Collections as artefacts: The making and thinking of anthropological museum collections

Abstract

Collections are artefacts—constructions that come into being when objects are physically or conceptually brought together. As artefacts, collections have properties,among the most obvious of which are the kinds of things they contain and their proportions. Rarely, however, do these properties reflect in a representative way what it would have been possible to collect. A collection consequently both reflects the situation from which it was derived, andpresents a distorted image of that situation. The latter, however, can be highly informative, if only we can determine its character. Since most collections represent samples from unknown universes, this is no easy feat—it requires that we give a presence to the non-present so that what was collected can be compared to what could have been collected to establish the nature of the biases in a collection. Although often difficult, there are nevertheless several ways in which this can be attempted, including through linguistic comparisons. Such an exercise provides the basis for reflecting on a number of matters, theoretical and practical, relating to collections and their creation. These include the very notion of a ‘collection’, differences in kinds of collections, the processes by which an assemblage of items becomes a ‘collection’, and collections as mental constructs, as mentally conceived categories made manifest.

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