introduction to Part 2 3 Le centre des arts et traditions populaires 4 Les musées d’arts et traditions populaires 5 Carving a Modern Tunisian Identity in Traditions 6 Le patrimoine vivant
Part 3: Patrimonialisation (1985-2011)
Introduction to Part 3 7 Turning Traditional Culture into Heritage 8 The Heteronomous Pole of Cultural Production 9 Museums and Communities
Part 4: Revolutionary Museums (2011-2015)
Introduction to Part 4 10 The Field of Museum Production 11 The Journey of an Ethnographic Museum from the Colonial to the Post-Revolutionary Conclusion
Bibliography Index
Anyone interested in the fields of museum studies, anthropology, postcolonial studies, heritage studies in the Middle East and North Africa.