The Quest for Improved Collection Care: Opportunities for Participatory Processes Involving Distant Source Communities

ABSTRACT The Geneva Museum of Ethnography (MEG) often engages the participation of source-community artists and representatives when studying collections or creating exhibitions. At the same time, the museum's conservation department increasingly seeks to care for objects in a manner based not on the values assigned at the time of their acquisition, but according to their status as defined by the communities that used or created them, and to respond to those communities’ requests when it comes to sacred or secret objects. To achieve this, we believe that only a participatory approach involving these communities’ representatives will allow us to define the specific care objects should receive. Although the MEG is located in a non-colonizing country, Switzerland, its collection is largely the result of colonial enterprises from which the country nevertheless benefited. While the collection includes objects from a considerable number of different communities, the MEG is not engaged in participatory approaches specifically linked to reparation. How then do we ascertain the needs of such highly diverse collections and how do we define the priorities for their care? This raises the question of which stakeholders have the legitimacy to define an object’s or collection’s needs if their visions do not necessarily reflect those of an entire community. How can the museum define who has the legitimacy to answer its questions? Indeed, does the museum itself have the legitimacy to judge the legitimacy of others? One compromise is to accept that there can be no one solution, only a multiplicity of evolving solutions, and that these solutions are acceptable only insofar as they respect multiple voices and the intention to promote the collections’ wellbeing as well as that of the stakeholders who experience the benefit of interacting with those collections.