Lässt sich die Ethnologie in der „art premier“ auflösen?: Ethnographische Betrachtungen des Musée du Quai Branly aus der Perspektive eines teilnehmenden Beobachters”

This essay is an ethnographic description and a tentative of ethnological analysis of the project of the forthcoming Musée du Quai Branly and, by consequence, of the social and cultural environment of arts premier (non western arts) and its relationships in the contemporary French society. That project aim to put together the collections of two of the biggest Parisian museums dedicated to the societies of non western countries, the Musée de l'Homme (literally “Museum of the Man”) and the Musée National des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie (National Museum of arts of Africa and Oceania). Therefore this museum is not a new museum in the strict sense of the term. It is due to take over the heritage and to integrate the collections of the two former museums that have built the history of the French museology and anthropology. The author analyze this ambiguity as the main cause of the most part of the diatribes which encompass the organization of the project. Indeed, the mistake of this project is to put together two entities which can hardly coexist, the art and the science or, more precisely, the universalistic approach of a certain kind of specialist of non western art and the other, more particularistic of the anthropologist, motivated by the comprehension of the material culture as a form of expression of a social organization