Telling history: analysis of an experience among the Anishinabe

Abstract In this paper, I discuss, at first, the increasingly evident need to address museums as an anthropological research object. I encourage an analysis of museums that is capable of perceiving in them two types of procedures traditionally studied by anthropologists: classification and attribution of value. Museums are taken as constructed narratives about diverse realities. In the second part of the paper, I apply these ideas in the study of a particular case: the Ziibiwing Center, a cultural center built by Anishinabe Indians, in Mount Pleasant (Michigan, United States of America). The description and analysis of the permanent exhibition of this cultural center reveal a narrative in which historical time and mythical time are intertwined. The experience of the present is organized according to the past and directed towards the future.