OBJECTS AND WORDS: WRITING ON, AROUND, AND ABOUT THINGS—AN

INTRODUCTION
Author(s): JEREMY COOTE
Source: Journal of Museum Ethnography , 2012, No. 25, Objects and Words: Writing
On, Around, and About Things Papers from the Annual Conference of the Museum
Ethnographers Group Held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 14-15
April 2011 (2012), pp. 3-18
Published by: Museum Ethnographers Group

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Journal of Museum Ethnography , no. 25 (2012), pp. 3-18
© Museum Ethnographers Group 2012

OBJECTS AND WORDS:

WRITING ON, AROUND, AND ABOUT THINGS-
AN INTRODUCTION

JEREMY COOTE

Background

The Museum Ethnographers Group's annual conference for 2011 - 'Objects

and Words: Writing On, Around, and About Things' - was held at the University
of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum on 14-15 April. The original intention had
been to hold the conference (on a different topic) at the British Museum, but
when after protracted negotiations this proved logistically difficult (i.e. too
expensive), Alison Petch and I volunteered to step in and offer the Pitt Rivers
Museum as a venue. The 2008 conference had also been hosted by the Pitt
Rivers Museum (see JME, no. 22 (December 2009)), so we knew what we were
letting ourselves in for, as did our institutional colleagues - who were, as always,
supportive to us and welcoming to the sixty or so members who attended.
Unlike the theme of the 2008 conference, which emerged from discussions
the organizers had had around a particular Pitt Rivers Museum research
project, the theme of the 2011 conference did not arise from any particular
Pitt Rivers activity. Rather, it grew out of discussions at 'Making Things', the
2010 conference held at the Museum of English Rural Life at the University
of Reading (see JME , no. 24 (2011)). Looking back on it now, the starting
point was the conference's opening paper in which glass artist Jeffrey Sarmiento
presented examples of his recent work, in which he had embedded in glass
sculptures copies of inscriptions and other writings relating to objects in the
collections of Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens. For example, his
glass sculpture Ossify (2009; see Sarmiento 2011: 69, Fig. 6), in the form of
a particular Maori paddle in Sunderland's collection, incorporates embedded
graphics comprising a portrait of the Sunderland collector Edward Backhouse,
along with a drawing of the paddle's manata motif, and an extract from a local
newspaper about the opening of the museum in 1879 (ibid.: 70-71). Together
with Chris Wingfield's paper 'Making Museum Objects: The Archaeology and
Anthropology of Curatorial Practice',1 and Jenny Walkate's 'work-in-progress'
presentation on curators' daybooks 'Paper Identities' (see Walklate 2011a),
Sarmiento's presentation kick-started a discussion, which continued throughout

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Jeremy Coote

the conference, about the power of words and the fascination they have for
museum curators (and others), a discussion that culminated in a debate in the
final session between proponents of the view that the main purpose of paying
close attention to inscriptions, labels, and the like is for the evidence they provide
concerning original provenance and proponents of the view that their main
interest is for the evidence they provide of curatorial practice and museum
history. These opposing positions were not held with complete seriousness, as
both sides fully recognized the value of the other's position, but the polarized
discussion helped to bring to the fore aspects of the fascination that 'writing
on, around, and about things' has for museum curators and researchers in
general - and for museum ethnographers in particular.
Thus, when it came to choosing a theme for 201 1, some of us who had been
involved in the final discussion at Reading thought the Oxford conference would
provide a good opportunity to revisit that debate and use it as a launchpad for
a wider discussion. Our aim was never to have a tightly focused discussion,
but to use the general theme of 'objects and words' to see what work is being
done in the general area throughout the discipline. As usual, far more papers
were proposed than could be accommodated, and many more were given at the
conference than could be published here.2 Moreover, two of the presenters who
gave papers in the traditional 'work-in-progress' session (Tabitha Cadbury and
Caroline Cornish) also touched on the main conference theme and versions of
their contributions are also published below in the section devoted to 'Articles,
Research Notes, and Reports'. Before introducing the conference papers that
are published here, however, I want to draw on the opening presentation I
gave at the conference to reflect a little on objects and words at the Pitt Rivers
Museum.

Objects and Words in the Pitt Rivers Museum

Inscriptions, labels, inventories, registers, daybooks, letters, lists, catalogue

databases, captions, text-panels, notes, newspaper clippings, ephemera, form
journals, diaries, notebooks, lectures, conversations, emails, articles, books
libraries, websites. . .
The objects we curate, research, loan, conserve, display, and publish
are surrounded by words; indeed, it sometimes seems that words constitu
an impenetrable barrier between us and the things themselves. We have a
witnessed museum visitors spending longer reading labels than looking at
objects, and we all know of special exhibitions and new galleries that offer more
interpretation than objects to be interpreted. Moreover, many of us spend t
vast majority of our working days at our desks reading and writing words on ou
computers. Given how much time and effort we devote to thinking about an
honing our words, it is clearly worthwhile for us to spend some time reflecting

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 Objects andWords:An Introduction

on 'words and objects'. In contemplating the chosen theme in the run-up to the
conference, a few personal thoughts about the Pitt Rivers Museum and some
of the words on, around, and about things I had recently had occasion to work
with came to mind. As with the original presentation on which this section is
based, the thoughts and objects I discuss briefly here are offered as stimulations
to further thought rather than with any particular conclusions in mind.
Famously, the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum is overflowing
with objects, any one of which could be chosen as the starting point for a
discussion of objects and words. Moreover, the museum holds extensive
manuscript collections and a library, together comprising more words than
anyone could read in a lifetime. Perhaps the place to start, however, is with the
displays themselves and the words they contain.3
For a while, in the 1970s and 1980s, Museum staff mounting new displays
had taken to removing the historic metal-edged handwritten labels and replacing
them with printed ones on card. Since the 1 990s, this practice has been amended
so that the old labels are retained (except in rare cases, where the wording
they contain is too misleading or potentially offensive), but supplemented with
new labels bearing up-to-date information. Indeed, 'supplemented' is a good
word to describe what has been going on at the museum in recent years. In the
many refurbishments and redisplays that have been carried out, and even in
the completely new displays that have been mounted, the aims have been: (1)
to maintain the primary organization by type rather than geographical-cum-
cultural origin; (2) to maintain the high density of objects; and (3) to limit the
amount of additional, contextualizating information to what can be provided
without interfering with the number of objects to be displayed or getting in
their way. In this way, the museum's special atmosphere - in which fear, awe,
laughter, and puzzlement, inspired by the objects themselves, all have a place -
has been maintained,
In other words, the objective is to let the objects do the work, to let them 'speak
for themselves' as much as possible. To do this, however, is not to throw together
a random collection of objects and let them fend as best they might. They are
selected to fit together physically, visually, conceptually, and intellectually. They
are also introduced to the visitor. Since 2000, this has been done in a number
of ways: first, in the displays themselves, through the installation of case-
headers and brief introductory texts, providing the visitor with a brief account
of the nature of the display and about one or two objects in it, along with the
occasional 'field' photograph from the museum's own collections illustrating
the making or use of an object in situ; secondly, outside the displays, through
the development of audio tours and themed fact-sheets providing an overview
of the museum and its displays and detailed accounts of selected individual
objects; and thirdly, beyond the museum itself, through the provision online of
an enormous variety of resources ranging from publicly accessible versions of
the museum's databases through to introductory guides, virtual collections, and

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Jeremy Coote

Figure l.Image of'a selection of the museum's historic handwritten labels'; from a photograph
taken for the museum by Malcolm Osman in the early 1990s. Originally used for a postcard
(which continues to be one of the museum's best-selling range), the image has been reproduced
a number of times in museum publications (e.g. PRM 2009:14) and currently appears among
the key images in the banner on the museum's website. Courtesy and copyright , Pitt Rivers
Museum, University of Oxford.

sub-sites devoted to the museum's raft of externally funded research projects in

which staff work with source communities, researchers, and other stakeholders
around the world.

What makes all this work hang together is that it has been developed in direct
response to the museum's collections and its displays, which have come over
time to be so widely celebrated. The latter have not remained unchanged and
unaffected - indeed they have been much changed and heavily affected, though
most visitors may not realise it - but the aim throughout has been to maintain
the feel of the museum as a place in which visitors and objects can meet each
other 'face to face' and, after a brief introduction, can be left to get on with it.
For those who want guidance, and in a place as overwhelmingly full as the Pitt
Rivers there are always going to be some, there are guidebooks, information
sheets, trails, audio guides, and online resources. For those who feel no need
for such guidance, the museum remains as undidactic as ever. The possibilities
for direct engagement with objects thus remain undiminished and the objects
continue to speak for themselves.

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 Objects and Words: An Introduction

Figure 2. A drawer in the collections office at the Pitt Rivers Museum filled with old and new
labels, removed from objects and old displays, awaiting processing; from a photograph taken for
the museum by Madeleine Ding in April 2012. Courtesy and copyright, Pitt Rivers Museum,
University of Oxford.

Ironically, however, for a museum that prides itself on putting the objects
first, the Pitt Rivers is also famous for its labels. The museum itself recognizes
this and promotes it. On the 'Introduction to the Displays' section of the website,
visitors are told, 'If you look carefully you will see that actually a great deal
of information is provided about individual objects. The small labels, many of
them hand printed by the first Curator, are very revealing'.4 Indeed, for many
years now the museum shop has sold a postcard featuring 'a selection of the
Museum's historic handwritten labels' (Figure 1). As mentioned above, for a
while old labels were removed from objects being newly displayed or redisplayed,
a practice that was reversed in the 1990s. Being good museum people, however,
those who removed the old labels could not bring themselves to dispose of
them, so they survive - along with an 'archive' of other exhibition labels - in a
drawer in the collections office (Figure 2). As such, they have become objects
themselves, that await if not accessioning then at least processing into the
museum's documentation system.
The first actual objects that came to mind when I was preparing to speak at
the conference were the two brass patus the museum holds from the forty that

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Jeremy Coote

Figure 3. Two of the forty brass patus made for Joseph Banks at the foundry of Eleanor Gyles
and engraved at the workshop of Thomas Orpin in 1 772; 365 and 363 mm long; Pitt Rivers
Museum, University of Oxford: top, donated by Royal Society (1932.86.1); bottom, founding
collection (PRM 1 884. 1 2. 280); from a photograph taken for the museum by Malcolm Osman.
Courtesy and copyright, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

Joseph Banks had made to take with him on what we now refer to as James
Cook's second famous voyage of discovery (Figure 3). 5 In a presentation at
MEG's 2007 conference at the National Maritime Museum I referred to the
engraving on the patus as serving for museum ethnographers 'as a sort of
indelible label' (Coote 2008: 61). I cannot now remember quite how seriously
I meant that, but it is undoubtedly the case that the engraving transforms the
object, making manifest the relationship between it and the person responsible
for its creation, in a similar way to an artist's signature on a painting. Looked at
another way, the object brings with it its own documentation, or at least enough
to link it to the paper documentation that exists.
In other cases, objects have entered the museum with labels that bear witness
to their later history, though leaving us ignorant of their original makers and
users. An intriguing example is provided by the Middle Palaeolithic bout coupé
handaxe illustrated here in Figures 4 and 5. No record for this object existed at
the museum until I created one in October 2010. What is known is that some
time before 1981 the object had become part of the teaching collection held
the Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre, which was associated
with the Pitt Rivers Museum from 1975 to 2003. On the retirement of the
centre's director Derek Roe in September 2003, this teaching collection was
integrated physically into the museum's collections. Seven years later, this object

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 Objects and Words: An Introduction

Figure 4. Middle Palaeolithic handaxe of bout coupé type, from

( Whitehiir near Thetford , Norfolk; 1 00 mm long, 74 mm wide;
Pitt Rivers Museum , University of Oxford , 2010.65.1; from a
photograph taken for the museum by Malcolm Osman. Courtesy
and copyright , Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

was 'found unentered' and formally accessioned as 2010.65.1. What fascinated

me about it then, and continues to intrigue me today, is that its later history,
from the moment it was found by Henry Trigg (formerly Prigg) in 1865, at
a place near Thetford in Norfolk he called 'Whitehall'., until (and including)
its accessioning at the Pitt Rivers Museum, is recorded on the object itself.
It has not yet been possible to identity the particular significance of all the
labels it bears, but two in particular are worth noting. The large stuck-on label
inscribed 'FIGURED Evans ASI f 432' records the fact that it was illustrated in
1872 as Figure 432 in John Evans's The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons and
Ornaments of Great Britain , where it was also briefly discussed:

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Jeremy Coote

Figure 5. The other face of the handaxe illustrated in Figure 4;

Pitt Rivers Museum , University of Oxford , 2010.65.1 ; from a
photograph taken for the museum by Malcolm Osman. Courtesy
and copyright , Pitt Rivers Museum , University of Oxford.

Mr. Prigg records having obtained three flint implements from this place [Whitehill] ,
one of which, at present in the Blackmore Museum at Salisbury, is engraved as Fig.
432. Its surface has become white and decomposed, and is partially covered by an
incrustation of carbonate of lime. A part of the edge, towards the point, on the right
side of the figure, appears worn away by use. (Evans 1872: 500; see also Evans 1897:
556)

We can also trace the origins of the stuck-on printed number '20' to the
Blackmore Museum at Salisbury, for in his Flint Chips , the then honorary
curator of the museum Edward T. Stevens records the contents of Case Al 4
and notes: 'No. 20, from White Hill, Thetf ord, is a remarkable specimen' (see

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 Objects and Words: An Introduction

Figure 6. Maori fish-hook; 180 mm long (excluding cord); acquired by Joseph Banks in Te
Aoetearoa / New Zealand during James Cook's first famous Pacific voyage, 1 7 68-71; given
by Banks to Christ Church, Oxford by 16 January 1 7 7 3; transfer red on loan to the University
Museum, Oxford in 1860; 'incorporated' into the Pitt Rivers collection in 1887, where it
was misidentified as Hawaiian; Christ Church collection, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of
Oxford, 1887.1 .379;from a photograph taken for the museum by Malcolm Osman. Courtesy
and copyright, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

Stevens 1870: 45). Having no expertise with Palaeolithic handaxes, there is a

sense in which I do not even see this object as an axe at all; what I see when I
look at it is a much-used specimen on which curators, scholars, and researchers
have - deliberately or accidentally - left traces of their engagements.
Having begun with two objects made for Joseph Banks, I turn now to a
Maori fish-hook collected by him on Cook's first voyage to the South Seas
(Figure 6). When it entered the Pitt Rivers Museum's collections in 1887 all
information about its origins had been lost and it was provenanced - presumably
on stylistic grounds - to what were then known as the Sandwich Islands, that
is Hawai'i; 'Sandwich Ids' being written on to the object itself (see Figure 7).
Once I was able to establish that the fish-hook was part of a small collection
given by Banks to his old college Christ Church before 16 January 1773 after
Cook's first voyage (see Coote 2004a, 2004b), a Hawaiian provenance was

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Jeremy Coote

Figure 7. Detailed view of the inscriptions on the Maori fish-hook illustrated in Figure 7;
Christ Church collection, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1887.1.379; from a
photograph taken for the museum by Malcolm Osman. Courtesy and copyright, Pitt Rivers
Museum, University of Oxford.

out of the question as Cook did not 'discover' Hawai'i until 1778, on his third
voyage. Further stylistic comparisons suggested a Maori provenance and closer
examination revealed that the plant material used to make the snood was almost
certainly from the flax-like plant harakeke ( Phormium tenax ), which is unique to
New Zealand and thus - despite being a type of lily - known as 'New Zealand
flax'. Moreover, it appears quite possible that the fibre used to lash the bone
point to the hook has been made from kiekie ( Freycinetia banksii ), another native
New Zealand plant.
However, the object as presently constituted is not only a Maori fish-hook, it
is also a museum specimen of which the inscription is a 'permanent' component.
As a historically minded curator I find labels and inscriptions intrinsically
interesting, but not as necessarily expressing any sort of truth. Rather, I regard
them as constituting and providing clues, which may be false as well as true, no
more reliable than any other words, which may constitute fictions, errors, and
lies as often as facts. I should hope that most of my colleagues and most visitors
to the museum also treat words with caution as well as respect.6 On occasion,
however, the power of words inscribed on to objects seems to be overpowering.
Thus, on a research visit to the museum in 2009, a researcher from the Museum
of New Zealand Te PapaTongarewa, Chris Paulin, was led by the inscription -
what he calls the 'old ink writing directly on the wooden shank' (Paulin 2010:
68) - to 'see' the lashing as sennit, by which he means coconut-husk fibre,
and to argue that my provenancing of the hook to New Zealand - where the

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 Objects andWords:An Introduction

coconut palm does not grow - was thus incorrect. Seemingly, the power of the
inscription was so strong that he was led to see sennit where none existed and
to miss the presence of both harakeke and kiekie.1 As a major reason for Paulin's
project was to examine the earliest attested examples of Maori fish-hooks in
museum collections, of which this is one, this was an unfortunate outcome.
What seems to have happened is that Paulin has taken the writing on the object
as being integral to it and as constituting an essential truth about it. In this case,
my nineteenth-century predecessor's action of inscribing what he believed to
be true about the object on to its surface has interfered with the fish-hook's
ability - in this case through the materials out of which it is made - to speak for
itself.

Old, New, Collectors, Curators

Like the objects discussed briefly above, the papers that follow might best be
left to speak for themselves. However, a few words of introduction are in order.
The four main conference sessions were entitled 'Old Words', 'Collectors'
Words', 'Curators' Words', and 'New Words', but most of the presentations
could easily have been assigned to more than one session. Here, therefore, I
take the papers one by one on their own terms, rather than attempting to give
an overall account of the conference.7
As museum artefacts, the South African rock art panels discussed by
Patricia Davison are well provenanced. As she documents, it is known who
cut the famous Linton panels from the solid rock, precisely when they arrived
at the South African Museum, and what has been written about them - 'the
shifting interpretations' - ever since. As Davison demonstrates, however, it is
only because of the surviving words of /Xam-speakers recorded in the late
nineteenth century by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd that it has been possible
for researcher David Lewis-Williams and others to provide a meaningful
interpretation of the art that is embedded in indigenous discourse rather than in
theoretical assumptions. In this example, it is the survival of the words of a few,
late-nineteenth-century survivors of a disappearing culture that have enabled
the museum objects to be treated with 'historical imagination and respect for
the artists and their beliefs'.
The Australian Aboriginal objects known as toas that Philip Jones discusses
make little if any sense without the associated words of J. G. Reuther, the
missionary who 'collected' them and, Jones argues, created the context in which
they were made. To reach this understanding, Jones has had to deconstruct the
words of previous researchers and curators - and to 'deconstruct' the objects
themselves through X-rays and CAT-scans - and re-examine the objects as
products of the words of the missionary and his associates rather than as the
straightforwardly Australian Aboriginal objects they were once thought to be.

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Jeremy Coote

As Jones puts it, 'Reuther's passion for words, names, and etymology probably
provoked the toas into existence'.
Sally Ayres's paper illustrates the sort of 'detective' work that enables
researchers to establish the identity of the donor of an unprovenanced collection.
In this case, Ayres has been able to demonstrate from the original donor's
handwriting that a collection from Congo that formed part of the Folklore
Society collection held in Cambridge from 1910 to 1965 and since then at the
Pitt Rivers Museum was collected by Richard Dennett, who is already known to
be a source of related material at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter.
In this case, writing itself has enabled the collection to be properly provenanced
and the objects given additional identity and research value as part of a wider,
well-known corpus. No doubt these objects will now be subjected to additional
words as they attract further research interest.
In Katy Barrett's paper, the focus is not on the objects themselves - coins
and medals in the eighteenth-century collections of George III and Sara Sophia
Banks at the British Museum - but on the thinking behind them, how this was
manifested in their original registers, and how this can be accommodated in a
modern computer database. Given how much time many of us spend inputting
into and interrogating databases, Barrett's discussion provides a valuable case
study for thinking about the relationship between objects and the electronic
structures through which they are now presented to the world and given identity.
Seeing an object 'through' a computer screen can never match seeing it in its
'original' cabinet, but parallel structures can be built that enable some of the
object's original organizational locus to be appreciated.
In her paper, Françoise Lauwaert takes us into the world of contemporary
Chinese museums. Her focus is on writing, not as script or literature but as
calligraphy - the art of brush. After outlining the changes that have occurred
recently in Chinese museums, she discusses the continuing tensions between
artistic and documentary values in the presentation of calligraphic works in
museums and galleries, illustrating the difficulties involved in making an elite
and complex word-based art form accessible to a wider - and foreign - public.
Artist Alana Jelínek's starting point is a collection of Fijian 'cannibal forks'
that she first saw in a decontextualized context in her office at the University
of Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Rather than, as a
museum ethnographer might, seeking understanding through the museum's
records and the related anthropological and historical literature, Jelinek sought
understanding through the words of her colleagues. As she explains, what
she discovered was not the 'meaning' of the forks but 'a strangely wide range
of interpretations'. Rather than attempting to resolve the contradictions she
recorded, she chose to present them in an installation in the museum. Lacking
curatorial authority, words seem here to confirm the museum as a contradictory
institution, rather than one where words are precise tools of description,
classification, and communication. In the same way that Jelínek's installation

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 Objects andWords:An Introduction

made for uncomfortable viewing, so her paper makes for uncomfortable

reading, casting doubt on the status of the words that wash around the objects
in our museums.
The final contributor, Jenny Walklate, draws on a wide range of theoretical
writings to explore documentary practice and illuminate some of the unspoken
assumptions of museum curation. At a time of swift technological change,
she argues, it is important to rethink the complexities of documents and to
encourage institutional self-reflexivity. In a rich and thought-provoking
discussion, she draws attention to how words are socially constructed and to
the 'difficult relationships' between objects and documents: 'museums must not
identify the document surrounding an object too much with the object itself'.

Conclusion

Given the open-ended nature of the topic and the wide range of examples and
approaches of the presenters, it is not surprising that no particular conclusions
were reached. What was clear was that those attending had been intrigued,
entertained, and enlightened by the stories told and the points argued - by the
words of the speakers and the discussants. Certainly, I was inspired to continue
to investigate and reflect further on the words my predecessors have used and
those I use myself, and I trust that the papers that follow will inspire further work
on 'objects and words' and on 'writing on, around, and about things'. Clearly,
museum ethnographers will never run out of unprovenanced collections to
investigate, interpretations to revise, meanings to uncover, cataloguing projects
to construct, as well as artists to disrupt their work, and theoretical reflections
to ponder.
As I see it, the challenge for museum ethnographers is to become more
sophisticated in our understanding of what we are doing, but to do what we do
in simpler and more accessible ways, so that we can, as far as possible, let the
objects speak for themselves. There is always more to learn about how we can
use words to further understanding of the objects we care for, the cultures they
originate from, and the work we do - and about how it may sometimes be best
to use fewer or no words at all. In museums as in life, there are some occasions
when words are not needed, when silence is far more eloquent than chatter.
Seemingly simple, but slippery and recalcitrant - and sometimes wrong, words
need careful handling; just like the objects we try to capture with them.

Acknowledgements

The conference was organized by Alison Petch and myself. I am grateful to Alison for
taking on the logistical burden, and we are both grateful to our colleagues at the Pitt

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Jeremy Coote

Rivers Museum, particularly Faye Belsey, Madeleine Ding, and Cathy Wright, for their
assistance. We are also grateful to all the presenters, to the session chairs, and to Chris
Wingfield and Claire Wintle for leading the final discussion. I am also grateful to Alison
Petch and Chris Wingfield for their comments on a draft of this introduction.

Notes

1. Wingfield's paper has not been published, but a version of it has appeared as
chapter six in his doctoral thesis (Wingfield 2012), and it also provides the basis for
a forthcoming essay about his methodology for engaging with museum labels in an
archaeological way (see Wingfield in press).
2. For various reasons, not all the papers given at the conference are published here.
The full list of papers given, with their original titles, is as follows. Introduction: 'Objects
and Words at the Pitt Rivers Museum', by Jeremy Coote. First session, 'Old Words',
chaired by Helen Hales: 'Hidden "Charms": Writing On, Around, and About a Congo
Collection', by Sally Ayres (Plymouth) ; 'Limitations of Labels: Interpreting Rock Art at
the South African Museum over the Past Century', by Patricia Davison (Cape Town);
and 'Carefully Sculpted Words: The Lake Eyre Toas in their Time and Place', by Philip
Jones (Adelaide). Second session, 'Collectors' Words', chaired by Helen Mears: 'The
Egon von Eickstedt Collection', by Katja Müller (Leipzig); 'From Social to Material to
Spiritual: Objects and Words from the African Collection of the Congregation of the
Holy Spirit (University of Coimbra)', by Ana Rita Amaral (Coimbra); 'Ethnographic
Specimen or Art? Reflections on the Greek Embroidery Collecting and Associated
Writings of R. M. Dawkins and A. J. B. Wace', by Ann French (Manchester); and "'A
Pastor's Cloth": Constructing a Story of Religious Conversion among the Naga of
North-East India through the Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum', by Vibha Joshi
(Göttingen). Third session, 'Curators' Words', chaired by Julia Nicholson: 'Iconoclasm
and the Label', by Chris Wingfield (Birmingham and Oxford); 'Coming Out of the
Eighteenth-Century Cabinet: Documenting Historic Coin Collections in the Modern
Museum', by Katy Barrett (Cambridge); and 'Cataloguing Central Asia: Whose
Fingers are in the Museum Pie?', by KenTeague (Horniman). Fifth session, chaired
by Chantal Knowles: 'Documentation and Interpretation of Meaning in Politically
Charged Collections in Northern Ireland's Museums', by Elizabeth Crooke (Ulster);
'Words, Words, Words...: A Glance at Some Museums in the People's Republic of
China', by Françoise Lauwaert (Brussels); 'Words and Objects: The Many Things
We Know but Don't Communicate', by Alana Jelinek (Cambridge); and 'Unforeseen
Constellations: Documentary Porosity in the Ethnographic Museum', by Jenny
Walklate (Leicester). The sixth session, 'Discussion', was led by Chris Wingfield and
Claire Wintle. The fourth session, of 'work-in-progress / short reports' on a range
of topics not necessarily related to the main conference theme, chaired by Adam
Jaffer, included the following presentations: 'The Charms of Scarborough', byTabitha
Cadbury (Plymouth); 'A "Stories of the World" Project at Brighton Museum & Art
Gallery', by Helen Mears (Brighton); 'Memory Voids and the Transnational Heritage
of Europe', by Chiari De Cesari (Cambridge); 'Forgotten Voices behind the Display
Glass: Formosan Musical Instruments at the Pitt Rivers Museum and Historical
Research on the Music of Taiwan', by TsaiTsan-Huang (Hong Kong); "'Useful

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 Objects and Words: An Introduction

Curious": A Totem Pole at the Kew Timber Museum', by Caroline Cornish (London);
and 'Effective Collections Project in Five Museums in the Eastern Counties', by Len
Pole (Independent).
3. The following paragraphs draw on a recent article in the Interpretation Journal
(Coote 201 1), which I was writing at the same time as preparing my presentation for
the conference.
4. See the section headed 'Type of Display' at <http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/pittrivers.html>.
5. 1 do not attempt to provide fully detailed accounts of the objects discussed here, for
all of which further information is available in the museum's database, available online
at <http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/databases.html>.
6. My colleagues and I regularly receive emails, letters, or notes from visitors who have
spotted errors or omissions in the museum's labels and other texts. Among recent
examples I might mention a visitor politely pointing out that a late-medieval ivory panel
(1884.67.129) on display in the court did not portray, in anticlerical fashion, 'a man
kissing a nun', but a well-known scene in Christian iconography - that is, the meeting
of saints Joachim and Anne at the Golden Gate in Jerusalem. Joachim and Anne were
the parents of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the meeting symbolizes Mary's own
'immaculate' conception.
7. To be fair to Paulin, it is proving extremely difficult to obtain an absolutely positive
identification for the plant materials used to make the hook. Microscopic analysis,
however, confirms the complete absence of sennit and the likely presence of harakeke
and kiekie. Attempts to obtain positive identifications continue. I am grateful to my
colleague Jeremy Uden, Deputy Head of Conservation at the Pitt Rivers Museum, for
his assistance in this matter.
8. For a review of the conference, see Walklate 201 lb.

References

Coote, Jeremy 2004a. 'An Interim Report on a Previously Unknown Collection from
Cook's First Voyage: The Christ Church Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum,
University of Oxford', Journal of Museum Ethnography , no. 16, pp. 1 1 1-21.

Given by Joseph Banks to Christ Church , Oxford after t

Cook Memorial Museum.

pp. 49-68.

for Heritage Interpretation], Vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring), p

Evans, John 1872. The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons a
London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer.

edn, revd), London: Longmans, Green, and Co.

Paulin, Chris D. 2010. 'Mãori Fishhooks in European Mu
13-41.

PRM [Pitt Rivers Museum] 2009. Pitt Rivers Museum: An Introduction , Oxford:
Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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Jeremy Coote

Sarmiento., Jeffrey 2011. 'Ode on a Maori Paddle: Ethno/Graphic Glass Art Practice',
Journal of Museum Ethnography , no. 24 , pp. 58-73.
Stevens, EdwatdT. 1870. Flint Chips: A Guide to Pre-Historic Archaeology as Illustrated by
the Collection in the Blackmore Museum , Salisbury , London: Bell and Daldy.
Walklate, Jenny 2011. Taper Identities: Constructing the Curator in Museum
Documentation', Journal of Museum Ethnography , no. 24, pp. 74-88.

through World Collections: The Museum Ethnog

online at <http://museumethnographersgroup.blog
conference-20 1 1 -objects-and.html> .
Wingfield, Chris 2012. 'The Moving Objects of t
Experiment in Symmetrical Anthropology', Birmi
Ph.D. thesis; available online at <http://etheses.

with Symmetrical Anthropology and the Arc

Harrison, Sarah Byrne, and Anne Clarke (eds), Re
Agency and Ethnographic Collections , Sante Fe: S

About the author

Jeremy Coote is Curator and Joint Head of Collections at the University of Oxford's Pitt
Rivers Museum, where he has worked since 1994. Since 2005 he has also been Editor
of the Journal of Museum Ethnography.

Address for correspondence

Jeremy Coote, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford,
OX1 3PP; [email protected].

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