In whose interest?
workshop organized in ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE
association with the RAI at Roehampton,
University of Surrey, May 2004).
Second, new publications are already in
progress. An edited volume, Applications of
anthropology, based on the first seminar of the
series, is to be published by Berghahn: this
surveys and comments on contemporary
applied anthropology, its substantive and
methodological approaches and its relationship
with academic anthropology. In addition,
Veronica Strang is developing an introductory
text under the title Applied anthropology: A
primer.
Third, a new book series, Studies in
Applied Anthropology, edited by Sarah Pink
and published with Berghahn, aims, among
other things, to make applied work available to
students, and fill the gap in provision high-
lighted by Gerald Mars. There is already active
discussion of book proposals to demonstrate
and develop the applied-academic relationship.
These networks, activities and events have
been designed to complement and work col-
laboratively with the existing Anthropology in
Action email discussion list and journal, which
continue to play a leading role in the develop-
ment of applied anthropology in Britain. Of
course, more can always be done, but the situ-
ation is more complex than some polemical
editorials suggest (such, after all, is the nature
of editorials). The foundations have been laid,
if only we are able to build upon them.
The American Society for Applied
Anthropology lists 25 academic institutions at
which applied anthropology is taught in the
US.3 If Britain has the same potential market,
the first British university to set up an MA in
Applied Anthropology ought to be flooded
with applicants. But this will become a reality
only if anthropologists working in anthro-
pology departments and their budget holders
are convinced of its viability as an option
and here the ASA can only do all in its power
to encourage such a development. As we noted
at the outset, the ASA is not much more than
the sum of the efforts of its members but
anthropologists know well that the whole may
exceed the sum of the parts. Recent commen-
tators may be correct about needs but misin-
formed about existing initiatives. We need to
communicate more effectively, and we are
grateful to the pages of ANTHROPOLOGY
TODAY for providing us with another opportu-
nity to do just that, but more than anything we
need people to get involved. !
Sarah Pink (ASA Networking Officer),
networks@theasa.org
Richard Fardon (ASA Chair)
chair@theasa.org
Reports on the seminars and their findings are available
on the ASA website (http://www.theasa.org/). Also see the
pages of the Applied Anthropologists network, as well as
those of Anthropology Matters, since 2002 the ASAs
postgraduate network (see the organizers letter in AT 20[3]).
1. Now titled ASA Networking Officer, the role
encompasses outreach to anthropologists working outside
academic institutions as well as the management of the new
ASA networks.
2. Unfortunately Sillitoe was unable to attend, but he was
cited in several presentations.
3. At http://www.sfaa.net/sfaaorgs.html
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 20 NO 4, AUGUST 2004
long ago to the British Museum itself, after a
BRITISH MUSEUM
On the planned abolition of the Department
of Ethnography
The British Museum is a strange institution.
Neil MacGregor, its able, forward-looking
director, has stated on several occasions
recently that he sees the Museum as a museum
of the world, for the world a splendid ethno-
graphic sentiment. And in his introduction to
the booklet accompanying the new exhibition in
the Wellcome Trust Gallery, Living and dying
which won the 2004 Museums and Heritage
Award for Excellence (Permanent Gallery) he
writes that the exhibition looks at how people
around the world deal with the tough realities of
life, averting or confronting trouble, sorrow,
need and sickness. What we find is not an
unremittingly solemn response, still less a
single strategy for dealing with such realities
The theme is universal, it can be traced in one
degree or another in all the galleries of the
British Museum. This is excellent anthro-
pology.
Yet at the same time, apparently, the British
Museums administration has decided to move
the Asian and European collections and their
curators from the Department of Ethnography
to the Departments of Asia and of Prehistory
and Europe respectively. The remaining sec-
tions of the Department would become the
Department of Africa, Oceania and the
Americas. These changes would cut the heart
out of the Department of Ethnography, and
eliminate the word ethnography from the
Museums vocabulary at the very time, ironi-
cally, when so many of its newly sumptuous
and much thronged galleries are rich (no other
word will suffice) with ethnographic displays;
and when, incidentally, museum ethnography is
thriving at numerous other major museums in
Britain (including at one capital city and at least
three universities), where it is regarded as a
holistic discipline.
This action is being taken, apparently, despite
the concerns of many members of staff within
the Museums Ethnography Department, and
notwithstanding the prominence achieved by its
displays and the emphasis on the importance of
the Departments new Centre for Anthropology
as a public face for the discipline. Fortunately
the Centre is to remain, but aside from its study
and library facilities (in the latter of which, of
course, the members of the RAI retain a vested,
long-standing interest), no funding or organiza-
tional structures appear to be in place to support
any wider role.
The Department of Ethnography has existed
as an independent department only since 1945.
Previously, although the British Museum had
included artificial curiosities in its collection
since its foundation, ethnography as such had
been only a section of a sequence of depart-
ments, including the vast Department of British
and Medieval Antiquities. Ironically, it is to one
of the successors of this latter that the European
section of the Department of Ethnography is to
be attached.
The Ethnography Department returned not
period of isolation behind Piccadilly, where
nonetheless it had much more space than previ-
ously and mounted admirable displays (as the
Museum of Mankind, 1970-97). Now, within its
ancestral setting, it has demonstrated very
quickly its research and display abilities. These
achievements make the plan to dismember it
even more deplorable.
This decision is inimical not only to the pro-
fessed vision of the director for the British
Museums world-view, but also to the well-
being of the entire anthropological profession.
Dr MacGregor has in effect offered an anthro-
pological perspective towards the British
Museum and its collections as a whole, but this
act of dismemberment would seriously curtail
the scope of the team of curators which has
helped to generate this perspective.
To create three sub-departments, geographi-
cally defined, and to hive off Asia and Europe,
is to deprive the Ethnography Department of its
unique world-view, by definition one not shared
by, for example, the disciplines of archaeology
and art history as they are at present constituted
within the Museum. It is an administratively
generated change, inviting the charge that the
concept of the Savage, noble or not, has been
readmitted to the British Museum from these
lower world areas. Such a geographical
emphasis, as distinct from a unified cultural
one, not only dismembers anthropology. It also
facilitates, if only in the long term, the possi-
bility of a takeover of the core activities of these
three sub-departments by, for example, special-
ists in archaeology, art history and documentary
history, and the lessening of the role of anthro-
pology itself.
Peter Gathercole
Darwin College, Cambridge
p.gathercole@virgin.net
This comment has benefited from input by six anonymous
referees, to whom my thanks are due.
Enthusiasm for strangeness is inseparable from
the comparative approach to cultures to which
both anthropology and the British Museum owe
their origins in the mid-18th century. For many
decades, academic anthropology integrated data
and theory about the human condition more
effectively than museum ethnography, which in
confining itself to tribal art and material culture
more or less monopolized these fields. In this
sense, museums and anthropology became mar-
ginal to each other. Over the last 20-30 years,
however, new interest in material culture and
shifts in museum practice have transformed this
situation. Within the British Museum, anthro-
pology has brighter prospects than ever.
Much was achieved in the former Museum of
Mankind at Burlington Gardens, but with the
return of the Ethnography Department to the
Bloomsbury site, the British Museum itself
becomes the real museum of mankind. The
anthropologically-informed vision which the
BM has now adopted that of a museum of the
world and for the world is the best possible
compliment to the anthropologists on its staff,
and a green light for our work. Far from closing
down, things are opening up, including opportu-
nities for anthropological curators as vacancies
23
arise elsewhere in the museum. On our agenda
are new and increasingly collaborative approa-
ches to research, display and other activities
across the institution and understandably a
reorientation for curators, as much for anthropo-
logists as for those from other disciplines.
This reorientation has already begun, espe-
cially with the Wellcome Trust Gallery the
Museums first large permanent gallery with a
thematic content and with the new Centre for
Anthropology (CfA), where a programme of
regular seminars begins in the autumn, and
which importantly belongs to the BM as a
whole, not just to one department. As well as
welcoming readers and enquirers about the col-
lections, the CfA will encourage and co-ordi-
nate anthropological work across the BM and in
collaboration with colleagues outside it. The
CfA will supply a disciplinary focus for BM
anthropologists, wherever based, and will begin
to link the subject to a vast and varied public.
Especially in terms of public recognition, the
term ethnography is unnecessary when
anthropology better defines what we do.
Doing anthropology in the BM cannot only
mean working on what are normally called
ethnographic collections, any more than anthro-
pology itself is still shackled to the exotic. But
this doesnt mean that such collections are no
longer important: on the contrary, it is precisely
because of the wider contexts in which they can
be understood, and to which in turn they can
contribute understanding, that they deserve the
higher profile to which they can now aspire. It
is increasingly appreciated that a museum of the
whole world cannot restrict itself to the classical
Mediterranean or civilizations or literate or
sedentary societies, or even, for that matter, to
objects divorced from the ideas and activities of
those who made them.
As the BMs 250th-anniversary exhibition
showed last year, comparing objects cross-cul-
turally can highlight neglected meanings and
expand the range of questions which collections
might address. The Museum of the Mind: Art
and memory in world cultures, curated by John
Mack, drew on material from all parts of the
BM, and, like the Wellcome Trust Gallery,
showed the potential of putting anthropology to
the fore. You can of course compare collections
without combining them, but theres nothing
like juxtaposing displayed objects to convey
insights to others. The immediate point of trans-
ferring collections from one department to
another is neither perversity nor administrative
tidiness, but a desire to provoke new ideas and
give them prompt public expression in display.
In these circumstances, if sharpening and
enlarging our own understanding of culture and
cultures, and sharing this with our millions of
visitors every year, isnt a golden opportunity
for anthropology then I dont know what is.
Ethnography is not alone in being reorgan-
ized geographically: recently four other depart-
ments have been combined into two, one each
for Europe and Asia. But in the light of a new
vision for the BM as a whole, policies for more
collaborative research, intelligible galleries and
accessible collections, the return of anthropolo-
gists from the former Museum of Mankind, and
the creation of the Centre for Anthropology, the
precise configuration of curatorial departments
is in any case much less significant than it
might have been in the past. Reallocate Asian
and European ethnography from the
Ethnography Department and you are of course
left with a tripartite Africa/Americas/Oceania
department, but over the next few years each of
these sections will have an important role in the
BM, which will inevitably raise its profile. No
configuration of departments is set in stone, but
at the moment none of the African, American
and Oceanic sections would be viable on its
own. It is this, not some unworthy concession to
primitivism, which explains the composition
of the new department. Is anyone claiming that
anthropologists in other museums have worked
less effectively through being in similarly
named departments? Some concern about the
name is understandable; beyond that, its a dis-
traction. What matters now is that we are
invited to develop and apply our insights in
more parts of the Museum than we ever got to
in the past to make a real difference.
In short, to describe the transfer of its Asian
and European sections to other parts of the
British Museum as dismembering or cutting
the heart out of the (soon to be former)
Department of Ethnography is inaccurate. As
one of those transferring and with due apolo-
gies to T.H. Huxley if I had to choose
between being a severed limb and a misin-
formed doomsayer, then I would unhesitat-
ingly choose the former. !
Brian Durrans
Acting Keeper, Department of Ethnography,
British Museum
bdurrans@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk

from the archives

A FLOATING MUSEUM OF MANKIND?
At the Council meeting of the Ethnological Society held on 8 January 1851
a letter from George Catlin was read, introducing his idea of purchasing the
SS Great Britain and converting it into a floating Museum of Mankind.
Catlin (1796-1872) was an American painter of native Americans who had
become involved in an unsuccessful project on Texas colonization the pre-
vious year. The SS Great Britain, a ship so large that, according to Newton's
calculations of the length of a cubit, she outdid Noah's ark in size, had been
launched in 1843, but had run aground in Northern Ireland in 1846 and
damaged her engines. She was, at the time this letter was read, up for sale.
It will be seen from Council's report on Catlin's scheme that it was taken
seriously and judged to be an excellent idea. Only the sheer size of the
financial outlay required prevented the Society from becoming involved.
The Museum was to contain living examples of the varieties of mankind;
perusal of the minutes of the Society during this period reveals that exhibi-
tions of native people were very popular at the time, and attendance at
meetings increased enormously when such individuals were presented for
examination: in 1851-52 Chinese, Kaffirs, Polynesians and Esquimaux enterprise.
were all brought to the London rooms of the Society. Their thoughts and
feelings on the matter are not recorded.
In the event, George Catlin's dealings brought him to bankruptcy in 1852,
but he then set off on an exploration of South America. The SS Great
Britain was sold at a knock-down price to Gibbs Bright & Co of Liverpool,
and was reborn as a famous carrier of emigrants to Australia. The
Ethnological Society continued to prosper and eventually merged with the
Anthropological Society to become the Anthropological Institute in 1871. !
Sarah Walpole,
Archivist, RAI, archives@therai.org.uk
ETHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON
Minutes of the meeting of Wednesday 12th March 1851
Item 7, ff. 80-1
Resolved
That the following be the Report on Mr Catlin's scheme.
'At the meeting held on the 12 Feb. Mr Catlin's proposal for the establishment of
a Museum of Mankind was read; on which a conversation ensued, when it was deter-
mined that the Council should take the subject into consideration and report upon it
at the next meeting on the 19th March.
Mr Catlin proposes to purchase the Great Britain steam ship and to convert her into
a floating Museum in order to visit various seaports in Europe and America for its
exhibition. The Museum will contain
1. Specimens of Varieties of Man.
2. Specimens of the arts, implements, weapons, &c. of various tribes of mankind.
And thus together to form a museum illustrative of the Natural History of Man.
And under certain circumstances Mr Catlin proposes to carry passengers and
freight, so as to aid in obtaining a remunerative profit on the Capital embarked in the
The Council are convinced that the formation of such a Museum would be of great
advantage to Ethnology. And the Council deem Mr Catlin to be eminently qualified
to carry so comprehensive a design into effect. But considering the whole scheme in
its details, and the large outlay (for 60,000 is required to start with) the Council
deem it to be less adapted for Scientific patronage than for that of the Mercantile
Capitalist, on whom the Council thinks it must depend for a successful issue.
Under any circumstances the Council trust that Mr Catlin's present valuable
collection will not be lost to the Country, but will find its way to the Ethnological
department of the British Museum.

24 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 20 NO 4, AUGUST 2004