Ruth Phillips, Director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, describes the direction toward the use of historical and cultural biographies of objects in interpretation as evidence of the emergence of a ‘Second Museum Age’, situated in response to the ‘First Museum Age’ of positivism and evolutionism a century earlier. She discusses the problems inherent in assigning objects to groupings such as ethnographic, archaeological, art, and historical, when objects may in fact be all of those things and more. Phillips takes a step further in explaining that the value of objects comes also from all the senses—audio, tactile, olfactory, and gustative in addition to visual.

She also discusses the effects that repatriation has had on the valuation of objects and interpretation, including collections-based research as another form of repatriation, and describing how indigenous types of interpretation and exhibition add layers of meaning to the objects presented and provide a different frame of reference for the selection of relevant information. Striking is her account of a ‘narrow escape’ in which the museum became a stage for First Nations chiefs demanding the attention of museums and the government to issues of repatriation. Central to the demonstration was the purposeful almost-breaking of a copper object from the museum’s collections in a traditional declaration of rivalry. While watching the ceremony, she realized that the copper was far more valuable for the statement it could facilitate in being broken than as an ethnographic specimen and did not stop the chief. In the end, he did not actually break the copper; he only mimed it. This new function of the museum as forum is so vital to Phillips’ Second Museum Age that the redesigning of the Museum of Anthropology to include spaces for indigenous consultation and study is one of two parts of her museum’s plan for renewal. The second is development of a more comprehensive online collections research database as a form of ‘virtual repatriation’.