A critique of the natural artefact : anthropology, art and museology

Abstract

This essay, the edited text of a lecture presented by Dr Nicholas Thomas, addresses a key vehicle for the practice of art history: the museum. Thomas argues that a museum is a far more complex entity than a mere collectivity of objects. Looking in particular at museums devoted to artefacts gathered from the Pacific, he proposes that we need to appreciate them as 'systems', as living assemblies of relationships rather than as static depositories. And we need to move beyond an unhelpful field of understandings that includes what he calls a 'naturalism of the collection'. His essay offers some vivid examples of other ways of thinking about collections and the way they might be engaged in a museum setting.