Abstract

Although the genesis of the term goes back to the ancient world, the present age can be named the ‘museum epoch’. This chapter considers the genesis of the museum as an institution and as a term, starting in antiquity. The museum experienced its first globalization in the sixteenth century. While museum strategies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were oriented towards cultural differentiation, after World War II, the museum became a mass medium. This chapter explores the changing configurations of this institution from its beginning and since that moment, as an instrument of economic growth, as a player in the art market and as a place for corporate representations, in Europe and beyond. In Europe, the ethnological museums became re-conceptualized as national projects. This process is related to debates on objects and collections, on the relationship between art and ethnology and on new forms of collaborative curating and exhibiting with source communities. But still, museums can also be seen as places of criticism and of social imagination, to give globalism a new meaning.