Collecting Cultures

Reviews / Votes

This book provides unique insights into one of the largest and most ambitious expeditions to Aboriginal lands, the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, Australia. The extraordinary ethnological collections from these expeditions, partially housed at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, are still a subject of research, debate, and controversy. The lessons to be learned from this book are both local and global. -- Claire Smith, President, World Archaeological Congress The book is valuable in telling the story behind a collection, a story that might otherwise, as is so often the case, remain obscure to present-day museum goers....the true value of the book, in giving the collection a history which allows the present-day configurations and assemblages of museum objects to the understood....this book is incredibly valuable in providing a rare historical account of such an expedition and a consideration of the afterlives of its collection, including the ongoing significance of its objects to contemporary indigenous people from its source communities. It should be of interest not only to academics and museum professionals, but also, by drawing attention to the histories of ethnographic collections in museums, to the broader museum-going public. This is a significant work of museum historiography. * Conservation and Management Of Arch. Sites, August 2010 *