Blinded by ‘Science’: Ethnography at the British Museum
Author(s)
Coombes, Annie E.
Abstract
There are of course a number of serious questions raised by the evidently peripatetic nature of the ethnographic collections of the British Museum. Clearly there is historically some confusion over the classification of those objects which none the less apparently shared enough identifiable features to be unanimously categorized as ‘ethnographic.’ The fact that challenges to the hegemony of bourgeois values have traditionally been less rather than more likely to have taken place in ethnographic collections is partly a product of the ambivalent and difficult relationship which ethnography and its sister science, anthropology, have historically negotiated with the state. In order to appreciate fully the significance of the neurotic mobility of the Ethnographic Department of the British Museum we should look a little more closely at the kinds of values historically attached to the ethnographic object and the object of ethnography and at its designated roles within the museum.
