Will Museums of Ethnology Have a Future?

Resumo

If one puts the question this way, it would seem that it is merely a rhetorical one which could only be answered affirmatively. The reason is that there are, in quite a large number, museums of this sort which by now have a very long history and have grown into big institutions with collections of tens and even hundreds of thousands of objects. Because of the sheer value of the collections it seems unbelievable that these museums could be abandoned. But if one looks at some recent publications on this topic, one gets the impression that a large number of ethnologists working in these museums are not at all sure about the security of the future of this sort of museum.