Sichtbare Ansichten - "Ich sehe was, was Du nicht siehst!" Eine museumsethnologische Untersuchung zur Präsentation und Repräsentation von Kultur am Beispiel von Ausstellungen über Mexiko

This ethnological thesis located in the field of museology deals with the theoretical analysis of museological representation and its implementation into museographic exhibition practice. By transferring the fundamental question of whether and how the Other in its Otherness is representable at all to the anthropological museum, it is demonstrated that problems of ethnographic presentation and representation apply equally to both, ethnographic writing and museum exhibition. It becomes apparent how through subjectivity and the process of selection and recontextualization a certain meaning is communicated. The design elements peculiar to the museum create an interplay between the mediation of the subject matter and its visual representation. The latter supports the former or may even spawn its manifestation. Data based on empirical research into the Mexican festival días de muertos is contrasted with exhibitions having this very festival as theme. In this way the thesis can establish that every exhibition has its own specific idea in mind that it wants to bring across and is doing this by stressing selected aspects relating to the festival that convey the wanted subject matters and neglecting others that would not do so. Taking it thus for granted that the representation processes decisively shape the presented statements, the possibilities that more transparency would offer are pointed out. In doing so the artificiality of the ways and forms of representation could be focused on, since it always only constitutes the frame for how the material artifacts are picked out as a central theme. The aim is to counteract the impression of completeness in the representation of cultural reality and to include the aspect of construction and the fictitious content of the re-/presentation.