Architecture of the contact zone: Four post-colonial museums

Abstract

Museums have become important locations for shaping and reshaping contemporary relations between post-colonial nations and indigenous cultures. The anthropologist James Clifford has used the term ‘contact zone’ to describe the indeterminacy and possibility that exists when the formal, anthropological knowledge held by curators and the embodied, evolving culture represented by indigenous groups encounter each other within the orbit of the contemporary museum. Clifford’s use of the term ‘contact zone’ is borrowed from the work of Mary Louise Pratt who used it rather in an historical sense to describe the strangeness and unanticipated outcomes for epistemology of encounters on the frontiers of ..