Thursday, March 15, 2007

Notes and Queries and the Pitt Rivers Museum

The second a paper in the new issue of Museum Anthropology [30(1)]--just published in AnthroSource--is titled "Notes and Queries and the Pitt Rivers Museum" and it is by Alison Petch, a researcher and the museum registrar at the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University. The abstract for Dr. Petch's paper is as follows:
This article examines the contribution that a major ethnographic museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, has made to the development of anthropology in the United Kingdom, through the prism of a seminal publication, Notes and Queries on Anthropology, which was published in several editions between 1874 and 1951. While Notes and Queries has been of considerable interest to historians of anthropology, its connections to museum anthropology and to material culture studies have, to a large degree, gone unexamined hitherto. [Keywords: Fieldwork, Museum History, History of Anthropology, United Kingdom]
The full paper can be accessed here. Also related is an earlier blog post on the Relational Museum project, which can be found here. My thanks go to Dr. Petch for her valuable and interesting contribution to the journal.