Menu Expand
Hunting the Gatherers

Hunting the Gatherers

Michael O'Hanlon | Robert L. Welsch

(2001)

Additional Information

Book Details

Abstract

Between the 1870s and the 1930s competing European powers carved out and consolidated colonies in Melanesia, the most culturally diverse region of the world. As part of this process, great assemblages of ethnographic artefacts were made by a range of collectors whose diversity is captured in this volume. The contributors to this tightly-integrated volume take these collectors, and the collecting institutions, as the departure point for accounts that look back at the artefact-producing societies and their interaction with the collectors, but also forward to the fate of the collections in metropolitan museums, as the artefacts have been variously exhibited, neglected, re-conceived as indigenous heritage, or repatriated. In doing this, the contributors raise issues of current interest in anthropology, Pacific history, art history, museology, and material culture.


Michael O'Hanlon is Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.


Robert L. Welsch teaches at the Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth, New Hampshire.


“... a most welcome book ... Reading this book should irrevocably change how one looks at an ethnographic exhibit ... These wide-ranging articles ... augment our understanding of museums and their objects ... Overall, this is a rich collection of essays, brimming with data and, for the most part, cogently analysed.”  · JRAI

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Series Page ii
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Dedication v
Table Of Contents vii
List of Illustrations ix
Notes on Contributors xiii
Preface xvii
Chapter 1. Introduction 1
Chapter 2. Gathering For God 35
Chapter 3. Exploring Tensions in Material Culture 55
Chapter 4. 'Before It Has Become Too Late' 81
Chapter 5. Surveying Culture 103
Chapter 6. Collecting Pygmies 127
Chapter 7. One Time, One Place, Three Collections 155
Chapter 8. The Careless Collector 181
Chapter 9. Felix Speiser's Fletched Arrow 203
Chapter 10. On His Todd 227
Chapter 11. Reverse Trajectories 251
Chapter 12. Epilogue 273
Index 279