Benoît de L'Estoile
Benoît de L’Estoile is Research Professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and currently Head of Research and Teaching at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. He has done extensive fieldwork in Brazil. He focuses in political anthropology, and has pioneered the anthropology of museums in France. He has written among other on colonial governmentality, on the ritualization of identities, on colonial legacies. He is the author of Le goût des Autres. De l’Exposition Coloniale aux Arts premiers (2007), and co-edited Empires, Nations and Natives. Anthropology and State-Making, Duke University Press, 2005.
September 2025Special Report
OBJECTS WATCH US GO BY
We often imagine that museum curators, exhibition curators and collectors collect works of art and everyday objects. But if we move away from this somewhat phantasmagorical vision of accumulation, from a logic of bringing back the missing object, of metaphorically bringing back the phantom limb, we can open up another perspective. We are merely passing through, while the objects remain. It's the objects that watch us go by.
