The Ethnographic Museum as Distributive Institution

Introduction In a series of lectures given at Oxford University this year, we introduced our students to the history of ethnographic museums, with the Pitt Rivers Museum on our doorstep as a highly significant exemplar of the relationship between academic anthropology, colonial-period collecting and the role of objects in constructions of culture. In looking back to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we were examining a period that could be described very simply as one of ‘goods inwards’, when vast quantities of objects from all over the world were purchased or solicited for accession into museums. They were then classified, conserved and displayed according to the intellectual and pedagogic regimes of the day. Our lectures therefore did not just consider the things accumulated within museums. They also addressed architectonics, exhibitionary techniques and the importance of museums as sites for the production of knowledge, where objects and ideas were presented for the edification and enjoyment of the public. Underlying this formulation is, of course, the assumption that visitors would be physically present within the museum and would encounter artefacts in person. As Tony Bennett and others have theorised since the 1990s, museums were thus configured as socially active entities in which people became citizens by participating in their ‘civilising rituals’ and the ‘imagined community’ of the nation was made manifest. More recently, Actor Network Theory has inspired new modes of analysis for deconstructing the history of an institution like the Pitt Rivers Museum and privileging the agency of those who