Les tribulations de John Errington de la Croix en « chine »

Abstract

Jacqueline Guicciardi It is only after complex negotiations, sometimes marked by sordid dealings, that museum objects arrive at their final destinations. Even donations are rarely without an ulterior motive. They are often capable of masking a hidden agenda designed to obtain a decorative award or to see one's name engraved on a plaque of prestigious contributors to a museum. In the late 19th century, the Musée Ethnographique du Trocadéro (The Ethnographie Museum of Trocadero), the forebearer of the Musée de l'Homme (Museum of Man), obtained its initial collections from three major sources : older French museums which were getting rid of their exotic collections ; European bureaucrats posted in the colonies, in particular the British and the Dutch for the Indonesian archipelago ; and the representatives of the French government who undertook studies not so much of an ethnographical nature at the outset, but rather mineral, botanical and other such projects that were designed for commercial purposes. Serving as the prestigious window displays of the European colonial empires, the Universal and Colonial Expositions of the fin du siècle and during the 1930s reveal a double view of distant lands : on the one hand, the empire considered these faraway places as coveted objects in terms of their potential wealth ; on the other hand, the empire viewed them as objects of curiosity and sometimes of admiration for the peoples living there. The Europeans would bring back to their countries all that they could and by all the means possible that which was the others produced : at first the strange and spectacular and then, during a more thoughtful stage, the objects representing the everyday life of these peoples. The Europeans would compete with each other to obtain the richest collections. This article seeks to reconstitute a few of these underground dealings. It is a delightfully humorous collection of letters that John Erriginton de la Croix has left us of his mission to London one hundred and ten years ago. But, since then, man has not changed that much.