Musee du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac (institutional record)

The Musee du quai Branly, Jacques Chirac's own published account of its collections' history, read here from its institutional website, traces the museum's holdings back to the 1878 Musee d'Ethnographie du Trocadero, reorganized in 1937 as the Musee de l'Homme, merged in 2006 with the former 1931 colonial Musee national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Oceanie to form the present institution, whose nearly 370,000 objects are drawn from Africa, the Near East, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Its strength is that a holding institution's own record of its collections' custodial descent is authoritative for exactly this kind of fact, provenance lineage between predecessor institutions. Its limit is that it documents institutional history rather than the colonial context in which many of those objects were originally acquired, a separately contested subject the museum's own page does not resolve, so a claim about a specific object's acquisition needs that object's own provenance record rather than this institutional overview.