Re-Enactment and the Museum Case: Reading the Oceanic and Native American Displays in the Peabody Essex Museum (Case Study‪)‬

On the wall of a gallery in Salem, Massachusetts, a text dedication advises visitors that the room in which they stand was the first permanent home of the Peabody Essex Museum. 'To this hall', it explains, The dedication ends with an exhortation: 'Let this be the launching point of your journey into world art'. Before using this as my own launching point, I want to consider briefly what might emerge from an investigation of the relationship between the museum as an institution and re-enactment as a practice or set of practices. Over the last decade, the growth of reenactment as popular entertainment and popular history has been accompanied by mounting scholarly interest in--or preoccupation with--re-enactment as a cultural phenomenon. As Jonathan Lamb has put it, suddenly everybody wants to know about re-enactment. (2)