What is an 'English object' Part II
Chris Wingfield,
Researcher 'The Other Within' project
Whilst preparing data for the
mapping exercise, it was striking that around 70% of the English objects could be given some sort of reasonably precise geographical location. This is a marked contrast to many other parts of the world, where the relevant geographical information recorded by donors to the museum can at times be as imprecise as ‘Africa – club.’ As you will see, the geographical distribution of dots on the
maps points up something very important which is the geographical location of the Pitt Rivers Museum in England. There are many more objects in the museum from Oxfordshire and many more places recorded as locations in that county than for many others counties. Both in the mental geographies of those collecting and presenting material to the museum and in their actual physical movement there seemed to be factors of proximity operating. The nearer you get to home, the more detailed relevant geographical information seems to become, and perhaps the more familiar and memorable place names are. Furthermore, the closer you get to the museum, the easier it seems that objects found their way into the museum. However, in preparing the database we had to consider what it meant for an object to be from a particular place. The objects recorded as connected with a particular place in England by the database all definitely had a connection with that place, but the range of connections could be very different. An object could have been collected in a certain place, but in some cases it was rather made in an English place. Some items such as scrimshaw made from whales teeth by sailors, but recorded as English, were almost certainly not made in England, but by English sailors. Another object documented by Jeremy Coote elsewhere, is a brass patu, made as a model of a Maori club for Sir Joseph Bankes. For the many archaeological objects with places recorded in England, the places generally referred to the places where they had been found or excavated, so at least that was fairly consistent, but even then they might well have been brought to England at some earlier point before their archaeological deposition.
When examined closely it seemed that the database recorded a family of meanings for objects being ‘from England’ and that the only generally applicable defintion was that all object had at some point in their biographies had a connection to a place somewhere in England. What about all the objects that spent time in the houses of their English donors before they were donated to the museum? Is it not true of all the objects in the Pitt Rivers Museum are in a museum in England and in many cases have been for more time than they were in circulation outside the museum? Does this qualify them as English objects? It seems as if many of the objects the database recorded as being English had complicated biographies and were as entangled as the pacific objects for which Nicholas Thomas coined the moniker 'Entangled Objects'.
Return to 'What is an English object' page here.
Return to the site home page here.
[This is part of Chris Wingfield's final paper at the end of the project's seminar series, given on Friday 13 March 2009, to see the rest of that paper go here]
