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In response to the criticisms and suspicions about ethnographic museums, adding sections on collectors and collections has become a common, even ubiquitous, practice. It remains crucial to know how such a critical reflexivity is displayed and how unsettling it is for the museum. The ethnographic museums of Basel and Neuchatel in Switzerland recently presented exhibitions tackling the topic of expeditions ("Expeditions" Museum der Kulturen; "Return to Angola," Neuchâtel Museum of Ethnography). Indeed, the subject of these reflexive meta-exhibitions is the museum itself, whose legitimacy and predatory nature is questioned. Our contribution illuminates how reformist narratives take place in these exhibitions and how, through such self-exhibition strategies, the museum reinforces the legitimacy of Western museums. Through their displays, both exhibitions challenge the established systems of museums’ values. However, ambivalent postures (in the representation of subjects, in the expression of their voices, in the presence of human remains) show the limits of the critical resettling of the museums. In the end, it appears that these exhibitions are neither the place for undermining the Western museum nor places where the voices of others are expressed. Ultimately, the agencies of display contribute to a reinforcement of the museum’s authority and its legitimate right to collect, preserve and display.

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Reformulation of the museum’s discourse in reflexive ethnographic exhibitions. Limits and ambivalences at the Museum der Kulturen (Basel) and the Neuchâtel Ethnography Museum