The mission of the musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac is, on the one hand, to conduct research on and around the collections it houses and, on the other, to develop research on contemporary issues in the fields it covers. With this in mind, the research carried out by the Research and Teaching Department will be structured along three lines. The many and varied research projects carried out by the museum fall within the fields of anthropology, history and art history, without excluding other themes:

Diversity of aesthetics and forms of creativity

Bringing together anthropology, history and art history, this theme focuses on the many ways in which human beings perceive and evaluate the world around them. The notion of aesthetics, in the etymological sense of the term aesthesis, goes far beyond what we in the Western tradition call art or the arts, referring to the diversity of ways in which different human groups shape perceptions and experience. It includes not only sensitive and intellectual dimensions, but also emotional, moral and political ones.

Aesthetics and creativity are expressed not only in arts and crafts, but also in a range of festive and ritual practices, involving the body and the various senses, combining sound, dance, performance, the spoken word, bodily movement, still and moving images, as well as food, home decoration, gardening and other practices. They bring into play the taste for sculptures as well as the pleasure before a harmoniously arranged meal, or the emotion before a ritual, a landscape, a monument.

The research carried out at the musée du quai Branly thus contributes to the exploration of new ways of reporting and making sensitive the diversity of aesthetics and forms of creativity for the benefit of a vast public, by more systematically mobilizing perceptive dimensions, particularly visual and sound ones.

From this perspective, the question of art is a singular case whose historical and contemporary genesis and metamorphoses need to be studied, for example, the processes involved in the constitution of arts and art markets that are both “traditional”, “popular” and “contemporary”, “This may take the form of labels associated with major cultural regions or areas (“African art”, “Islamic art”, “Latin American art”), nation-states, or new collective identifications.

Museums, heritage, cultures, identities

A second line of research focuses on a comparative approach to the processes of patrimonialization, museumization and the staging of identities. Today, it is essential to understand the transformations of museums and heritage, both tangible and intangible, in countries where collections originate.

A number of codified festive practices linked to music and dance, once considered “folkloric” and often claimed today as “traditional” or “cultural”, are one of the privileged forms of ritualizing identities, both for oneself and for others. More recently, institutional creations that originated in the West, such as museums, heritage and the notion of culture itself, have been reinterpreted and reappropriated in a variety of ways around the world.

In many countries, we are witnessing a proliferation of museums of all kinds, driven by tourism, but also linked to forms of identity affirmation. On a global scale, the relationship between museums and “communities of origin”, in particular indigenous peoples, is being redefined, with new demands being made on museums, which sometimes give rise to misunderstandings or tensions, but also offer new opportunities. The museum (from the new indigenous museums to the national museums) has thus become a privileged place for the expression of claims.

Colonial legacies: reappropriations, claims, sharing

A third line of research focuses on “colonial legacies”, in the sense of the many ways in which the past relations between Europe and other continents are present in today's world. The contemporary stakes of colonial legacies, the ways in which they are faced and partially appropriated, or even radically rejected in the name of “decolonization”, are posed both in former colonial powers and in formerly colonized countries. It includes research into the history and legacies of slavery.

The notion of colonial heritage, understood in this sense, includes both tangible aspects (museums, monuments) and “intangible” ones (languages, food, music, bodily practices, dances, knowledge, etc.). Colonial heritages include the knowledge produced in the course of history about non-European worlds and their cultures, aesthetic creations, languages and so on. This knowledge is generally the result of interactions, often asymmetrical, with local interlocutors bearing their own knowledge, and is the basis on which Westerners perceive, classify and think about other societies. This knowledge, materialized and preserved in various forms - including archives, notebooks, drawings, photographs, films, inventories, lexicons, genealogies, etc. - typically constitutes a plural heritage: documents for scientists past and present, they are also a possible source of historical knowledge, a medium of collective and individual memory and identification for the descendants of those they deal with. Reflecting on the construction of knowledge - anthropology, archaeology, geography, history and history of art, theology, but also the natural sciences - in the context of colonial relations, is thus an essential aspect of any investigation.

From this point of view, this latest line of research is concerned with a vast set of processes of circulation, re-appropriation, sharing and conflict, which are expressed through objects, but also through the development of new relationships, and raise the question of the possibility of multiple, even shared appropriations.