Many of the staff at France's leading anthropology museum, the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, are on strike in protest at a proposal to move its ethnology collection to a new museum of primitive art and civilizations.

The staff are angry that they may be deprived of access to the artefacts, which represent peoples from around the world. “Without our collections, we can no longer function as a museum, linking teaching and research,” claims Bernadette Robbe, a researcher at the museum's ethnology laboratory, and a member of the strike committee.

The backdrop to the strike is a widely accepted need to reform the museum, which has failed to modernize the presentation of its collections and has slipped back from the forefront of anthropological research. After much debate, a commission set up by French president Jacques Chirac decided to transfer the ethnology collection, the museum's library and its photographic collections, to a new museum, due to open in 2004. This will be known as the Musée du quai Branly, after its riverside location in the east of Paris.

But Robbe argues that no decisions about the collections should have been taken without consultation with the new president and scientific advisory committee of the National Natural History Museum — the Musée de l'Homme's parent body. As Nature went to press, appointments to these posts had not been made, but were expected imminently. Robbe accepts that the museum needs to be reformed, but says that lack of money and personnel have prevented staff from taking their ideas forward.

Jean-Claude Moreno, the interim administrator of the natural history museum, says that the strike is symptomatic of the museum's “intellectual and scientific crisis”. He argues that the museum has missed at least three opportunities to reform its research programme, because staff could not agree on a coherent scientific project.

The decision to move the collections has provoked mixed responses in the wider research community. William Sturtevant, curator of North American ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, describes the collections as among the best half-dozen in the world. “The proposed change is potentially disastrous for preservation of and access to the artefacts,” he says.

But Dominique Michelet, deputy director of the unit of Archaeology of the Americas in Paris, part of the CNRS, France's national research agency, says: “This is an unmissable opportunity to restore the collections and recreate a strong research base.”

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