“Who Can Afford?” – non-permanent exhibition at the Ethnographic Museum of Kraków

Abstract

The article takes the readers behind the scenes of the changes made to the permanent exhibition of the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow at the end of 2020. A separate space entitled “Who Can Afford?” has been created in two exhibition rooms in the Museum's main building. Instead of generalising about “folk culture” and “the people”, the curators relate  a story about different people comprised of  individual cases, actual human fates, and very disparate experiences – silent, forgotten. This way, the ethnographic collection becomes the key to talking about the idea of legacy – the often troublesome inheritance from our ancestors and the emotions associated with stepping into the ambiguous role of heirs.