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In this introductory essay, I summarise a history of “musée des Autres” (museum of Others) and suggest that colonial cosmopolitanism and colonial humanism can be useful concepts to analyse colonial museums in Europe and America, such as the South Kensington Museum, Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, Museum of American Indian in New York and Musée de l’Homme in Paris

This paper attempts to analyse the Indian textile collection in the South Kensington Museum and tries to show the identity of the museum as an early colonial museum. The Indian textile collection was formed through the moments such as the Great Exhibition 1851 and the design reform movements initiated by Henry Cole and Owen Jones. The Grammar of Ornament written by Owen Jones was a visual essay and lexicon which was used as a guideline to collect Indian design patterns for British textile manufacturers. John Forbes Watson, the reporter on the products of India at the India Office made Indian textile sample books for imperial commerce. Watson’s books was a kind of a ‘portable museum.’ The colonial museum and decorative art museum, two faces of the South Kensington Museum was harmonized under the discourse of colonial cosmopolitanism. The Museum showed how early colonial museum aestheticised the objects of the others.

This paper attempts to analyse Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde (the ethnological museum in Berlin) in the last decades of the 19th century. Berlin’s museum für Völkerkunde was long understood as a purely research institution that differed from the other European ethnological museums as colonial museums. That was the vision of his founder, Adolf Bastian. This German ethnologist with cosmopolitan thoughts wanted to create a museal archive for a new science, ethnology, which should have a vast collection from all over the world. Therefore, Bastian’s museum became the greatest ethnological museum in the world in his time, which contributed significantly to the establishment of the German ethnology. However, it did not mean that Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde initially had nothing to do with colonialism. On the contrary, Bastin’s museum contributed to legitimacy of German colonialism. This was indirectly, but much more efficiently than eurocentric colonialism: colonial cosmopolitanism. With the analysis of Bastian’s ethnological thoughts and museal experiments, this article attempts to show the close relationship between Berlin’s ethnological museum and colonialism.

This article focuses on the creation of the Museum of Man (Musée de l’Homme) in Paris and the foundational years of French anthropology. The Museum of Man was born in the dual context of reconfiguration of French colonial empire, which was both in apex and in crisis and the new synthesis of French anthropology drawing on the resources of both Durkheimian sociology and Maussian ethnology. As a museumlaboratory (musée-laboratoire), the Museum of Man functioned as an “administrative-scientific complex,” which aimed to develop an understanding of indigenous society as a distinct totality. In this sense, I would argue, the story of foundation of the Museum of Man can be better seen as the development of new forms of French colonial administration governed by the political rationality of colonial humanism.

The Museum of the American Indian was founded by George Gustav Heye, a wealthy engineer and financier. Heye had collected more than 800,000 Indian objects since 1903 and established the Hey Foundation in 1916 and opened the Museum in 1922. In this study I has tried to relate Heye and the Museum to a larger historical context and to evaluate the Museum of American Indian as ‘a Colonial Museum.’ The late 19th century was the heyday of natural history and anthropology museums, and imperialism and colonialism brought to theses museums objects for study and exhibition in Europe as well as in America. Heye’s museum also modeled those anthropology museums, saying “its sole aim to gather and to preserve for students everything useful in illustrating... and to disseminate by means of its publications the knowledge thereby gained.” Add to these phenomena the 1890s had marked a turning point in the U. S. Indian policy from ‘removal and segregation’ to ‘assimilation’. This change in the policy brought along the assumption that the American Indians were vanishing and their culture was on the verge of extinction. This assumption eventually led Heye to the ‘collecting fever’ seeking out everything related to this ‘disappearing Indian.’ But Heye had little interest in contemporary Indians, it was their past that motivated him to collect. He seems to have embodied some of the larger society’s ambivalence toward American Indians at that time, simultaneously destroying and preserving Indian cultures.Therefore as a typical colonial museum, the Museum of American Indian can be said to be ‘the Museum of Others’, where collector(George Heye) exhibits Others’(Indians’) objects, without mentioning their societies drained of their essence, institutions undermined, land confiscated, religions smashed by white men. Heye made American Indian ‘things’ stuffed in the ‘frozen time.’

This paper examines how the representation of the culture of ‘others’ through colonial and human exhibitions in the early 20th century Japan connected to conἀgurate anthropological knowledge and the expansion of Japanese empire. The first human exhibition was held at the Anthropological Gallery of the Domestic Industrial Exhibition in 1903. Tsuboi Shogoro, professor of anthropology of Tokyo Imperial University and his anthropology laboratory, strongly supported the formation of the Anthropological Gallery. Professor Tsuboi appraised the importance of the exhibition in order to the popularize the anthropological knowledge. The 1912 Colonial Exhibition in Tokyo was the more huge and systematic human exhibition. In the 1912 Exhibition not only Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan but Sakhalin and Hokkaido exhibited.

This essay purports to indicate some problems inherent in the translation of Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova into Korean. For that purpose it ἀrst delineates the analogy between the thought of the contemporary philosophers of language and that of Vico, to the effect that the former’s refutation of Russell and Carnap bears similarity to Vico’s confrontation with Descartes. Then it goes on to delve into Vico’s view of language and its connectedness with his general philosophy of history. Finally it points out some practical problems in the translation per se.

On 3. Juni 1873, the Iwakura Mission arrived in Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Empire, where the Vienna International Exposition was opened a month ago. The Iwakura Mission was the ἀrst ofἀcial Japanese journey around the world, initiated in 1871 by the modern government of the Meiji period. The historian Kume Kunitake was the ofἀcial diarist, who wrote detailed about this cultural accident, and then in 1878 he published A True Account of the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary’s Journal. Now an important question can be raised, what the Japanese Embassy saw there in the modernized Vienna during about 15 days. The good answer might be perhaps found in Beio kairan jikki 歐美回覽實記, which can be only realized by critically reading this document on the historical context in Europe. Fistly, the Iwakura Misson could see the grandiose modern street Ringstrasse, which was recently developed as one of the modernization projects of the capitol, initiated by the Emperor. Kume described that this boulevard should be realized through the exellent combination of the tradition and the modernity. But his impressive description resulted from watching rapidly only the passade of the falling Habsburg Empire, because this great city was confronted with many serious modern problems that could be not easily resolved in those times.Secondly, the Iwakura Mission visited the Vienna International Exposition 1873, located on the Prater park. Seeing the whole landscape, Kume admired that the Exposition should be resulted from the exquisite combination of the nature and the human things. He appraised especially the main hall building Rotunda as one of the greatest symbolic sturcture in the International Exposition in Vienna. But just the bizarre asthetics of this building was furiously criticized as a silly architecture by many famous architects and intellectuals in Vienna. In this meaning it is acceptable to ciricize him because he failed to take any account of the important environmental asthetics of the Exposition on the Prater park.Thirdly, the Iwakura Mission was strongly impressed through looking around the various products from the world in the exhibit rooms. In this whole processing Kume became convinced that the western civilzation should be superior and the oriental culture inferior. But his strong conviction was certainly the reflection of the dirction intention of the western Empire, which would give such dual impressions on the oriental visitors. Unconciously he accepted the directed cultural image of the western imperialism. According to Edward Said, his uncritical view of the world should be called as Orientalism which was born first in Europe in 19th Century and could be rapidly spreaded into the Asia. Just in this way the Iwakura Mission played a great role not only in Japan but also in other asiatic countries.

Tibet is not geographical concept. It is also not possible to ἀx historical territorial boundary. It is one of the reconstruction of image by Western. The start of reconstruction is Lost Horizon by James Hilton in 1933. Shanggri-La in this novel is the first symbol of ‘the Empire of Myth, Tibet’. It means a paradise was lost by modernized western. The second symbol is Dalai Lama, an exile from China in 1950. He symbolized the Savior can separate the Tibet from China. The move of Seven Years in Tibet makes him as a Savior decisively. The last one of symbol of ‘Tibet’ is China. China take a place as a symmetry axis of good. IT means an axis of evil. China made Tibet as a losted paradise. ‘The Empire of Myth, Tibet’ constitute of three symbols, Shanggri-La, Dalai Lama, and China, was completed in the exile of Dalai Lama in 1959.The exile of Dalai Lama in 1959 was the start point reproduction of the Tibet myth by western in Korea. Many popular travellers, novelists, religious persons and scholars have reproduce the western Tibet myth in Korea from 1959. Now Korean historical writers of Tibet is confronted with need of reconstruction of the western system of Tibet myth. Making history of Tibet is the start point. It makes us faced up with the ideology of hegemony groups in Korean popular society.