Extract from M. McLeod's Collecting for the British Museum
Field collecting (1)
Field collecting (3)
[pp 19 and on]
To us [that is, the British Museum], however, it was important that the objects we acquired came legally. In addition we required that they should carry with them as much information as possible about their exact provenance, their context of use, who their makers were and their age. Our basic need for detailed information conflicted with the desires of many dealers. It was characteristic of the trade that many dealers were unwilling to provide any useful information at all about the sources of their objects. In many cases they simply did not know where the objects had come from because they had bought them from other dealers, who had, in turn, got them from other dealers and so on. Often pieces had been passed along a chain of people before they ended up in London. As the object travelled along the chain its price went up and the amount of information that accompanied it went down.
This lack of detailed contextual information about pieces greatly lowered their value to scholarship. It also served to emphasise that if the Museum were to continue collecting it must seek ways of acquiring pieces which came with good documentation.
The broad lines of our collecting policy were thus being influenced by changes in the outside world. It was clearly a matter of great urgency to develop ways of acquiring objects which were both well-documented and legally exported. ...
It was very clear to me that other factors had also to be taken into account in our collecting. In future the Department would have little credibility unless it became directly and closely involved in field-based research. As a social anthropologist by training I was very conscious that ethnology; and museum ethnological studies in general had little scholarly credibility in most universities, where the main advances in the human sciences were being made. This lack of credibility arose largely because collecting, and the research that went with it, lacked a conscious theoretical framework. In many Museums collecting had become more of a reflex action than something driven by intellectual inquiry. In these museums the aim was first to get, and then to keep, what was got. The task of asking illuminating questions about what was collected was generally left to some undefined future generations. Where analysis of museum objects did occur this was often based on an almost total neglect of, or at best, a very poor grasp of the concepts of the indigenous societies involved. Such an approach had little appeal or credibility to those trained in the social sciences nor, I suppose, to anyone with an intelligent and inquiring mind.
Anything but the most superficial study of the art or material culture of another society requires grappling with the ideas which the art helps express and which shape and surround it. Without some grasp of the basic, informing, concepts of the society any comment on its art is almost certain to be ill-informed, superficial or downright wrong.
It is only by close study of another society and a knowledge of its language that one can begin to develop even the most basic understanding of its concepts. One of the best ways to gain this understanding is to live in the society and interact with its members on a day to day basis over a considerable period of time. As a basic method of studying other societies, and understanding them, this technique had been accepted since the 1920s by British social anthropologists. That simple message, however, had failed to get through to the British Museum by the 1970s. [Though not, in defence of PRM , in all museums; here such members of staff as Beatrice Blackwood have, throughout the Museum's history, undertaken long field collecting and ethnographic fact collecting in the field].
... curators fully realised the need for field-based collecting and research. But powerful interests in the British Museum were unwilling to allow senior staff the time and resources to carry out such fieldwork. ... [Eventually McLeod ensured that field collecting and research was accepted as part of his Department's custom and practise]
[p 39] In commissioning ... field-based collections we did not, of course, neglect to buy or accept as gifts earlier material whenever we could. ... There was one other important source of African material [McLeod's main subject area]: that of major private collections which had already been in existence for a considerable time. By the mid-1970s most of the great ethnographic collections had left their original owners. Often they had been dispersed. Much of the family collection of General Pitt Rivers had been sold [Note: this is a separate part of Pitt Rivers original collection, which had been kept by the family rather than given to Oxford in 1884]. The Beasley collection, for the most part, had come to the British Museum and Oldman's had gone to New Zealand ... and the heirs of James Hooper were preparing to auction many of the pieces he had acquired. ...
[pp47 - 48] ... [An] interest in post-contact materials had important theoretical implications for it carried with it an acceptance that change, whatever the speed at which it took place, was an essential aspect of the study of small-scale societies. There is a wrong-headed belief held by some curators and collectors that change should be ignored or avoided and that only objects from some mythical pre-contact, pre-change era are worth collecting. It seemed to us that it was impossible to maintain this position. In virtually all cases it is impossible to identify a clear cut-off point and the products of a changing society are just as interesting as those of a far more stable society and, in certain cases, they can throw far more light on the forces which shape art and material culture. ...
[p 90] In the past such a concern for cultural 'purity' had sometimes led institutions into a theoretical cul-de-sac. By collecting only pre-contact or early post-contact material they have cut themselves off from many items that exhibit noticeable change. Yet it is just these sort of items which can most easily elucidate the key mechanisms which determine the forms taken by material culture in society. These institutions also seem mistakenly to believe that change hardly occurs in pre-contact times. (Although how they would try to explain how the multiplicity of traditional cultures arose is not clear). In such institutions the exclusive collecting of 'pre-contact' or 'unchanging' materials thus becomes divorced from any ideas of causation. What is collected is seen as representing an unchanging past, what is not collected reinforces an inability to explain change. The result of all this is that such museums have no interest in how things happen and they do not have material which can help explain how changes occur.
The British Museum's contrary concern for documenting the ways in which traditional cultures alter in the face of new stimuli and, especially, new markets for their products, took its collections in many directions. In a comparatively short period many new fields of collecting opened to us.