Museums and Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century
Extract from Stocking's Objects and Others
(p7 and on; references given by Stocking are fully cited in the
bibliography)
Although the museum has been called 'the institutional homeland' of anthropology (Lurie, 1981: 184), it took a long time for anthropology to find that homeland, and its presence there was, even in the so-called 'Museum Period' always somewhat problematic. The renaissance humanist 'cabinet of curiosities' - the commonly accepted prototype of the modern museum - emerged contemporaneously with the age of discovery and exploration; from the time Cortez sent back pieces from Mexico after the Conquest, both 'artificial' and 'natural' curiosities from the New World and the East found a place in them (Sturtevant, 1969: 621). Along with the dodo, the marine unicorn (or narwhal) and the stirrups of Henry VIII, the collections of the Tradescants, which formed the basis of the Ashmolean Museum established in Oxford in 1683, included 'Pohaton, King of Virginia's habit all embroidered with shells' [Alexander, 1979: 43]. It was some time, however, before ethnographic objects began to be treated as a distinct category. When the British Museum, the first great national museum, was founded in 1753, its three departments were devoted to 'Printed books, Maps, Globes and Drawings', 'Manuscripts, Medals and Coins', and 'Natural and Artificial Productions'; a fourth, added in 1807, was devoted simply to 'Antiquities' - although by that time the Museum's ethnographic materials had been greatly augmented by the expeditions of Captain Cook (Alexander, 1979: 45).
During the first half of the nineteenth century, however, a number of museums of a more clearly anthropological character were established, or evolved out of previously existing collections, along several different lines. In the case of the National Museum established in Denmark in 1816 - where Christian Thomsen's categorization of the contents of Danish burial chambers, kitchen middens, and bog-sites provided the basis for the 'three-age' system of archaeological periodization - the anthropological dimension emerged as an aspect of an interest in the history of the nation itself (Daniel 1943); it was only in the 1840s that a specifically 'ethnographical' collection was established. In the case of the ethnographic museum of the Academy of Sciences in Petrograd [now St Petersburg], whose independent existence has been dated to 1836, the anthropological element derived from an interest in the peoples of an internal empire. In the case of the National Museum of Ethnology founded in Leiden, customarily dated from the opening of von Siebold's collection to the public in 1837, overseas imperial interests were implicated from the beginning, although the Siebold collection itself focused on Japan (cf. Ave 1980).
Although the 'Museum Period' has been described as extending from the 1840s to the 1890s (Sturtevant 1969: 622), the designation seems somewhat anachronistic for the earlier portion of those years. In three of the major national anthropological traditions, a more characteristic institutional setting was perhaps the 'Ethnological Society' - founded in Paris in 1839, in New York in 1842, and in London in 1843. While ethnographic materials were by that time included in museum collections in each of these countries, the establishment of their major anthropological museums began only with the founding of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in 1866 (c.f. Hinsley, 1985).
Internationally the great foundation period of museum anthropology extended over the rest of the nineteenth century. Some museums followed the pattern of the Peabody, focusing on prehistoric archaeology and ethnology; others, especially in continental Europe, were museums of national and peasant culture in the Volkskunde tradition. In some cases, anthropological exhibits were a department of a general national museum, or - especially in North America - of a museum of natural history; others were the outgrowth of international fairs or exhibitions (c.f. Chapman, Jacknis and Williams, 1985). Many of the earlier foundations, however, took some time to reach institutional maturity; from the point of view of both the employment of anthropological personnel and the support of field research, the great period of museum anthropology only really began in the 1890s. By that time, the university was already emerging as a complementary, but in the longer run alternative (and dominating) institutional setting (c.f. Sturtevant 1969: 623; Jacknis and Stocking, 1985).
.... it is hard to locate the historical moment when the situation of anthropology within the institutional 'homeland' of the museum was not intensely problematic. In programmatic statements or retrospective analyses, it may be possible to specify clearly the theoretical notions or ideological messages that were intended to be or seem to have been conveyed through the arrangement of material objects for viewing by diverse audiences. The explicitly stated theoretical and ideological agendas of General Pitt Rivers and of Franz Boas contrast sharply in this respect: the one arranging objects linearly, in terms of externally defined formal or functional qualities, to convey an ethnocentric message of conservative evolutionary gradualism; the other arranging them contextually, seeking to preserve the multiple functions and inner meanings of a given form, to convey a message of liberal relativism. But in both cases, program was frustrated by the pragmatics of museum practice, and by the perhaps inherent contradictions of museum purpose. Even before the institutionalization of anthropology in museums had peaked - in terms of numbers of jobs and resources for field research - Boas had already become acutely conscious of the 'limitations of the museum method of anthropology' - just as he had previously argued the 'limitations of the comparative method of anthropology' (c.f. Jacknis, 1985).
Museum collections remained important for certain research purposes, especially in relation to the culture area and distributional concerns of the diffusionist schools that continued to flourish into the 1920s. More generally, the museum tradition in its Volkekunde form has continued strong on the European continent (c.f. Hofer 1973). But in the Anglo-American tradition, the shift toward a more behaviorally oriented anthropology, reinforced by substantial funding from foundation philanthropy, had by the outbreak of the second World War left museum anthropology stranded in an institutional, methodological, and theoretical backwater (c.f. Stocking, 1985).
Except in archaeology, material culture studies and museum collections were no longer important for anthropological research. Surveying major anthropological journals for ethnological papers 'concerned (at least in part) with material culture,' and the fraction of these 'based (at least in part) on museum collections,' William Sturtevant found in 1969 that although the timing and duration of the peak of museum anthropology had come at different times in England, France, Germany, and the United States, the general trend after 1930 had been uniformly down, reaching a low point in the United States in the 1960s ... (Sturtevant, 1969: 626). At the last point in history when it would be possible to collect and document 'hand-made traditional artefacts', few field ethnographers were still interested in collecting ... In a context where 'at least 90% of museum ethnological specimens (had probably) never been studied' at all, the research function of museums had atrophied, and the professional status of curators drastically declined. ...
This extract has been included with the kind permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, The book is available from the publishers, or in UK from Eurospan Ltd Tel. 02071 240 0865 Email eh@eurospan.co.uk