1 August 2018: Article for Shanghai Museum Journal Making Differences: Transforming Museums and Heritage in the 21st Century Sharon Macdonald In colloquial English, if you ‘make a difference’ you have changed something, and for the better. ‘Making differences’ in the context of museums and heritage can thus be about ways in which they might make a difference to society or culture – such as, by educating about what is deemed valuable. It can also refer to the classificatory work of museums – that by putting objects into different categories, museums impose systems of difference upon them. By doing so they might, for example, divide history, geography or groups of people in particular ways. Moreover, it can also refer to how museums and heritage sites play a role in making social differences; contributing, for instance, to the making of class distinctions between those who visit and those who do not. Some might argue that in these last two senses of ‘making differences’ – classificatory work by museums – that it is not so much the cultural institutions making differences as reflecting existing cultural, social or other divisions. In part, this is true. And the fact that it is so, means that museums and heritage sites are good places to look at and for differences that a particular society finds significant. But at the same time, they choose to focus on some particular topics and times, and include some differentiations and not others. Moreover, they also make differences visible and tangible to a wider public through the ways in which they label and order objects and other exhibits. All of these various meanings of ‘making differences’ are relevant for the research project ‘Making Differences in Berlin: Transforming Museums and Heritage in the 21st Century’ – which those of us working on it usually abbreviate to ‘Making Differences’ . In the context of this project, ‘making differences’ also refers to the hope of me and of my team of researchers that our research can make a difference to museums and heritage. We hope, that is, to contribute to understanding of how museums and heritage work, what they can do in relation to wider society, and how publics might profit from them. ‘Making Differences’ is the lead project of a new research centre that I established at the Institute of European Ethnology at the Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, in October 2015. This is the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage – CARMAH.1 Funded primarily by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, with further support from the Humboldt University, the Berlin Museum of Natural History, and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (which is responsible for Berlin’s national museums), CARMAH is, as far as I am aware, the world’s largest concentration of museum and heritage researchers taking a specifically anthropological approach. By this 1 For further information on CARMAH and on the Making Differences project and other projects that it hosts, see: www.carmah.berlin