The popular stereotype that sees museums as dusty and gloomy vaults, in which objects identified by yellowed curling labels are crowded in dimly-lit Victorian cabinets, is more prevalent than many curators may want to admit. The image has been grasped by critics and artists alike. Theodor Adorno (1967) described museums as `the family sepulchres of works of art'. Similarly, Robert Harrison (1977:140) sees the museum as existing somewhere between graveyards and department stores where things are entombed or up for sale: `it's life, naturally ghost-life, meant for those more comfortable with ghosts, frightened by waking life but not by the past'. David Mellor(1989:16), writing on Richard Ross's `Museoloy' photographs, finds museums existing as `twilight zones' whose still-life displays combine wonder with terror.

Until recently, local museums have done little to dispel this chilling, but to some intensely compelling and romantic image of arrested time and decay. There are few other areas where the effects of lethargy and neglect have been more acutely felt than in ethnography displays, where under-capitalization, lack of specialized expertise and problems of contextualization have threatened the preservation of materials and compromised the commitment of serious curators to provide appropriate settings for their collections.

The Marischal Museum, Aberdeen, combines excellent visual presentation with a challenging comparative approach to anthropological themes.

Susan Vogel (1991, 200), the director of New York's Center for African Art, has astutely noted: `The museum communicates values in the types of programmes it chooses to present, and in the audiences it addresses, in the size of staff departments and the emphasis they are given, in the selection of objects for acquisition and more concretely in the location of displays in the building and the subtleties of lighting and label copy. None of these things is neutral. None is overt. All tell the audience what to think beyond what the museum ostensibly is teaching'. In the present context these criteria suggest the degree to which the value and significance of ethnographic collections in the United Kingdom are under-estimated. In the case of university museums of ethnography - Pitt-Rivers (Oxford), Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Marischal Museum, Aberdeen - serious under-funding limits public access, while others and local authority museums (Birmingham, Brighton, Ipswich, Manchester) have do make do with small and cramped ethnography galleries. At Birmingham, despite a £350,000 capital project to display collections previously in storage, the new gallery is hidden at the back of the museum, isolated from archaeology and history galleries, while important pre-Columbian collections are scattered along the back staircase. Ethnography at the Manchester Museum is divided between two unconnected galleries.

Many of the country's estimated 378 ethnographic collection remain in storage.[1] In south-east England (Sussex, Kent and Surrey) alone, only three museums (Brighton and Hastings, and the Powell-Cotton Museum at Birchington) of 26 public institutions holding ethnography collections, display a significant part of their material. The area of exhibition space given to permanent ethnographic displays in the country as a whole may actually be shrinking as a result of the closure of the Bristol gallery, and the loss of two of the three former galleries at both Cambridge and at Edinburgh's Royal Scottish Museum. The situation is worsened by the limited number of specialized positions in museums for ethnographers. Outside London, there are about seventeen ethnography posts in the country as a whole, only six of which are in local authority museums.[2]

Partly, but by no means wholly, the problems are due to under-capitalization of local museums. In 1990-91, central government spent about £90m. (supplemented by a further £6m. from local authorities) on 650 local authority museums.[3] This amount, £10m. below government expenditure on the national museums, is far too thinly spread between numerous and widely differing institutions. Imaginative networking and the rationalization and specialization of some local authority museums, at a regional level, appears crucial and inescapable if the conditions of preservation, interpretation, exhibition and diffusion are to be significantly improved.

Despite this admittedly sober view of the conditions of ethnographic material and exhibitions in the regions, there is room for optimism that museum ethnography, seemingly moribund for so many years, has begun to revive. A cursory survey of regional developments points to a movement towards critically re-valuing and renovating displays, rationalizing collections and collecting policy, increasing documentation and research and improved public and scholarly access. In the past seven years, seven museums - Marischal Museum, Russel-Cotes Museum (Bournemouth), Bankfield Museum (Halifax), Horniman Museum (south London), Birmingham, Nottingham and the Cambridge University Museum - have re-designed or opened new ethnography displays, while at least six others (Royal Cornish Institution, Brighton, Exeter, Hastings, Leeds and Liverpool) are either planning, or in the process of re-designing, new installations. Dispensing with their traditional insularity and conscious of the limitations of different genres of exhibitions and public accessibility, some museums, such as Birmingham, Brighton and Liverpool, have encouraged curators to visit and evaluate different types of display techniques in Britain, Europe and America to ensure more sensitive and appealing re-exhibition strategies at home.

There is also a sluggish trend to rationalize collections, particularly in Scotland, the West Midlands and the north-east of England where, outside Merseyside, Manchester, having absorbed collections from Halifax and Salford, occupies a good position to establish itself as a specialist regional centre. In the south-east, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery has begun a programme to re-design and almost double the area of its existing gallery and is beginning to work with other museums in the region on problems of ethnographic conservation, documentation and exhibition, as well as providing resources for schools and university courses.

While there remains a great deal of work to be done in compiling and publishing inventories of collections, significant advances have already been made. Regional ethnographic surveys have been conducted for north-west England and Scotland. Ipswich, Perth and the Horniman Museum have published inventories or guides to their various collections, while a number of others have published catalogues and descriptions of part of their holdings.[4]

The problem of public access and widening and developing the relevance and use of ethnographic collections is also increasingly acknowledged, following the pioneering work of the Leicestershire museums services in community-oriented programmes. Among others, work related to increasing inter-cultural understanding and promoting equal opportunities policies has been carried out by Blackburn, Halifax and Bradford Museums. Blackburn Museum, acknowledging the town's multi-cultural composition, has a South Asian Gallery and an active community programme: while the Pitt-Rivers Museum has instigated an imaginative series of activities involving visiting groups of dancers and musicians from Papua New Guinea, India and Nigeria putting on public and school performances.

Nevertheless, it still needs to be more generally recognized that ethnographic collections can provide opportunities to examine the historical relationships between a particular region and the wider world. In this respect it is important that in any future rationalization policy, collections should be concentrated together in a specific museum within the area. Since ethnographic collections were usually made by local people in the course of activities that often connected the economic, political or military history of a region with the wider world, museums have an obligation to ensure wherever possible that artefacts are not alienated to other UK institutions outside the region. Among the museums that have used ethnographic collections to document aspects of local economies or social history are Perth Museum, which displays a Tahitian mourning costume, donated by David Ramsay, as part of an exhibition on local travellers and discoverers, and the Bankfield Museum with its superb collection of non-Western textiles and weaving implements collected on account of the importance of textiles to the local Halifax economy. Other museums such as the Russel-Cotes in Bournemouth and Birchington's Powell-Cotton Museum incorporate important ethnographic displays for the significance that they held in the life of their collectors. Ethnographic displays have a double edge, capable of telling us as much, if sometime not more, about our own history and values as those of their geographically remoter origins.

The growing multi-cultural character of European society, and greater public awareness of other cultures, provide new roles for ethnographic collections. No longer consigned as `curiosities', ethnographic artefacts ought increasingly to be regarded as evidence of relationships with other cultures, as well as examples of the technical and aesthetic achievements of non-Western peoples. Once properly arranged, galleries can become doors that open between different worlds of thought and practices, rather than institutional confirmations of Western prejudices.

Given their gradually changing fortune it may be opportune to examine briefly the implications behind the different genres of ethnographic exhibitions that at present confront the public across England and Scotland.

Aesthetic exhibitions

The formal sculptural of African artefacts were acknowledged by museums in Britain even before the publication of Carl Einstein's Negerplastik (1915), or Roger Fry's Vision and Design (1920). Following the lead of private Liverpool museums, such as Bullock's, the Royal Institute and Mayers Egyptian Museum, the Walker Art Gallery arranged ethnographic exhibitions in the 1880s using material from the Liverpool Museum. During the early part of the twentieth century, the British Museum, in line with then current ideas about the worth and significance of naturalistic art as against stylized or abstract compositions, treated Benin bronzes and what were thought as Kuba portrait sculptures, as possessing artistic merit, and commended them for their startling display of technique and realism. Ideas of affinity between non-Western objects and early twentieth-century Continental art were presented in 1948-49 when Brighton Museum and Art Gallery supported the Institute of Contemporary Arts' exhibition 40,000 Years of Modern Art by providing a large loan of ethnographic pieces to be displayed alongside the work of modern masters such as Picasso, Braque, Miro, Modigliani, Brancusi and others.

Nevertheless, despite some exceptions in the work of British artists such as Epstein and Henry Moore, Britain did not develop any popular or sustained current of interest that regarded non-Western artefacts as `art' comparable to that in France, and later in the United States , where they were enthusiastically greeted for the innovative, stylistic and technical solutions they suggested for old pictorial and sculptural problems. John Mack (1992: 19) has suggested that the British reluctance to endorse the aesthetic appeal of such artefacts can be traced to the existence of a sufficiently rigorous alternative paradigm, constructed by anthropologists and curators at the Cambridge and Pitt-Rivers Museums, that persuasively emphasized their ethnographic significance and worth.

Apart from `Treasures' and the Aztec Turquoise Mosaics exhibitions at the Museum of Mankind, only the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia is arranged by formal aesthetic principles.[5] The recently completed re-display at Cambridge distinguishes a number of notable North-West Coast totems, Maori canoe prows, Malanggans and Fijian ivory and bone pendants by displaying them in the galleries' central court, where the formal sculptural properties of the pieces can better be appreciated, unencumbered by more dense display techniques in the surrounding cases. Nevertheless, labels provide the objects with the same kind of ethnographic or historical contextualization found elsewhere in the museum. Aesthetic criteria have, however, been applied more frequently to temporary touring exhibitions, many originating outside the United Kingdom.[6]

It is important to distinguish between exhibitions that are either consciously or implicitly structured by reference to classical aesthetic ideology and those in, say, Cambridge and Liverpool that use aesthetic design and display criteria but which nevertheless through suitable juxtapositions, groupings and labels convey ethnographic, historical or critical information. In the absence of any alternative narrative interpretation, aesthetic displays implicitly uphold a particular ideological position. However, where aesthetic criteria are subordinated to an explicit ethnographic or historical narrative, it may be more appropriate to distinguish such displays as `visualistic'.

Liverpool Museum provides a particularly good example of an exhibition that has high aesthetic standards but which also groups materials by style and culture and includes sufficient textual information and photographs to provide adequate ethnographic contextualization. The Pacifice section of the gallery provides an introduction to various aspects of New Guinea ritual and cosmology by focusing on the activities that take place in the men's house. Each display cabinet, with their complementary photographic and textual panels, represents different aspects of activities and beliefs in various cultures that share the same institution (Iatmul, Abelam, Asmat, Massim, etc.). The formal qualities of the objects and method of display encourage the perception of objects as art, while the structured theme of the exhibition and the use of photographic and detailed text panels provide them with an ethnographic context.

A similarly careful design and arrangement of objects to accentuate the formal qualities of non-Western artefacts can be found in the Museum of Mankind's current exhibition, Images of Africa: Emil Torday and the Art of the Congo 1900-1909. The exhibition's visual code has been strongly subordinated to a narrative structure that clearly defines the historical conditions under which the items were collected and the ethnographic contexts in which they were used.

The Cambridge Museum and the Museum of Mankind's Images of Africa provide a well-developed reflexive presentation of their collections by examining the historical conditions of collecting and the relevance of their benefactors and collections in the growth of anthropological theory and museological practices. Together with the Liverpool Museum's exhibition, all three examples demonstrate the limitations of opposing aesthetic to ethnographic and historical criteria and exemplify the added richness and advantages of displays that incorporate different reading codes. Aesthetic, historical and ethnographic criteria can, in different ways, re-contextualize exhibitions. What is important are not the necessary oppositions between any of these criteria but the relationship between the visual presentation and narrative within exhibitions.

Images of Africa: Emil Torday and th Art of the Congo 1900-1909, Museum of Mankind. The installation combines strong visual display with excellent historical marratives that present both the aesthetic qualities of the objects and their historical significance. (See the review by Tom Phillips, R.A., A.T., June 1991.)

Structural functionalist exhibitions

Outside the few aesthetically influences displays and the more recent uses of `visualism' described above, municipal and university museums still adhere to modes of representation derived from older anthropological paradigms.

Structural functionalist notions of society, as an insular and self-regulating ensemble of interrelated institutions and belief systems, are by far the most enduring legacy found in museum representations of other cultures. In this view specific art styles are identified as characteristic cultural traits that distinguish one society from another. Structural functionism was influential in providing a model for monographic type exhibitions like those pioneered by the Museum of Mankind in the 1970-80s (Yoruba Religious Cults, The Ashanti, Nomad and City). These exhibitions used material culture to provide an overall description of different societies or focused on a particular aspect that was contextualized in the wider social whole. Visually, the use of elaborate reconstructions of environments, dwellings, markets, religious buildings etc. signalled their implicit commitment to notions of natural-realism and authenticity, which suggests parallels with the earlier use of dioramas in natural history museums, with their shared commitment to objective exhibition criteria. The use of dioramas in ethnographic displays persisted until relatively late in Britain, with Leeds Museum continuing to exhibit distinct artefacts and dress in reconstructed habitats up until 1990.

More important, however, structural functionalism represents other societies as insular and unique, each distinguished by their territorial jurisdiction and a set of institutions and beliefs that are the product of tradition rather than historical process. Culture is exhibited as an idealized, static section that often confirms Western stereotypes. Commenting on this same tendency Philip Ravenhill (1988: 5) has noted: `Throughout colonial museography there was this type of assumption that the attribution of an object to the correct indigenous category constituted in itself an explanation. The enterprise of categorization ultimately produced nice, neat lists of basic object types for ... and restricted to ... each ethnic. This packaging of material culture on an ethnic basis served in turn to reinforce the "reality" of colonially reified ethnicity. For material culture studies, the question of style became simply a matter of ethnic traits'.

Brighton, Exeter, Glasgow, Ipswich, Manchester and parts of the exhibition in the Royal Scottish Museum assume a similar concept of culture. Their displays are organized according to territorial units or culture areas with few and unsustained attempts to provide any historical context. The effect of the combination of visual presentation with functionalist narrative is well-represented by Brighton Museum's ethnography gallery, which combines a blackened, dimly-lit exhibition space with wall cases decorated by an assortment of dark cloths, animal print wallpaper and mirrored plinths. The gallery, due to be refurbished this year, suggests a subtle ranking of cultures by the use of backdrops. Connotations of savagery produced by the animal print paper used to display the African collections, reinforce the narrative classification of peoples. African and North American collections are divided by tribal affiliation, while Asian material is identified by nation. The exhibition therefore provokes a contrast between tribal and national cultures. Within this division, each African society is represented by specific and different manufacturers - the Yoruba by sculpture, the Hausa by domestic clothing, South and East Africa by weapons and shields. Such an approach encourages the notion that material specialization corresponds to specific psychological dispositions: the notion that some societies are made up of religiously devoted artists, while others have a settled, practical and decorative flair. Visual display criteria and narrative mutually reinforce four messages:

1. Non-Western societies are insular, ahistorical and caught in the web of tradition that buffers them from change.
2. Societies can be divided between African and American tribal cultures and Asian national cultures with the implication that one is superior to the other.
3. Cultures are identifiable by not only the styles but the types of manufacturers they produce.
4. Certain cultures are more adept at certain activities than others.

Some of the museums that have adopted this genre of exhibition have attempted to correct these implicit ahistorical views by inserting historical narratives. Glasgow and Ipswich have introduced sections on early collectors and benefactors, as well as acknowledging the historical development of African kingdoms and the effects of Western colonial expansion on non-Western peoples. Nevertheless, in the absence of any discernible sustained thread of historical contextualization to weave areas of the displays together, visual and narrative criteria rigidly re-affirm the functionalist limitations of this genre.

Comparative exhibitions

One of the earliest collections made and exhibited to demonstrate universal principles by cross-cultural comparison was assembled in the late nineteenth century by Augustus Pitt-Rivers and forms the cornerstone of the collections housed in the museum that continues to bear his name. Objects were collected, sorted into types and arranged in sequence to illustrate `the successive ideas by which the minds of men in a primitive condition of culture have progressed in the development of their arts from the simple to the complex, and from the homogenous to the heterogenous' (quoted in Thompson, 1977: 38).

Since 1985, under the pioneering influence of Charles Hunt at Aberdeen Univesity's Marischal Museum, comparative criteria have regained fashion in structuring permanent re-exhibitions of collections. Discarding the pseudo-historical pretensions of their evolutionist predecessors, the new generation of exhibitions dispense with history in favour of a synchronic comparative presentation of ideas, institutions or behaviour. Birmingham, Nottingham and the Horniman, all of which have adopted this approach, have incorporated Western and non-Western artefacts, thereby relativizing equally the values of the domestic and foreign societies that have produced them.

Nevertheless, while these displays share certain common characteristics, each uses different criteria in devising its own exhibition format. The Marischal Museum's gallery compares categories of person (man and woman, child, ancestor, priest, big man, outsider) archetypes (conquering hero, cosmic hero, heroic sacrifice, monsters), the use of objects (gifts, medicine, masks), and social processes (religious conversion, warfare, politics). Birmingham's Gallery 33 adopts an interrogative approach and uses objects to partly answer questions such as `What is society?' `What is Politics?' `What is Religion?' In addition, it compares ways of marking status and ethnic identities, object categories (textiles, masks and musical instruments) as well as social activities (celebration, eating, drinking). The Horniman's new balcony gallery Patterns of Life, unlike Birmingham and Aberdeen, restricts its comparative treatment of any one theme to two or three different cultural examples. With two exceptions, the Horniman bases its new display on the less ethnocentric categories of activities (collecting, life-cycle, social, political and economic relations, food production and preparation, and performing arts).

Structural-functionalist exhibitions isolate cultures and can easily lead to different types of activities and manufactures being ascribed to different peoples. Note how the Yoruba are represented largely by ceremonial objects (left) while the Hausa are epitomized by more domestic wares (right). Brighton Mueseum and Art Gallery.

One is left with a tentative impression that the Marischal Museum presents comparison at the level of ideas, Birmingham Museum contrasts social institutions, while the Horniman focuses on the comparison of human activities. The variety of comparative exhibitions parallel the different levels of interest found between French and Anglo-American anthropological paradigms in the 1960-1970s. One leaves the Marischal Museum with a strong suspicion that many of its themes are heavily influenced by Lévi-Strauss and French anthropology, while Birmingham and the Horniman remain more conservatively wedded to the British empirical tradition.

In all three examples, texts and exhibitions share a common concern to demonstrate that apparently exotic practices and beliefs have their own logical coherence, that these are directly comparable to familiar Western experiences, that social categories and classifications are culturally constructed and that humanity everywhere shares common mental proclivities.

Like the academic traditions from which they originate, this mode of representation examines cultural categories and cosmologies for their internal characteristics and common consistencies, rather than as ideologies. Consequently they present a static view of culture rather than one based on production and reproduction. As with structural functional exhibitions, attempts have been made to graft on a historical dimension, by including sections on the lives and motives of collectors (Alfred Haddon at Liverpool, Ida Wench at Birmingham and Frederick and Emslie Horniman at the museum named after them) or by the inclusion of categories such as `the outsider' and `religious conversion' (Aberdeen) and social, political and economic exchange (Horniman). Nevertheless, at best this only isolates history to certain corners of the displays and does not provide the sustained historical contextualization demanded by politically concerned critics.

Visual presentation reinforces the distinction and ranking of nation states and tribes while animal-print wallpaper acts as a backdrop for African 'tribal' displays. Brighton Mueseum and Art Gallery.

The politics of exhibition

Comparative style exhibitions attempt to link the particular with the universal. In the case of Birmingham, comparative displays are used to express the idea of the global village. The exhibition criteria, however, project a limited and idealistic view of the indivisibility of humanity that ignores the political and economic vicissitudes and dislocations which have created a global village divided into marginalized, impoverished ghettos and affluent centres and the lack of consensus on the politics of representation between their inhabitants. Birmingham Museum confronts this problem of legitimacy not only through providing an inter-active video display that presents four attitudes to collecting from indigenous and Western perspectives (the example is taken of the Solomon Islands), but also by affirming the relativity of their exhibition criteria. The political aspect of museum representations is also raised at Aberdeen where two mannequins of pygmies confront the visitor with a petition signed in 1880 exclaiming `We protest at being exhibited so are we curiosities or human beings? Is science more important than compassion? You have cast us in the role we would not choose.' Ethnographic displays ignore at their peril the political sensitivity required in exhibiting other cultures and peoples; a lesson embarrassingly learned recently by the Natural History Museum at Banyoles whose display of a 104 year old stuffed southern African caused African diplomats and officials to threaten the boycott of the Barcelona Olympics.

Nevertheless, it is worth remembering that any exhibition criteria is under-written by textual assumptions that may have explicit or unforeseen ideological implications which themselves only become transparent in the process of the West's changing relationship with other parts of the world. Exhibitions cannot avoid the limitations that their historical situations place on them any more than their critics. Curators are, however, able to manipulate the relationship between visual criteria and ethnographic and historical narratives to create diverse reading codes and modulate the implicit and explicit messages that exhibitions communicate. There is no real opposition between aesthetic and so-called `contextualized displays': only between good exhibitions that acknowledge the formal aesthetic or technical qualities of work and provide historical cultural contextualization, and bad exhibitions that choose between aesthetic and `contextual' presentation and regard their visual and narrative codes as final and absolute. In this respect Images of Africa provides the most articulate example of a new paradigm of exhibition that acknowledges the importance of an engaging visual presentation, unencumbered by mock reconstructions and mannequins but firmly structures by a strong, historical and cultural narrative that provides critical contextualization. The exhibition exchanges the platitudes long discussed by museum critics, for a tangible demonstration that questions and finally discards the dichotomy between aesthetic and ethnographic displays.

In the regions, meaningful and significant re-displays of ethnographic artefacts are dependent on increased financial commitment, the established of new relations between national and local museums and on the willingness of museums with smaller collections to transfer and concentrate material in larger regional museums where they can be better cared for and contribute towards more broadly based resources for regional and national programmes.

An eye-catching example of an exhibition style as yet unknown in British ethnographic museums: a display on the theme of androgyny ('Tu sera jou»e: vers le neutre') in the current exhibition Les Femmes, open till 10 January 1993 at the Mus»e d'ethographie in NeuchÇtel, Switzerland, one of the most innovative museums of its kind in Europe. The exhibition, curated by Jacques Hainard, which has been locally criticized for being about, rather than by, women, is accompanied by a paperback volume of essays with the same title, published by the museum (SF 24.70). (Photo © Alain Germond.)

In Britain, the possibilities of ethnographic exhibitions have not begun to be realized. While there are some signs that the number of temporary exhibitions is increasing[7] museums and arts institutions need to provide much greater resources and encouragement. Furthermore, with the exception of Paolozzi's Lost Magic Kingdoms at the Museum of Mankind, exhibitions have tended to adhere to a rather purist definition of non-Western artefacts and have ignored the re-use of Western materials and the influence of Western design elements on the decoration of non-Western objects. This ethnographic puritanism has blocked one avenue through which the relationship between the West and non-Western cultures can be explored. Instead such purist interpretations have represented indigenous cultural traditions as exhausted at the point when they begin experimentation with new outside media and styles. By contrast, on the Continent the point of rupture with internally defined cultural conventions has provided the departure for some of the most exciting, if controversial, of recent exhibitions: Art from Another World (1988) at the Rotterdam Museum voor Volkenkunde, Magiciens de la Terre (1989) at the Pompidou-La Villette sites, and Lotte or the Transformation of the Object (1990) at the Grazer Kunstverein. Temporary exhibitions need to be both critical and reflexive, concerned with the ascription of names, the fixation of meaning to unfamiliar objects and the inscription of value and use within Western fields of discourse. These are historical processes that are inescapably linked to the relations that have a continue to pertain between different cultures.

Exhibitions need to focus on the different and specific definitions the West has attributed to the Other and in so doing, examine the historical construction of its own successive self-images. Such exhibitions - that question distinctions between art and material culture, galleries and museums, the inte-dependence of the West and the Other; that are concerned with the political control of discourse and the changing meanings imposed on objects and their roles in defining Euro-American culture; exhibitions that invite us to examine, and help enable us to come to terms with the conditions of your own alienation in the world - remain as yet unconfronted projects in the United Kingdom. It is not exhibitions curated by ethnographers that have taken the lead in problematizing the West's relationship with other cultures, but the installations of artists such as Lothar Baumgarten, Vera Frenkel, Louise Lawler, Olivier Richon and the younger generation of artists such as those who contribute to Stoke City Museum and Art Gallery's Palaces of Culture (1987). Jacques Derrida's `anthropological warfare', `the essential confrontation that opens communication between peoples and cultures,' is taking place around ethnographic galleries, but seldom within them.

Adorno, T. 1967. Valéry Proust Museum. In Prisms, London, Neville Spearman
Audit Commission. 1991. The Road to Wigan Pier? Managing Local Authority Museums and Art Galleries. London, HMSO.
Derrida, J. 1974. Of Grammatology, Baltimore and London: John Hopkins P.
Harrison, J. 1977. Eccentric Spaces. New York, Avon Books.
Mack, J. 1991. Emil Torday and the Art of the Congo 1900-1909, London, British Museum P.
Mellor, D. 1989. The Delirious Museum. In Museology; photographs by Richard Ross. New York, Aperture Foundation Inc.
Ravenhill, P. 1988. The Passive Object and the Tribal Paradigm: Colonial Museology in French West Africa. Paper presented at the Workshop on African Culture at Bellagio, May. Unpublished ms.
Schumann, Y. (ed.). 1986. Survey of Ethnographic Collections in the UK, Eire and the Channel Islands: An Interim Report. Ethnographers Group, Occasional paper 2, 2 vols.
Thompson, M.W. 1977. General Pitt-Rivers: Evolution and Archaeology in the Nineteenth Century. Bradford-on-Avon, Moonraker P.
Vogel, S. 1991. `Always True to the Object, in Our Fashion'. In Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (eds.) Exhibiting Cultures: The poetics and politics of Museum Display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution P.

[1]This figure is based on the Museum Ethnographers' Group 1986 survey of collections in the United Kingdom, Eire and the Channel Islands, and includes collections that have since been transferred or otherwise disposed of.
[2]This refers to full-time positions in ethnography. In many museums, ethnographic collections are overseen by non-specialist staff.
[3]Audit Commission (1991).
[4]The Marischal Museum (Shark Tooth, Stone and Blade: Pacific Island Art from the University of Aberdeen), Manchester (Australian Aboriginal Material in Manchester Museum, and Aotearoa: The Maori Collections at the Manchester Museum), the Royal Scottish Museums (Pacific Art in the Royal Scottish Museum, and The Hausa of Northern Nigeria: A Catalogue of the R.E. Miller Collection and Others), Glasgow (Art of the Mende: The Guy Massie-Taylor Collection), Brighton (African Carvings), the Russel-Cotes Museum (The Art of Japan), the Pitt-Rivers Museum (The McDougall Collection of Indian Textiles from Guatemala and Mexico, Australia in Oxford, etc.), Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Iban or Sea Dayak Fabrics, etc.)
[5]In its 1975 re-organization, the Liverpool Museum incorporated an art gallery reserved for the display of ethnographic objects. The ethnographic displays were under re-arrangement during my visit to the Museum (January 1992) and only part of the exhibition area was open.
[6]Treasures of Ancient Nigeria (Royal Academy, 1982-83), Sacred Circles: 2000 Years of North American Indian (Hayward Gallery, 1976-77), and the current exhibition of Ancient Mexican Art at the Hayward Gallery. In 1970 Charles Hunt, then at Liverpool, curated Still Ecstasy.
[7]Bristols The Art of Ruins: Adela Breton and the Temples of Mexico (1989), Manchester's Aotearoa (1990), Brighton's North American Indian Portraits of Europeans and Epic, Dream, Satire: Puppet Theatre (1991), the Arts Council's touring exhibition Exotic Europeans (1990-91), and the Horniman's Yoruba exhibition (1991).

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