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The Department of Ethnography
was created as a separate deportment within the British Museum in 1946,
offer 140 years of gradual development from the original Department of
Antiquities. If is concerned with the people of Africa, the Americas, Asia,
the Pacific and parts of Europe. While this includes complex kingdoms, as
in Africa, and ancient empires, such as those of the Americas, the primary
focus of attention in the twentieth century has been on small-scale
societies. Through its collections, the Department's specific interest is
to document how objects are created and used, and to understand their
importance and significance to those who produce them. Such objects can
include both the extraordinary and the mundane, the beautiful and the
banal.
The collections of the
Department of Ethnography include approximately 300,000 artefacts, of which
about half are the product of the present century. The Department has o
vital role to play in providing information on non-Western cultures to
visitors and scholars. To this end, the collecting emphasis has often been
less on individual objects than on groups of material which allow the
display of a broad range of o society's cultural expressions.
Much of the more recent
collecting was carried out in the field, sometimes by Museum staff working
on general anthropological projects in collaboration with a wide variety of
national governments and other institutions. The material collected
includes great technical series - for instance, of textiles from Bolivia,
Guatemala, Indonesia and at areas of West Africa - or of artefact types such
as boats. The latter include working examples of coracles from India, reed
boars from Lake Titicaca in the Andes, kayaks from the Arctic, and dug-out
canoes from several countries. The field assemblages, such as those from
the Sudan, Madagascar and Yemen, include a whole range of material culture
representative of one people. This might cover the necessities of life of
an African herdsman or on Arabian farmer, ritual objects, or even on
occasion airport art. Again, a series of acquisitions might represent a
decade's fieldwork documenting social experience as expressed in the
varieties of clothing and jewellery styles, tents and camel trappings from
various Middle Eastern countries, or in the developing preferences in
personal adornment and dress from Papua New Guinea. Particularly
interesting are a series of collections which continue to document the
evolution of ceremony and of material forms for which the Department
already possesses early (if nor the earliest) collections formed after the
first contact with Europeans.
The importance of these
acquisitions extends beyond the objects themselves. They come fo the Museum
with documentation of the social context, ideally including photographic
records. Such acquisitions have multiple purposes. Most significantly they
document for future change. Most people think of the cultures represented
in the collection in terms of the absence of advanced technology. In fact,
traditional practices draw on a continuing wealth of technological
ingenuity. Limited resources and ecological constraints are often overcome
by personal skills that would be regarded as exceptional in the West. Of
growing interest is the way in which much of what we might see as
disposable is, elsewhere, recycled and reused.
With the Independence of much
of Asia and Africa after 1945, if was assumed that economic progress would
rapidly lead to the disappearance or assimilation of many small-scale
societies. Therefore, it was felt that the Museum should acquire materials
representing people whose art or material culture, ritual or political
structures were on the point of irrevocable change. This attitude altered
with the realisation that marginal communities can survive and adapt In
spire of partial integration into a notoriously fickle world economy. Since
the seventeenth century, with the advent of trading companies exporting
manufactured textiles to North America and Asia, the importation of cheap
goods has often contributed to the destruction of local skills and
indigenous markets. On the one hand modern imported goods may be used in an
everyday setting, while on the other hand other traditional objects may
still be required for ritually significant events. Within this context
trade and exchange attitudes are inverted. What are utilitarian objects to
a Westerner may be prized objects in other cultures - when transformed by
local ingenuity - principally for aesthetic value. In the some way, the
West imports goods from other peoples and in certain circumstances
categorises them as ‘art'.
Collections act as an
ever-expanding database, nor merely for scholars and anthropologists, bur
for people involved in a whole range of educational and artistic purposes.
These include schools and universities as well as colleges of art and
design. The provision of information about non-Western aesthetics and
techniques, not just for designers and artists but for all visitors, is a
growing responsibility for a Department whose own context is an
increasingly multicultural European society.
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