Museums and Modernization: The Football Kit, the Tractor, and the Plastic Doll

Abstract

The paper looks at the modernization of museum displays as well as at resistance to this process. This slow process of modernization and the resistance that the transformation of museum practice has encountered from the first are exemplified by two exhibitions at the Museum of Ethnography in Belgrade (“Football Fans’ Uniforms and Gear” in 1986 and “The Plastic 1990s” in 2010) and the events that accompanied these exhibitions. The paper then proceeds to reflect on an exhibition that was to have been held, and which could have marked a turning-point had it been held at that particular time. The conclusion that can be drawn from the three examples is that this transformation could have been achieved at a much faster pace, and that an opportunity was missed for museum ethnology to become, through the transformation of museum exhibits and displays, a leader in the modernization of the field, which at the time was fossilized both in a thematic and in an interpretational sense.