To collect or not to collect, that is the question: a story about the collections policy at Leiden's Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in the sixties

The sixties were a time of social movements, public debates and changing perspectives. It was the time that in the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde new ideas about its collecting practice came up. But only little is known about the collecting practice and collections policy of the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in the 1960’s. This Master thesis was written to find out what these looked like. Research questions were: was there a collections policy in the sixties in the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde? What did it look like? And is this collections policy reflected in the actual acquisitions, especially from Middle- and South-America? Three methods were used for collecting data: the jaarverslagen (annual reports), correspondence between the museum and the collectors and TMS (The Museum System, the museum’s collections database). A database was set up to combine information from TMS with that of the jaarverslagen. This database showed the total amount of objects given to and collected for and...Show moreThe sixties were a time of social movements, public debates and changing perspectives. It was the time that in the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde new ideas about its collecting practice came up. But only little is known about the collecting practice and collections policy of the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in the 1960’s. This Master thesis was written to find out what these looked like. Research questions were: was there a collections policy in the sixties in the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde? What did it look like? And is this collections policy reflected in the actual acquisitions, especially from Middle- and South-America? Three methods were used for collecting data: the jaarverslagen (annual reports), correspondence between the museum and the collectors and TMS (The Museum System, the museum’s collections database). A database was set up to combine information from TMS with that of the jaarverslagen. This database showed the total amount of objects given to and collected for and by the museum per year. The jaarverslagen, written by director Pott, proved to useful in understanding the difficulties in forming a new collections policy. The jaarverslagen also show the need to collect but this was not always possible due to financial problems. The correspondence between the museum and the collectors gave a good insight in the collecting practice. It can be concluded that there was no actual collections policy present in the sixties. The collecting practice very much depended on personal preferences of the director and the curators. However, there were some common ideas about collecting in the museum. One of them was that objects from ‘unknown’ cultures should be collected but in a way that visitors could identify with them. This can be clearly seen in the Borys Malkin and Luis Laffer collections. Also the idea of ‘saving’ parts of cultures before they disappeared is part of these common ideas. Malkin was one of the collectors that worked with this so-called ‘salvage anthropology’. Pott’s ideas about the collections policy are not very different from the collecting practice. His ideas are clearly visible in the collecting practice and this can lead to the conclusion that Pott was well aware of the difficulties and possibilities of the collecting practice.Show less

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To collect or not to collect, that is the question: a story about the collections policy at Leiden's Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in the sixties