75 FIG. 9 (right): Seated fi gure. Baule, Côte d’Ivoire. 20th century. Wood, kaolin. H: 52.5 cm. Musée des Confl uences, inv. 2003.11.1. © Pierre-Olivier Deschamps/ Agence VU’ – Musée des Confl uences, Lyon. FIG. 8 (left): Shirt and leggings. Plains culture, North America. First half of the 20th century. Antelope hide, horsehair, human hair, glass beads, porcupine quills, pigment. H: 145 cm. On loan from the Pontifi cal Missionary Societies, Lyon. Musée des Confl uences, inv. D979-3-357 (shirt) and D979-3-58 and 59 (leggings). © Patrick Ageneau – Musée des Confl uences, Lyon. This prestigious ensemble is one of the remarkable works in the North American collection of the Pontifi cal Mission Societies, which has been on loan to the Musée des Confl uences since 1979. The shirt and the leggings are in the Upper Missouri style and were ostensibly collected in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century in the Great Plains region. They display various kinds of decoration, including dyed porcupine quills and glass beads, pictograms of pipes and heads on the front of the shirt, and horse mane and human hair fringes around the edges of the hide. There is no confi rmed information about who collected it, but it is believed that it was Michel Giraud, a Lyon native who was a fur trader in North America, specifi cally among the Osage, from the 1830s until his return to Lyon shortly before the Civil War. – Marie Perrier. The Network of Life), deals with how different living things are connected and interrelated. The notion of “culture,” in particular, is considered through the presentation of a group of Senufo objects associated with the Poro initiation society. A third permanent collection installation, Sociétés, le théâtre des hommes (Societies: The Theater of Mankind), looks at issues that are essential to communal life, such as forms of power, connections to territory, exchange systems, the transmission of knowledge, etc. This is where the Oceanic currencies I mentioned earlier are presented. In this section we also focus on “hybridization” and “cultural appropriation,” and we endeavor to demonstrate that no society escapes from borrowing and outside infl uences, and, moreover, that those phenomena are not even necessarily perceived as such. To illustrate this, we show Native American objects from the Pontifi cal Mission Societies, including a birch bark dish, a beaded shoulder bag, and a bag decorated with porcupine quills. In the same display case is a Baule fi gure, a blolo bian (spirit spouse) fi gure, wearing a colonial helmet (fi g. 9), an emblem of power and obvious proof of the sculptor’s appropriation of it as a symbol of modernity used to enhance a traditional iconography. The fi nal section, Éternité – Visions de l’au-delà (Eternity: Visions of the Afterlife), examines funerary practices which, observed everywhere in the world, testify to the various attitudes and strategies man uses to confront death. Art objects, especially masks, are particularly numerous in this section. These four subject areas clearly are very broad and can be approached in many ways. This favors the rotation of the objects in the displays, which is desirable both for their preservation and to meet our audiences’ expectations, whose input we actively solicit. I’d also like to point out that many of our objects are shown outside display cases, making it possible for our visitors to get truly close to them, and that proximity is something they say they especially appreciate. T. A. M.: The Musée des Confl uences is also known for its intensive temporary exhibition program. What projects can we expect in the near future that will highlight your non-European collection? MUSÉE DES CONFLUENCES
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