Rivet's mission in colonial Indochina or the failure to create an ethnographic museum

Abstract

By focusing on a transfer of a museological model from the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro to colonial Indochina, the paper examines the failure to create an ethnographic museum. The paper analyses, on the one hand, the collecting practices in the field and the circulation of knowledge, people, and objects from metropole to colony and vice versa. On the other hand, it seeks to highlight why Rivet and the École Française d’Extrême- Orient focused their research programme on the Montagnards from 1932 onwards at a time when French administration attempted to control the Highlands due to its strategic importance in terms of controlling Indochina. The concern with establishing ethnographic collections in Indochina extending from 1920s to 1938 attests the ways in which museums could be evolved in the governance of colonial populations. However, this concern underestimated the very fact that ethnographic museums differed for metropolitan populations and for colonizers.