Museums, Interactivity, and the Tasks of “Exhibition Anthropology”

This chapter proposes and demonstrates an approach that the author calls “exhibition anthropology,” explaining why it is needed and explicating its potential uses by a series of case studies. It treats the art museum as an institution that is permeated by rules and regulations. These are not necessarily automatically respected by all museum‐goers. Indeed, many of them engage themselves in acts of trial and error to find out what is allowed and what is not. Of course, there are also those who transgress the rules because of negligence or ignorance. The museum is a place where complex negotiations take place between the institution and its visitors. The task of the exhibition archaeologist is to observe such processes and to come up with theoretical explanations about their underpinnings. The exhibition archaeologist may occasionally need to engage in actions like those of the visitors he or she observes in order to make visible the invisible rules, barriers, and codes of the museum.