ABSTRACT This paper examines how museological curation, understood as a historically contingent regime of knowledge production, mediates the racialization of Roma identity through the “Indian origin” theory. Focusing on the Museum of Romani Culture, a state‐subsidized organization, Czech Republic (MRC), and its permanent exhibition The Story of the Roma , I analyze how the chronicling, mapping, and visual narration of the Roma's putative Indian heritage are shaped by the intertwined histories of Czech nationalism, racialized whiteness, and minority governance. While Critical Romani Studies has traced the genealogy of the “Indian origin” trope across philological, ethnographic, and later serological and genetic paradigms, its musealization has remained largely unexamined. I argue that the MRC's curatorial voice simultaneously reproduces colonial epistemes and stages the Roma as both internal European minorities and externalized, civilizational “others.” Drawing on critical race theory, scholarship on musealization and racialization, and raciolinguistics, the paper shows how museum practices rearticulate Roma identity through Orientalist genealogies while displacing the epistemic violence embedded in these frameworks.
This article examines how ethnographic museums in India are rethinking inherited museological frameworks shaped by colonial knowledge production and post-independence nation-building. Focusing on two self-grown, non-state institutions, the Arna-Jharna Museum in Rajasthan and the Amrapali Museum in Jaipur, it argues that ethnographic museology in India is increasingly emerging through practices that lie outside formal state mandates. Arna-Jharna articulates an ecological, community-centered approach in which ordinary objects like brooms become entry points into lived social worlds and vernacular epistemologies, while Amrapali demonstrates how jewelry can be read ethnographically through documentation of craft genealogies, regional variation, and ritual use, even as objects circulate within commercial contexts. Read together, these case studies challenge rigid binaries between state and private museums, preservation and circulation, and scholarship and entrepreneurship. The article proposes that such museums constitute ethnographic interventions, generating context-specific forms of knowledge production and rethinking representation and authority in postcolonial museum practice.
ABSTRACT This review suggests that Nuxalk Strong: Dancing Down the Eyelashes of the Sun reframes the ethnographic gallery as a site of protocol rather than as a trophy case. Co‐curated by Snxakila—Clyde Tallio (Nuxalk Nation) and Jennifer Kramer (UBC MOA), the exhibition centers law, lineage, and language to present belongings and supernatural beings as ongoing relations. Contemporary makers stand beside ancestral treasures; Nuxalk Radio and interactive bilingual spaces turn sound and speech into reflections of sovereignty; and intentional returns—most notably of masks and weavings linked to the McIlwraith collections—are treated as part of the interpretive arc of engaged and community‐facing scholarship, not as backstage logistics. We celebrate the juridical‐ceremonial method, the clear pedagogy of governance, and the refusal to romanticize both loss or return, and note productive tensions around acoustics and attention in this multi‐modal gallery. Taken together, the exhibit's careful choreography of law, story, and material and immaterial culture models the kind of ethical partnership in which authority remains with families, ancestors, supernatural beings, and belongings and collections continue to work and circulate in the world.
ABSTRACT The temporary exhibition called Siberia. Voices from the North at the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków sought to explore connections between people and their living contexts at different times and in different spaces through collected objects now kept in museum storage. Objects originating from various Siberian cultures were all brought to this southern Polish city during the late 19th century by a variety of people. Leading up to the exhibit, extensive field research conducted in 2016–2019 produced valuable knowledge and an inexhaustible trove of stories. These stories brought some of the once “silent” museum objects into a sort of new life.
