This is an essay about the interplay of objects, art and visual culture in several
community museums and historical sites dedicated to local social history in
coastal Brittany. There, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Breton maritime culture invented a range of compensatory ritual objects, sites
and practices to account for loss of life at sea. The presentation of this material
culture of mourning in small museums, regional museums and ecomuseums on
the Breton North Coast and the islands of Sein and Ouessant are examined in
this essay. These material objects once bore material witness to crucial moments
in the life of the family and today serve to represent the community’s collective
memories and to narrate the community’s heritage to the outside world. In several
cases examined in this essay, literary representations, art and visual culture
are compared to heritage sites and museums. Methodologies are drawn from
social art history, studies of tourism and collecting, museum studies, material
culture studies and feminist interests in the politics of the everyday.