Secrecy is alluring! Already early anthropologists showed great interest in secret knowledge
and secret societies and in the age of Wikileaks and the ongoing Internet privacy debate the
issue is still high on the list. The companion volume to the exhibition of the same title at
the Museum der Kulturen Basel looks at secrecy from the perspective of social order. Secrecy
creates boundaries between insiders and outsiders between the informed and the uninformed.
Access to secret knowledge means power revealing it spells danger. Contributions from current
research in diverse fields uncover how secrecy comes into effect in different cultural settings
while in-depth portraits of arcane objects from the collections of the Museum der Kulturen
Basel reveal that secrets not only have a hidden but very often also a visible public
dimension. Exhibition: Museum der Kulturen Basel 13. April 2018 - 21. April 2019
