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Falling under the curious, wooden gaze of the turn-of-the-century Yoruban sculpture strategically displayed in the front lobby of Berlin's Ethnological Museum several years ago produces a rather uncanny sensation for the museum's visitors. After all, museums are generally thought of as places for people to look at objects rather than for objects to look at, and appear to take notes on, people. Peering curiously from its glass display cabinet at the slightly self-conscious passerby, the sculpture, labeled Writing European (Figure 1), represents a moment at which the European observer has been observed; the ethnographer rendered ethnographically interesting. While mirroring the inquisitive looking enacted by the typical museum-goer – a kind of ethnographic observer, twice removed – this effigy of the ethnographer simultaneously encourages us to reflect on the practices of observing, writing, and collecting that shaped the nineteenth-century ethnological museum, the objects that entered its walls, and the discipline they helped to authorize. As you approach the cabinet, in order to gain a closer view, it occurs to you that you look not into a mirror but rather into a 'split screen of the self and its doubling": your reflection in the glass and the sculpture that returns your gaze.¹

DOI: 10.1057/9780230378018_2

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