THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES AND SCHOLARLY NETWORKS

Abstract

Items in the anthropology collections of the Horniman Museum in London that originate from those parts of the world which today make up the modern state of Malaysia number approximately 1,200, a relatively small collection built up over a period of about 150 years. In many ways the changing nature of museum collections of ethnographic artefacts reflects the history of the anthropological museum in Britain as well as the changing relationships between Britain and the parts of the world where items have been collected. This article examines the Museum's Malaysian material, whether donated, purchased or collected in the field by curators and considers both how it fitted in with the changing concepts informing museum practice and what it tells us about the views it expresses of ‘other’ cultures in general, and the Malay world in particular.

¹In this article I deal with material originating from those territories that make up present-day Malaysia, which I refer to as the Museum's Malaysian collections henceforth.

Drawing on the Museum's correspondence files, registers and handbooks, as well as the collections themselves, the article seeks to explore how ideas about the Malay world were formed and expressed in the way material was interpreted and displayed. The picture revealed, especially in the early period, is one of a network of British people, chiefly academics, with a shared view of what kinds of material culture from the Malay world should be collected and how that material should be interpreted. Underlying this, however, are suggestions of an increasingly wide range of relationships between people of the Malay world and Britons abroad, embodied in the material which found its way for whatever reason into the cases or storage shelves at the Museum.

Notes

¹In this article I deal with material originating from those territories that make up present-day Malaysia, which I refer to as the Museum's Malaysian collections henceforth.

²As yet no catalogue of the Horniman Museum's Malaysian collections has been published. Enquiries about the contents of the collections should be addressed to the curator.

³This number does not include items in the musical instruments department, which were originally part of the anthropology collections but were listed separately when a distinct section dealing with musical instruments section was established in the 1950s.

⁴Part of the inscription on the plaque situated at the entrance to the Museum.

⁵See Nicky Levell's 2001 interpretation, in which she follows Bennett's argument that museum displays were intended also to elevate working class visitors by instructing them in ideas of progress.

⁶There is a reference to the discovery of implements of Neolithic type such as polished axe-heads in Burma, Cambodia, the Malay Peninsula, Java and Borneo (Harrison 1906: 60).

⁷Roth (1855–1925) had been educated in England and Germany and had worked on the sugar industry in Australia, where he had become interested in local culture. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1882. In 1884, he returned to England and settled in 1888 ‘in business’ at Halifax. From 1890 he was part-time curator at the Bankfield Museum in Halifax.

⁸This information was probably passed to him by Haddon, whose former pupil, Ivor Evans, was shortly to become curator of the Perak Museum on Haddon's recommendation.

⁹Theodore Hubback (1872–1942) was the first Chief Game Warden of the Federated Malay States. He is best known for having lobbied the colonial government for 15 years to establish a national park. In 1938 his efforts resulted in an area being set aside for this purpose and in 1939 it became the King George V National Park. It now forms part of the Malaysian Taman Negara. Noone was a prominent archaeologist who later published on stone implements found in Australia.

¹⁰Bartlett was part of the same colonial community in Sarawak as Charles Hose, with whom Haddon himself had spent several months in Baram district in 1899 following the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits.