For the past two decades, ethnographic museums – understood here in the broadest sense as museums of the ethnology of present-day humans and fossils, to use Paul Rivet's terminology – have occupied a growing place in the public arena. The much-publicised issue of restitutions (Sarr & Savoy 2018), or more or less opportunistic decolonisation projects (Lee 2022, Vergès 2023), have taken over from debates on changing museum names (Caldwell 2000, Stallabras 2014; more widely Stocking 1971). This public and media attention conceals the fact that these museums have long been (Stocking 1985) and continue to be the subject of investigations by historians, but also - ethnography being a discipline that values reflexivity - by ethnographers (Gonseth, Hainhard, Kaehr 2002) and professional museum associations (Deutscher Museumsbund 2021). This large body of work, including historiography, has made it possible to explore a wide range of aspects of these institutions.
Limiting ourselves to the most recent publications, we can identify two main themes. On the one hand, the colonial dimension of ethnographic museums - and the expression of the desire for their decolonisation - is now well documented, with varying degrees of finesse (Cf. for example: Bennett et al. 2016, Turner 2020, Hicks 2020). The same is true of work examining the contestation by local populations of knowledge developed in the museum (Larson 2015, Glass 2018) or museums outside the global North (Berthon 2018, Bondaz, Frioux Salgas (ed) 2022). On the other hand, a great deal of work has studied museums as centres of translation and places where material is accumulated (Brydon 2019, Mushynsky 2023), which has led to an analysis of the ways in which collections are collected, transferred and put into writing (see Gonseth, Hainard, Kaehr 2002, Gonseth, Knodel, Reubi 2010, Smetzer 2015, Petrou 2016, Brusius 2017, Achim, Deans-Smith Rozental, 2021), and even to question the relevance of the divisions (institutional, thematic, chronological) established between objects by museum institutions and public authorities (Delpuech 2018). Finally, there is a great deal of research into the history of the institutions themselves, offering cross-disciplinary approaches, as shown in France by the most recent works on the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, the Musée de l'Homme (Blanckaert 2015, Conklin 2015, Loyau 2022) and the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (Hurel, Blanckaert 2022), among others.
In this dense landscape, the Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines wishes to broaden the perspective by examining museums in the disciplines of general anthropology (ethnography, prehistory, physical anthropology and linguistics) and neighbouring disciplines (art history, folklore, sociology),including those that rarely rely on museum institutions (geography, psychology), or even hybrid institutions, in terms of disciplinary background and museological project, such as eco-museums and other visitor interpretative centres (Debary 2002, Corrias, Le Foll, Möello 2020). The editors of this special issue are inviting contributors to focus on three little-documented issues, based on this object and the way in which historiography approaches it from the perspective of the actors involved (Bergeron, Debary, Mairesse 2020), and paying close attention to practices and their scientific and museological materiality.
A. The name as standard.
Following on from the lexicographical programmes of George Stocking and Claude Blanckaert and the 'Nommer les savoirs' dossier in the Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines (n°37, 2020), the editors of this volume are calling for work on the history of the names given to museums of the humanities and social sciences, the spaces they house and even the objects in their collections. The terms chosen when the museums were founded reveal backgrounds that historiography has sometimes forgotten – museums of ethnography and commercial geography in the late 19th century, or the reclassifications that erased the term "ethnography" as early as the 1937 Musée de l'Homme, but mostly the recent series of "new" old museums (MQB, Humboldt Forum, Museum der fünf Kontinente, etc.).The role of scientific, political and activist actors can be examined, as well as the specific ways in which new terminologies are invented and circulated, and the shared or, on the contrary, specific rhythms of these movements. We could also look at the seemingly innocuous reclassifications (ethnography museum or ethnographic museum, prehistory collection or prehistoric collection, Museum für Ethnografie or Völkerkundemuseum, etc.). Likewise, contributions on disciplines whose names never appear on museum frontispieces (sociology, psychology, linguistics, geography) will be welcome, even though their production can be of great importance in museums. The names given to the various areas of an institution (department, auditorium, rooms, wings, library, etc.) have also undergone regular changes, giving rise to reservations, opposition and sometimes indifference. These names, marked by their very stability or by changing denominations, contribute, like the name given to the institution, to shaping the symbolic, scientific and political imaginary associated with museums, and could also be the subject of investigations.We could also look at the ministerial supervisory bodies that oversee a museum and whose choices shape its missions and identity. Finally, the question of changing the name of an object or category of items for scholarly or secular reasons has long occupied museums.Their current renewal (von Oswald 2023) provides an opportunity to consider the uses and even the usefulness of the museum (as a place for documenting past scholarly practices, and as a place for producing and transmitting contemporary knowledge).
B. Distributing collections
As the work of Ventkateswaran (2020) and others has shown, collections are not bound for eternity to the institutions that house them for a time. They often circulate, from one museum to another, or even within the institution itself as a result of institutional and disciplinary reconfigurations, from one country to another or from one type of institution to another. This is particularly true of disciplines in the human sciences, which are sometimes intimately, institutionally or politically linked to one another (ethnography, archaeology, prehistory, folklore, linguistics, geography, art history, etc.). They may also relate to several systems of representation, and the objects associated with them may switch from one field to another and even, as shown by various proposals on the transfer of collections to source populations, hypothetically resume the life of the object before the museum.The editors will be particularly interested in proposals concerning the distribution of objects from the same collection between several museums, but also on the circulation of collections between and within institutions, as well as on the relationship between the museum space, the collection and scholarly discourse (Mandressi, 2007). Conversely, the maintenance of collections of naturalia, human remains, and prehistoric, Egyptological and linguistic collections in a museum of ethnography is an instructive counter-example of the durability of original arrangements that do not take account of new scientific or museum configurations. Contributions based on an examination of the materiality of objects (palimpsest, para-objects, paper technology, etc.) will be favoured. At the institutional level, the history of the distribution of collections at the time of the constitution of disciplinary museums from generalist museums makes it possible to trace the movement and relationships between disciplines or specialisations. Outside the museum field, the interplay between traditional craft centres, developed in the 'new nations' of the 1960s, and museums, or between religious, community and scientific institutions, also provides an opportunity to follow the biography of objects and collections after the museum.

C. Museology as a human science
Museology is a newcomer to the humanities, and historiography has tended to examine the history of museums solely through the prism of the discipline that occupies them. Journals such as Museums Journal (1902), Museumskunde (1905) and Mouseion (1927), however, point to the fact that museum history has a great deal of historical depth and geographical diversity, which may have influenced the particular scientific practices that are museums. It also has a variety of little-known disciplines, which museums in the humanities and social sciences are helping to understand. Divided between specifically disciplinary requirements, performance sciences, conservation sciences, law, (interior) architecture, scientific and political programmes and pedagogy, museology constitutes a fusion discipline, which has sometimes been assimilated to an interdisciplinary programme and which deserves to be better known than the few existing ad hoc surveys (e.g. Gorgus 2003, Berkowitz & Lightman 2017). The constitution of this knowledge, its transdisciplinary and transnational circulation – for instance the roles of the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, of the International Council of Museums and then of the International Committee for Museology – the identification of its actors (scientific, technical, political, etc.), the organisation of its modes of transmission, but also the ways in which it has been favoured, and then failed, the characteristics of its practical implementation, the technical or didactic difficulties that have been encountered, the variety of its uses and the ways in which it has been used. ), the organisation of their modes of transmission, but also the ways in which they were favoured and then failed, the characteristics of their practical implementation, the technical or didactic difficulties that were encountered, the variety of their productions (exhibitions, temporary exhibitions, catalogues, publications, etc.) or even the invention of operative ancestors could all be points of entry for shedding light on the history of objects, collections and museums.
How to contribute
Interested parties are asked to submit a title and a 500-word summary, together with a short biography, to arnaud.hurel[at]mnhn.fr and serge.reubi[at]mnhn.fr before 1 March 2024, in English, German or French.