Please find below an abstract for a proposed panel at
the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American
Anthropological Association (AAA) in San Francisco,
California (19-23 November 2008). We are soliciting
abstracts for 15 minute papers to be included in this
panel. If you are interested, please forward an
abstract of 250 words or less by Monday, 24 March 2008
to:
Leah Niederstadt (niederstadt_leah@wheatonma.edu) or
Tobias Sperlich (tobias.sperlich@uregina.ca).
Ethnographic collecting – the stories continue
The collecting of ethnographic materials played a
significant role in the development of anthropology as
an academic discipline. It has long been recognized
that in early anthropological studies, material
culture was considered important data that could be
used to understand and classify cultures on a global
scale. While it is generally acknowledged that
anthropologists and others collected ethnographic
objects throughout the entire 20th century and that
they continue to do so today, collecting as an
integral anthropological activity arguably came to an
end with the onset of functionalism. It appears that
this move to the fringe of anthropological inquiry has
also meant that recent collecting practices have
tended to escape the scrutiny of anthropological
investigation.
Nevertheless, the collecting of ethnographic material
culture still represents a key arena in which members
of different cultures engage with one another. Today,
many Westerners continue to live for extended periods
of time in the non-Western world. Like their
colonial-era predecessors, Peace Corps volunteers,
development workers, diplomats and military personnel,
among others, continue to create social networks with
locals and arrive at personal understandings of their
host cultures. Many of these individuals develop
collections of ethnographica, which can be regarded as
material manifestations of cross-cultural negotiations
and as representations of perceptions of other
cultures. These collections thus provide
anthropologists with a unique access point to
investigate a type of cross-cultural encounter that
continues to take place in an increasingly globalized
world but that has not yet been the focus of extensive
anthropological inquiry.
This panel seeks papers that present anthropological
examinations of ethnographic collecting in the present
and recent past, particularly those that focus on
types of collectors, e.g., Peace Corps volunteers,
military personnel, etc., that have rarely been the
focus of academic study. Some of the questions to be
considered include: How are cultures represented
through these individual collections? How do
collectors understand the objects in their
collections? How does the individual collector develop
his/her collection? What kind of collaborations
develop between the collector and the individuals from
whom objects are obtained? What significance does the
act of collecting have for the collector? How might
these collections impact our understanding of human
cultural diversity?
