Museums

Museums of the late 20th and early 21st centuries are commonly defined as permanent nonprofit institutions that serve society by acquiring, conserving, and displaying material so as to provide the public with opportunities for education and entertainment. Whether dedicated to art, culture, history, or natural history, museums often provide people with their first introduction to the field of anthropology. Although museums have become a focus of debate over who has rights to collect, conserve, study, and display culture in material and other forms, museums continue to serve as important resources for both anthropologists and the public.

The origin of museums lies in collections. The word museum comes from the Greek mouseion, a shrine dedicated to the daughters of Zeus, known as the Muses, who presided over various arts and sciences. In this sense, one of the earliest museums might be the 3rd-century BC Mouseion of Alexandria in Egypt that housed the famed library in addition to [Page 1648]other collections. China might have an even longer history of creating collections, but these were normally private and not open for general study.

Source: © iStockphoto/Mark Owens.

Modern anthropological museums originated during the era of European exploration when explorers, such as Christopher Columbus, and later military leaders, such as Hernando Cortez, collected and shipped finds of potential interest to their royal supporters. This initiated a custom of elites acquiring a “cabinet of curiosities” in which they might display a range of natural and cultural specimens acquired at home and abroad. The Ashmolean Museum of Oxford, based on a cabinet of curiosities, opened in 1683 as the first public museum offering a loosely defined “educational” experience for anyone who paid the admission fee.

During the 18th and early 19th centuries, national museums developed in Europe. Although the museums displayed cultural items, the purposes encompassed variations of nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Christian Thomsen at the National Museum of Denmark created the “three age system” organizing collections by material type—stone, bronze, and iron—to present a unified national history. The Ethnographic Museum of National Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg documented the growing diversity of people within the Russian Empire. The Louvre in France originated in collections nationalized under the French Revolution and the booty of Napoleon's campaigns that it legitimized by stressing public education. The National Museum of Ethnography in Leiden centered on the P. F. B. von Seibold collections acquired during visits to Dutch colonies and arranged according to cultural groupings.

Throughout the 19th century, holders of collections followed the trend set by national museums and transformed cabinets of curiosities into permanent public institutions run by academics for purposes of research and education. Although the field of anthropology was still in its infancy in both Europe and the United States, museums served as incubators of the field before the discipline became firmly established in colleges and universities.

The most common variety of modern museum is that dedicated primarily to collections. Most often, these are housed in special facilities designed especially for the collection and include areas devoted to display as well as extensive areas dedicated for storage, conservation, and research. This variety of museum tends to have the largest and most diverse collections of ethnographic and archaeological materials of interest to anthropologists. Many of the world's most famous museums fall into this category and include museums of the Smithsonian Institution, the British Museum in London, and the Field Museum in Chicago. Most university-run museums, such as those at the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania, are also of this type.

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