Displaying nationality as traditional culture in the Belgrade Ethnographic Museum: Exploration of a museum modernity practice

Abstract

This paper is an exploration of the modernist project of museums’ construction of "reality" through the processes of the collecting and displaying of objects, as practiced in the Ethnographic Museum Belgrade. Through the analysis of the museum’s collecting and exhibiting practices, I will try to argue that in Belgrade ethnographic museum practice the idea of the nation is closely connected with the idea of ethnicity as a bounded whole of the distinctive characteristics embodied in the traditional culture that the museum collects and displays.

Keywords

• anthropology of the museum
• nation state
• modernity
• museum of ethnography
• ethnicity
• nation
• traditional culture