“Is it real?” asks a French journalist as reported by contributing author, Howard Morphy, in the third section of the Museum Frictions anthology. She is watching a ceremonial performance by Yolngu people at the opening of the new National Museum of Australia in 2001 [489]. Such a question, or the more pointed variation “What is real in a museum?” underlies the whole of this extensive (almost daunting) volume. It is a question that has already been addressed in the two books that precede it in the same series, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991) and Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992). As the Duke promotional flyer claims, the volumes have “become defining books for those interested in the politics of museum display and heritage sites,” linking museological investigation to the fields of anthropology and ethnography, as well as to wider interests in the construction of heritage, and to more focused discussions of museum management, interpretation, and curatorship. However, the central issue concerning who has the authority to define either the “realness” or the meaning of an object remains persistent. Claims to such authority were critical...