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Ethnography at the British Museum describes how ethnography has developed at the British Museum.
The ethnographical collection was originally linked to the Department of Natural History and Curiosities. [1] The addition of material gathered by Captain James Cook and his companions between 1767 and 1780, and presented to the British Museum by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, Cook himself and Joseph Banks, were a substantial addition to the material previously collected by Sir Hans Sloane. But much of this collection was dispersed. Some material found its way to Göttingen, [2] where August Ludwig Schlözer was developing his concepts of Völkerkunde and ethnographie. [3] However additional material was transferred from the "artificial curiosities" held by the museum of the Royal Society until 1781. In 1817 this was supplemented by material from West Africa collected by Thomas Edward Bowdich during his 'Mission to Ashantee', in 1825 by Aztec sculptures collected by William Bullock in Mexico and Captain William Edward Parry's Eskimo material from his second Arctic voyage of 1829. [2]
In 1836 the Department of Antiquities was established and the ethnographic collection was transferred there. When Christian Jürgensen Thomsen visited the British Museum in 1843, he did not hide his disappointment: he was unimpressed ‘by the British antiquities everywhere covered in dust and not much esteemed’ and complained that the artefacts were displayed without indication of their provenance. [4] An Ethnological Gallery was opened in 1845. [1] In 1851 there were 3,700 artefacts in the ethnographic collection, displayed in a single gallery. In 1852 this consisted of seventy four cases of material from outside Europe: nine containing Chinese and Indian material, 4 African material, 29 material from the Americas with remaining 32 cases containing material from Oceania and South East Asia. Polynesia alone accounted for 15 cases. [5]
In 1866, the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities was formed under the superintendence of Augustus Wollaston Franks, as Keeper. It included the ethnographic collections. Franks maintained the view that the museum's collections "should illustrate the manners and customs of such races as have not been subjected directly to European civilisation, so as to furnish the student with the means of examining the affinities and differences between such races and also to reconstruct some of the last pages of the history of the world". The Handbook of the Ethnographical Collection was published in 1910. [6]
The Department of Ethnography was set up as a separate department in 1946. In 1964 the department received 15,000 items from the Wellcome Foundation, the biggest single acquisition from which they ever benefited. [7]
From 1970 to 2004 the Department of Ethnography of the British Museum was housed at 6 Burlington Gardens, displaying collections from the Americas, Africa, the Pacific and Australia, as well as tribal Asia and Europe. This was due to lack of space in the museum's main building in Bloomsbury. Between 1970 and 1997, the department was known as the Museum of Mankind. 75 exhibitions were hosted, including many famous ones such as Nomad and City (1976), and Living Arctic (1987). It was created by Keeper of Ethnography Adrian Digby in the 1960s, and opened by his successor William Fagg. Fagg was succeeded by Malcolm Mcleod in 1974, and by John Mack in 1990. The museum ceased exhibiting at Burlington Gardens in 1997 and the Department of Ethnography moved back to the British Museum in Bloomsbury in 2004.
The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. The British Museum was the first public national museum to cover all fields of knowledge.
Penn Museum, formerly known as The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, is an archaeology and anthropology museum at the University of Pennsylvania. It is located on Penn's campus in the University City neighborhood of Philadelphia, at the intersection of 33rd and South Streets. It also is close enough for Drexel University students to walk or take SEPTA transportation services. Housing over 1.3 million artifacts, the museum features one of the most comprehensive collections of Middle and Near-Eastern art in the world.
The Nicholson Museum was an archaeological museum at the University of Sydney home to the Nicholson Collection, the largest collection of antiquities in both Australia and the Southern Hemisphere. Founded in 1860, the collection spans the ancient world with primary collection areas including ancient Egypt, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, and the Near East. The museum closed permanently in February 2020, and the Nicholson Collection is now housed in the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, open from November 2020. The museum was located in the main quadrangle of the University.
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6 Burlington Gardens is a Grade II*-listed building in Mayfair, London. Built for the University of London, it has been used by various institutions in the course of its history, including the Civil Service Commission, the British Museum and, currently, the Royal Academy of Arts.
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The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology is a museum affiliated with Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1866, the Peabody Museum is one of the oldest and largest museums focusing on anthropological material, with particular focus on the ethnography and archaeology of the Americas. The museum is caretaker to over 1.2 million objects, some 900 feet (270 m) of documents, 2,000 maps and site plans, and about 500,000 photographs. The museum is located at Divinity Avenue on the Harvard University campus. The museum is one of the four Harvard Museums of Science and Culture open to the public.
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The Secretum was a collection held by the British Museum to store artefacts and images considered sexually graphic or that depicted sexually graphic acts or images. Many of the items were amulets, charms and votive offerings, often from pre-Christian traditions, including the worship of Priapus, the Greco-Roman god of fertility and male genitalia. The separation was probably on moral grounds, motivated by a paternalistic stance from the museum to keep what they considered morally dangerous material away from all except scholars.
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Bernard Evelyn Buller Fagg MBE, was a British archaeologist and museum curator who undertook extensive work in Nigeria before and after the Second World War.
The Art & History Museum is a public museum of antiquities and ethnographic and decorative arts located at the Parc du Cinquantenaire/Jubelpark in Brussels, Belgium. The museum is one of the constituent parts of the Royal Museums of Art and History (RMAH) and is one of the largest art museums in Europe. It was formerly called the Cinquantenaire Museum until 2018. It is served by the metro stations Schuman and Merode on lines 1 and 5.
The Museum of Ethnography is a national museum in Budapest, Hungary.
Beatrice Mary Blackwood was a British anthropologist, who ran the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford from 1938 until her retirement in 1959.
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William Buller Fagg was a British curator and anthropologist. He was the Keeper of the Department of Ethnography at the British Museum (1969–1974), and pioneering historian of Yoruba and Nigerian art, with a particular focus on the art of Benin.
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Margaret Plass MBE (1896–1990) was an American anthropologist, collector of African artefacts and patron of the British Museum alongside her husband, Webster Plass.