Collecting

'People are intrigued by how ethnographic material is acquired by museums'
(Jane Pierson-Jones, 1992:231)

'.. .the defining feature of collections: that of being assembled with particular classificatory principles in mind...'
(M. O'Hanlon quoting S. Pearce, 1992:49)

• Introduction
  
• Contemporary field collecting (1)
  • Extract from Michael O'Hanlon's Paradise discussing the issues of field collection
  • Extract from J. Clifford's Paradise Visual Anthropology review
• Contemporary field collecting (2)
  • Extract from Malcolm McLeod's Collecting for the British Museum
• Contemporary field collecting (3): D. Zeitlyn on collecting Mambila shields
  
• 19th century field collecting
  
• Non-field collecting (1): Pitt Rivers
• Non-field collecting (2): Franks and the British Museum
  
• Bibliography

The term 'field collecting' is used to denote the collecting of objects by a named individual whilst in the country of origin (and most often, dealing directly with the previous owner). Pitt Rivers very occasionally collected in the field; for example when he obtained artefacts previously owned by mining and potting communities in the Auvergne in France in the 1870s but most of his collection was obtained at second hand from dealers and sale-rooms.

Today field collecting is the best source of material for ethnographic museum collections because it is the most likely to be received with full documentation. There is a very full literature on collecting in general and field collection in particular. This is not the right forum to bring forward all the issues but the extract from Paradise covers many of them, and the bibliography gives some possible further sources.