Processes of Change in Ethnographic Museology: Musealization and Exhibition of Objects of New Materials

Abstract

In recent decades, ethnographic museology has been rapidly expanding the field in which the contemporary environment recognizes the value systems of members of a folk culture that no longer exists today. Processes of change in conceptualizations have enabled museums to become active participants and creators of social changes. The exhibition project of the Belgrade Ethno graphic Museum, entitled Plastic Nineties, posed several questions and gave avant-garde answers to them. The question was about the anthropological “ethnographization” of the immediate past in the mirror of today’s undoubted permeation of urban, rural, and suburban communities, at the same time communicated through polymerized objects, the so-called plastic materials. In this way, the unwritten rules of ethnographic museology on the exclusive musealization of objects older than half a century, which are entirely made of natural materials, technologically processed in home, manufacturing or artisan production conditions, were challenged.