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

该项目将有助于创建一个重要的博物馆研究理论，以解释白人，中产阶级在19世纪北美收集的民族志物品中的品味。我将研究一件物品对19世纪收藏家的价值，不是物品本身的价值，而是与收藏遭遇的暴力直接相关的价值。我将调查收集者的性别如何影响他们收集的东西，以及他们在收集时使用的暴力方法。最后，我将使用物质文化理论和本土本体论来询问作为行动者的对象本身是否可以同意或反对自己的收藏。该项目将自己理解为一项历史调查，与作家们进行对话，探讨当今西方人类学和民族志博物馆中更广泛的正义、暴力和非殖民化问题。

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.