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Collecting Life's Unknowns

 

Historical exhibition display in the Museum für Völkerkunde (today Weltkulturen Museum), Oceania section. Weltkulturen Image Archive. Photo: Hermann Niggemeyer, date unknown.

MATERIALITY1 AND THE UNKNOWN, DATING, ANONYMITY, THE OCCULT

Collections have an anthropomorphic, fetishist feel to them. They are both about our failings and about our successes. They signify relations between things and ideas, between the inheritance of meaning and its erasure over time. In its singularity and ubiquity, the ethnographic museum can be seen as a household of foreign matter, of stuff that is diasporic, immigrant, domestic, bourgeois, effusive, feral, reclusive, rehabilitating, convivial, consumerist, curious, concerned, failed, and obsessive.

In the past, ethnographic museums not only collected the everyday, they sought out representations of life's unknowns. The unknown, unchartered, unexplainable, even the uncanny were part of the anthropologist's fascination with the Other and his bugchasing desire to put the status quo at risk.