Objects as Insights: R. H. Codrington’s ethnographic collections from Melanesia

Abstract

The Revd Robert Henry Codrington (1830–1922) is best known today as one of the founding fathers of Melanesian anthropology. Having joined the Melanesian Mission in 1865, Codrington served as headmaster of its training college on Norfolk Island from 1867 until his retirement in 1887. From this base, he travelled regularly throughout the region, carrying out his official duties and pursuing (with what Nick Stanley characterizes as a remarkably humanist perspective) groundbreaking linguistic and anthropological research, especially in northern Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. From 1880 he began publishing articles in academic journals, and in 1891 the Clarendon Press issued his The Melanesians: Studies in their anthropology and folklore, which is widely regarded as the first systematic study of its kind. It was standard anthropological practice at the time to study and collect objects alongside, and as part of, information about other aspects of social and cultural life, but it is clear from his publications that Codrington had an especially developed interest in Melanesian art and material culture. As Stanley demonstrates in his very welcome new study, this interest lay behind and was made manifest in the extensive collections that Codrington amassed during his time in the Pacific. To begin with, he attempted to make systematic collections for, first, the Blackmore Museum in Salisbury (not far from the family home in Wroughton), and then for the British Museum. Neither of these attempts was particularly successful, however, as the museums’ curators would not tell him what they wanted or respond to what he had sent them.