Museums are increasingly taking the cultural values of source communities into account in their representational strategies, and that means that they now face the challenge of explaining to their publics how social responsibility toward distant source communities informs the choices each museum makes. This article examines how the National Museum of Denmark attempted to inform and discuss with the Danish public the museum's decision to not exhibit scalps in their temporary exhibition on Native American culture, Powwow: We Dance, We're Alive. Building on the new, contingent museum ethics proposed by Janet Marstine, the editor of the Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics, I show how the museum succeeded in engaging users in questions of museum ethics. However, this specific debate on human remains in museums developed into an encounter between a global, museological discourse on the responsibility of museum institutions toward indigenous groups and a common discourse in Danish political debates that views consideration toward the sensibilities of specific ethnic groups as a threat toward free speech and rational knowledge.
The life stories of migrants are increasingly being told, as part of the work of cultural organizations, and websites are well suited to making such life story projects accessible to the public. However, by using the lives of real people as raw material in a public forum, Web projects raise important questions about the terms on which participants are given a voice. This article focuses on a Danish website which depicts the life stories of migrant men through written texts, audio clips, and photographs. It presents a detailed analysis of the life story of one young man from a Muslim background who has openly declared himself an atheist. The article examines his experience of having this somewhat sensitive story made public. The religious aspect inevitably positioned his story in relation to broader political debates about Muslims in Denmark. Since migrants' stories often touch on highly politicized issues, it is crucial that their stories are not co-opted by societal discourses which they do not themselves support.
This is the accepted (but not finally published) version of the article (version 2); for the published version (version 3) please see Memory Studies, Vol. 9. Issue 2 Remembering Dutch-Moluccan radicalism: memory politics and historical event television.
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