Typology of Taking: An Investigation into the Motivations and Values of Collectors of Ethnographic Objects in 19th Century North America

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This project will contribute to creating a critical museum studies theory to explain white, middle-class tastes in the ethnographic objects collected in North America in the 19th Century. I will examine the value of an object to a 19th Century collector, not as intrinsic to the object, but as directly linked to the violence of a collecting encounter. I will investigate how the gender of a collector influenced what they collected, and the methods of violence they used to do so. Finally, I will use material culture theory and indigenous ontologies to ask if objects themselves, as actors, can consent or object to their own collection. The project understands itself to be an historical investigation, in conversation with writers grappling with questions of justice, violence, and decolonisation at stake more broadly in Western anthropological and ethnographic museums today.