Museum families: Canadian kinship and material culture

Abstract

Understanding and documenting the ways that objects become entangled in, produce, sustain, and rupture family relations are crucial contributions of museum studies to anthropological kinship theory. This article analyzes a Canadian exhibit entitled “Family: Bonds and Belonging,” developed in response to Canada's 150th anniversary, in 2017, by a British Columbia provincial museum, then brought to Canada's national immigration museum in Nova Scotia in 2019. The article demonstrates how curators invite objects to narrate kinship, and entangle visitors as theoretical accomplices, all while building national projects. Layered concepts of “family” plays a central role in this exhibit, simultaneously introducing “family” as complex, diverse, and varied while also reproducing middle-class conventions of family. I argue that this contradiction partly undercuts the representational content of the exhibit, and that the simultaneous multivalence and ideological uniformity of family in this setting points to how museum practices and procedures can unintentionally reproduce conventional ideas that implicitly counter curatorial work.