Anthropological Regionalism at the American Museum of Natural History, 1895–1945
52 Ira Jacknis: ‘America Is Our Field’: Anthropological Regionalism at the American Museum of Natural History, 1895–1945 ‘America Is Our Field’: Anthropological Regionalism at the American Museum of Natural History, 1895–1945 *Ira Jacknis Abstract This article outlines the regional interests and emphases in anthropological collection, research, and display at the American Museum of Natural History, during the first half of the twentieth century. While all parts of the world were eventually represented in the museum’s collections, they came from radically different sources at different times, and for different reasons. Despite his identity as an Americanist, Franz Boas demonstrated a much more ambitious interest in world-wide collecting, especially in East Asia. During the post-Boasian years, after 1905, the Anthropology Department largely continued an Americanist emphasis, but increasingly the museum’s administration encouraged extensive collecting and exhibition for the Old World cultures. For the most part, these collections and exhibits diverged from anthropological concerns, expressing imperialist messages, biological documentation, or artistic display. In thus constituting the ‘stuff’ of an anthropology museum, one can trace the transvaluation of objects, the importance of networks, institutional competition, and the role of disciplinary definitions. Keywords: museum, anthropology, collecting, exhibition, culture areas, American Museum of Natural History Almost by definition, the great metropolitan natural history museums were founded on a problematic relationship to a distant ‘field.’ Wandering through their halls, the visitor is confronted by cultures that are usually far away in space and time.1 As they were developed in the nineteenth century, these natural history museums, parallel to the art museums (Duncan and Wallach 1980), adopted Enlightenment schemes of universal survey.
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