What Makes Exhibitions Ethnographic?

Chapter 4 is the first of two chapters that consider the shifting notion of genre, central in both design and communication. It looks at how designed form helps create, blur, cross, and/or transform exhibit genres and expectations, by asking, “What makes exhibitions ethnographic?” The chapter explores the question through analysis of a traveling exhibit about the sociopolitical world of Indian royal courts from the eighteenth century to the 1940s, including extended colonial encounters. Mounted by the Victoria and Albert Museum and touring in North America, Maharaja: The Splendor of India’s Royal Courts showed in museums of art and natural history alike and was in part developed collaboratively with contemporary maharaja families. The chapter also considers how visitor expectations are built over lifetimes and how exhibit design can echo and reverberate into other exhibits, in part through visitor expectations and experience.