An ethnographic museum and the objects it contains oscillates between two orders of existence. On the day-to-day level, it engages in an unending struggle against the localized chaos housed within its entrails; working to maintain and improve its contents, which are composed of extremely heterogeneous collections, pragmatically organized displays and disparate classifications. Heirs of the « curiosity cabinets » (« cabinets de curiosité »), the collections of kings, princes and distinguished families, these museums operate as an immense reservoir of symbols and messages, a treasury of images no one completely understands, which overflows the uses to which it is put in restricted political and intellectual contexts. The gigantic and fragmentary archives and collections of museums – the result of an apparently disordered process of collective construction – seem to belong to the realm of dreams and the unconscious.