1 - The Formation of Ethnographic Collections: The Smithsonian Institution in the American Southwest

Abstract

Museums around the world hold countless ethnographic and archaeological artifacts, objects that have been analyzed and are waiting to be reanalyzed in light of recent theoretical advances. Several scholars, including Kroeber (1954), Collier and Fenton (1965), Fenton (1974), and Ford (1977), have pointed out that although museum collections are invaluable for anthropological research, the anthropological community has not been making effective use of these resources since the 1930s. Reasons for this lack of use are many and varied. This chapter describes another reason for the lack of use of museum collections—most researchers have understood neither the procedures employed in making the collections nor the assumptions and decisions that surrounded and informed their construction. The chapter describes some basic principles of museum collecting and of the use of objects in museums. It also explores the collecting activities of one institution in a particular time and place—collecting by the Smithsonian Institution in the American Southwest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries— to document the processes of museum collection, to illustrate that no ethnographic collection contains a random sample of objects, and to show that the collections that resulted are better for some research problems than others.