Museums of Anthropology or Museums as Anthropology?

Abstract

Abstract: During 1995 the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, marketed a postcard depicting 14 early handwritten labels from the museum's archive. This commercially orientated, self-reflexive museum production is taken as the starting point for an analysis of the relationship between the collection, the collector, the museum exhibition and the visiting public. The roles of documentation as an aspect of colonial appropriation, and that of artists in residence as parallel commentary are reviewed.Resume: En 1995, le musee Pitt Rivers de l'universite d'Oxford a mis en marche une carte postale reproduisant 14 etiquettes ecrites a la main, tirees des archives du musee. Cette production museale, orientee vers le commerce et se mettant en valeur, est prise comme point de depart d'une analyse de la relation entre la collection, le collectcur, l'exposition et le public visiteur. Les fonctions de documentation comme aspect de l'appropriation coloniale et celles d'artistes en residence sont analysees en tant que commentaire parallele.IntroductionDuring 1995 the Pitt Rivers Museum, one of the Oxford University museums, produced and marketed a surprising piece of merchandise. It sells in the ordinary way in the museum's gift shop and it costs only 25p (approx. 15[Symbol Not Transcribed]). The object is a standard postcard, but it depicts a selection of 14 early handwritten museum labels from the Pitt Rivers' documentation archive. This represents an extraordinary piece of self-reflection, not least because it is cast in the form of a cheap commercial piece, intended either as a basic souvenir or as the medium for brief, open, interpersonal communication of the please meet the 4:30 variety. This paper is devoted to teasing out the significance of the postcard.The situation at the Pitt Rivers (and at every other museum) can be captured by the analysis given in Figure 1. This shows the sequence of events over the last century or so as a series of interrelated action sets, each of which stands in a relationship to all those which preceded it. There is a relationship between the sets, because in each segment of the sequence the objects themselves remain the same and continue to offer opportunities for re-appraisal. But each re-appraisal, numbered 2-4 in the figure, positions the objects differently in relation to each other and to other objects and so creates a new context with a new meaning. The relationship between the segments, following (one strand of) normal semiotic usage can be called metaphorical, in contrast to the perceived intrinsic relationship of the material within the sets.Figure 1 Diagram Representing the Metaphorical Relationships of the Process of Material Culture from Its Own Society to that of the Museum-visiting Public 1 Indigenous community at time when objects collected, with all its own complexities and ironies: colonial society 2 The collectors and their colonial (actual or implicit lifestyle 3 Collectors' donation to the Pitt Rivers Museums; the objects' accession, curation and display 4 Contemporary self-reflecting and parodying, ironic postcolonial museum activity postcard, artist's residence 5 Contemporary visitors who see the earlier displays and the contemporary irony in juxtaposition, and may buy the postcardIt is beyond the scope of this paper to consider the colonial societies from which the objects whose labels are shown on the postcard were taken. We shall, however, need to look at the nature of collecting, particularly the collecting represented on the Pitt Rivers card. We shall need to consider how the material has been treated curatorially within the museum; and finally we must reflect upon the ironic, postmodernist, or postcolonial, activity to which the postcard belongs, and how this may strike the visiting public, who come at the end of the long line of metaphors because their contact with the material is the final segment in what has already been a long and complex sequence of events. …