Photography and the comparative method: the construction of an anthropological archive

Photography and thecomparative method:the construction of ananthropological archive

Christopher Mor ton Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

In 1931-2, Henry Balfour, the Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, decidedto create a systematic archive out of the collection of ethnographic photographs that he hadactively collected for the Museum over many years. The result was a series of thematically arrangedboxes intended to form a cross-cultural research resource. The archival groupings formed pose aseries of questions about the legacy of cultural comparativism in the twentieth century as itemerged from Victorian socio-cultural evolutionism and typological classification, and how it hasbeen rethought within a shifting intellectual rationale for the ethnographic museum in more recenttimes. The article both examines the specific genealogy and broader historical contexts for thecomparative method within the Pitt Rivers Museum itself, as well placing it within the context ofother archival projects of the 1930s. Through a comparison with the photograph collection of theWarburg Institute, which was reorganized along similar lines at a similar period, we understandBalfour’s project not simply as a final efflorescence of Victorian museum anthropology, but alsoas part of a wider universalizing archival movement of the inter-war period. The article seeks tounderstand why the archive series Balfour created was not continued by subsequent curators at theMuseum, arguing that the postcolonial period brought with it significant challenges to the identityand role of ethnographic museums, and especially the intellectual underpinnings of culturalcomparativism, and that these challenges were engaged with by reinterpreting arrangement bytype within a general humanist agenda.

This essay explores, through a particular case study, the historical relationship betweenphotography and the comparative method in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropology. In particular, it examines that form of cultural comparativismdeveloped within the ethnographic museum, through an ‘archaeological’ examinationof a single archival box of photographs in the University of Oxford’s Pitt RiversMuseum; a box that contains a variety of photographs brought together in the early1930s as a cross-cultural research resource.1 The underlying assumptions and organi-zational principles of this photographic archive pose a series of questions about thehistorical connections between socio-cultural evolutionism, cultural comparativism,typological classification, and the reinterpretation of the ethnographic museum in thepostcolonial period. Whilst situating the case study within such broad historicalthemes, the essay also seeks to pay attention to the accretions of institutional meaning

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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18, 369-396© Royal Anthropological Institute 2012

that archival activity has brought to collections of photographs over the years (seeEdwards & Hart 2004; Morton 2005; Morton & Edwards 2009; Rose 2000).

The intellectual rationale for cultural comparativism has shifted a great deal withinthe ethnographic museum, and none more so than in the Pitt Rivers Museum, whichhas largely maintained its nineteenth-century arrangement of objects by type.2 Sincethe middle of the twentieth century, the Museum’s comparative arrangement by typehas taken on a new mantle: that of the universal celebration of human problem-solving;or, even further, of human diversity within unity. Where once it served the notion of acultural and technological (and thereby mental) hierarchy from primitive to civilized,the comparative method has been latterly appropriated by a more general humanistagenda, fully exploited by the Museum in its ongoing attempt to find relevance in thecontemporary world. This essay will explore the creation of a comparative archive ofanthropological photographs by the Museum’s first Curator, Henry Balfour (1863-1939), in the early 1930s, and examine the shifting intellectual and institutional contextsthrough which it has gained activation and meaning over time. It is argued that the newdirection which anthropology took in Oxford in the 1930s – signalled in part by theappointment of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown as Professor of Social Anthropology in 1936 –meant that Balfour’s archival project was essentially still-born; subsequent Museumstaff did not add to the expectant gaps within the sequences, and whilst they may haveoccasionally referred to its contents in teaching or research, the academic context forcultural comparativism was to shift considerably in the post-war period. Throughcomparison with a similar archival rearrangement undertaken by Rudolf Wittkowerand Edgar Wind of the Warburg Institute in London in the same period, the argumentis made that Balfour’s project can be understood not simply as the final efflorescence ofVictorian cultural comparativism as applied to a visual resource, but also as part of awider universalizing archival tradition in the early twentieth century that sought toencompass human history and culture intellectually through the accumulation ofvisual data.

Much more than being the realization of a specific set of Victorian ideas aboutcultural development, and thereby somehow metonymic of Victorian anthropologicalscience more generally, the Museum, this article argues, should be re-evaluated as adidactic, transformative, and, above all, politicized space. If in the nineteenth centuryPitt-Rivers3 hoped that by showing the gradual development of human culture hewould help educate the working class and lead them away from revolutionary ideas, inthe early twenty-first century the Museum is arguably closer, in the public interpreta-tion of its displays, to eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas about the psychologicalunity of humankind (Stocking 1987: 17). As will be seen, the photographic archivediscussed in this essay plays a crucial part in, and is deeply inflected by, these shiftinginstitutional contexts. Whilst on one level it remains curiously atrophied, a remnant ofa particular project at a specific point in time, we cannot help but also see such survivalas an archival process in and of itself.

Socio-cultural evolutionism and the MuseumThe Pitt Rivers Museum was built as an adjunct to Oxford University’s Museum ofNatural History to house the ethnographic collection of Augustus Henry Lane FoxPitt-Rivers, given to the University in 1884.4 In Pitt-Rivers’s words, his cross-culturaltypological displays, first developed in 1874 at Bethnal Green Museum (an outpost ofthe South Kensington Museum), ‘were arranged in sequence, so as to trace, as far as

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practicable, the succession of ideas by which minds of men in a primitive conditionof culture have progressed in the development of their arts from the simple to thecomplex, and from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous’ (Lane Fox 1874: xi).Pitt-Rivers’s progressive developmentalism, signalled by this and other statements,was defined in essence in the early 1850s, and hence was easily adapted to the Darwinianrevolution after 1859. ‘Human ideas as represented by the various products of humanindustry’, he wrote, ‘are capable of classification into genera, species and varieties in thesame manner as the products of the vegetable animal kingdoms’ (Lane Fox 1874: xi).Since Darwin had only poorly elaborated on human psychology in his writings, themain source of Pitt-Rivers’s developmentalism was derived from Herbert Spencer’sevolutionary psychology, in particular his book The principles of psychology (1855). AsStocking suggests, it was perhaps because Pitt-Rivers’s main focus was on the develop-ment of material culture, which particularly lent itself to formal comparative treat-ment, that his ideas were more consistent with Darwin’s than some of his socio-culturalevolutionary contemporaries (Stocking 1987: 180). Spencer’s evolutionism was in factformulated quite independently of Darwin’s. In the early nineteenth century, previousEnlightenment ideas about the unity of humankind were gradually being underminedby developing ideas about hereditarian racial differentiation. Emerging out of thisstrand of thinking, Spencer’s work was based on a fundamental analogy between ‘lowtypes of organisms and low types of societies’ (Spencer 1873 [1860]: 400) – an analogythat reached into all realms, especially the psychological and social. Cultural differencesbetween ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ peoples, according to Spencer, could become organicthrough the inheritance of acquired characteristics: ‘[W]e know that there are warlike,peaceful, nomadic, maritime, hunting, commercial races ... which have a more or lessevident relation to habits of life, [and which] have been gradually induced and estab-lished in successive generations’ (Spencer 1855: 573). Spencer provided Pitt-Rivers withthe intellectual framework required to make the necessary links between the develop-ment of material forms and human psychological and social progress. AlthoughSpencer is now chiefly remembered for coining the phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’(1864: 444), Stocking convincingly argues that his influence on nineteenth-centurysocio-cultural evolutionary thinking was ultimately limited by his slowness to apply hisdevelopmentalism systematically to evolutionary sociology, and that when he did,others had mapped the territory before him (Stocking 1987: 137).

The key to Pitt-Rivers’s collection as an educational tool was the visible thesiselaborated through its displays. Rather than being a haphazard collection of curiosities,Pitt-Rivers considered his collection to be the first one to treat culture in a systematicand scientific way, collected and arranged in a comparative manner in order to dem-onstrate the evolutionary development or progression of cultural forms. Whereas,claimed Pitt-Rivers, collections such as the South Kensington Museum (now theVictoria and Albert Museum) and the National Gallery sought to educate solely byimitation and inspiration, his systematic and comparative displays were ‘of greatersociological value’ (Lane Fox 1875: 295). The purpose of the comparative method inPitt-Rivers’s displays was to bring similar types of objects together from differingcultures in order to pose questions, and propose answers, concerning the origins,diffusion, borrowing, and gradual development of material culture, with AustralianAboriginal artefacts frequently appearing as the most primitive ‘because they assimilatemost closely to the natural forms’ (Lane Fox 1875: 301) – a comment that echoes theSpencerian analogy between simple biological and cultural forms.5 But what in fact

Photography and the comparative method 371


were the intellectual roots of the comparative method? The eighteenth century sawvarious attempts to illustrate progressive developmentalism through objects, perhapsthe best known being Hans Sloane’s grouping together of what we would now callethnographic objects so as to trace the ‘progress of nations’.6 But in the early nineteenthcentury, a more important cornerstone was of course the vastly expanded time-depthof human existence on earth than had been allowed within eighteenth-century biblicalanthropology. This new scientific view of an expanded time-depth within humanhistory led to what Tony Bennett has termed the emergence of an ‘archaeological gaze’,characterized by the ‘continuous unfolding of the past into the present’ (2004: 39).Another important development was the idea that age could be thought of in terms ofstructure as well as chronology, allowing for arguments that made connections betweenmaterial homologies and non-material cultural forms (Stocking 1987: 173). This meantthat contemporaneous cultures could simultaneously inhabit different ‘periods’ ofmaterial development, from simple to complex. Where historical evidence was lackingon the question of cultural homologies, the concept of independent invention guar-anteed the processual regularity of the typological series, just as the developmentalstages guaranteed their temporal sequence (see also Stocking 1987: 181).

The cultural comparativism inherent in Pitt-Rivers’s collection was soonrethought and re-displayed, however, when it arrived in Oxford from the South Kens-ington Museum in June 1885. Evidence suggests that its first Curator, Henry Balfour,sought initially to emphasize in the new displays problems of cultural homology,analogy, and diffusion rather than development, and whilst many of Pitt-Rivers’sseries probably remained to some extent, few survived the transfer wholly intact.Partly, this was due to the collection’s disarray on arrival in Oxford, but also becauseBalfour considered the series as starting-points for continuation and elaboration,rather than as complete.7 In reworking Pitt-Rivers’s typological series, Balfour wasquite consciously following what he felt to be Pitt-Rivers’s own views about theprogress of scientific knowledge. Writing to Augustus Franks of the British Museumin 1880, for instance, Pitt-Rivers noted that ‘if my system were accepted by men ofscience it would be continued. If it were not, there would be no object in continuingit. Moreover, views become so much changed as knowledge accumulates that it wouldbe mischievous to hamper the future with the ideas of the present’.8 Certainly a press-ing problem was the large amount of material transferred to the Museum shortlyafter its foundation. In his Annual Report for 1890, for instance, Balfour wrote that‘[t]he frequent arrival of new and important additions, forming links in the series,necessitates constant slight rearrangements, in order to increase the educational valueof the series; so that few of the series can be said to be completed, as their interestand value is constantly increasing’ (1890: 33).

Whilst we now know, owing to detailed research on the Museum’s catalogues, muchabout what the founding collection contained, we know much less about the disposi-tion of Pitt-Rivers’s displays before their arrival in Oxford. This is mostly due to apaucity of visual or archival evidence relating to these early displays.9 What we do knowis that the Museum was intended to be didactic, to demonstrate by the use of objectsand images a series of scientific arguments about human cultural development, overtime and across space. Visitors to the early Pitt Rivers Museum (Fig. 1) encountered aposter near the entrance titled ‘Arrangement and Object of This Collection’, whichclearly set out the didactic aims of the displays.10 This explanatory text, copies of whichstill exist in the Museum’s Manuscript Collections, marked out the Museum’s territory



as, in Pitt-Rivers’s own words, an ‘educational museum’, rather than purely a ‘researchone’ that mostly benefited scholars.

Cultural comparativism and public educationIn his lecture to the Society of Arts in 1891, Pitt-Rivers made it clear that it wasimportant not only that his displays conform to a ‘scientific’ classification, but that theyhelped educate the broader population to accept the existing social order:

The masses are ignorant ... the knowledge they lack is the knowledge of history. This lays them opento the designs of demagogues and agitators, who strive to make them break with the past ... The lawthat Nature makes no jumps, can be taught by the history of mechanical contrivances, in such way asat least to make men cautious how they listen to scatter-brained revolutionary suggestions (Pitt-Rivers1891: 115-16).

That Pitt-Rivers had serious ideas about the social and educational role of his collectionwas demonstrated by its display at the Bethnal Green Museum between 1874 and 1878,in an area of London noted for its poverty. This Museum was a branch of the SouthKensington Museum, consisting of several prefabricated cast-iron structures, left overfrom the International Exhibition of 1862. Far from its later incarnation as a scholarlyOxford museum, the display of Pitt-Rivers’s collection in Bethnal Green is suggestive ofquite a different context, that of progressive Victorian social ideas. Pitt-Rivers wrote:

The working classes have but little time for study; their leisure hours are, always must be, compara-tively brief ... The more intelligent portion of the working classes, though they have but little booklearning, are extremely quick in appreciating all mechanical matters ... because they are trained up tothem; and this is another reason why the importance of the object-lessons that museums are capableof teaching should be well-considered (1891: 116).

Figure 1. Interior view of the Pitt Rivers Museum court, looking east, taken sometime between 1887

and 1895. The explanatory text for visitors is just visible between the arms of the carved figure to left.(Courtesy Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford [1998.267.95.3.].)



In fact, the social and educational potential of museums was accepted by both thepolitical and museum establishments (Coombes 1992). At the annual conference of theMuseums Association in 1902, its President, W.E.B. Priestley, argued vehemently for thepositive social and educational benefits of museums, and in particular for their orga-nization ‘so that the student shall easily grasp and appreciate the whole progress of artfrom the very earliest periods’. Echoing Pitt-Rivers’s own statement that his collectionshowed progress by degree rather than jumps, Priestley’s argument for museums to beorganized according to development was one where the student ‘sees before him theachievements of the past, and realizes that art, like everything else, is only step by step,and all that one can expect to do is to make one step forward’ (Priestley 1902: 10). Andnot only the student; the ‘ordinary passer-by’ would be influenced by such an arrange-ment to ‘consider things in a very much larger way’. This raising of consciousness,Priestley argued, would ‘elevate people above their ordinary matter-of-fact lives, andnot leave them to be tempted by vice and immorality for relaxation’ (1902: 11).

At the turn of the century, new legislation meant that time spent in museums couldcount as time spent in school, but its effectiveness was blunted by the stipulation that‘for a museum visit to be reckoned as school attendance the number of scholars mustnot exceed fifteen’ (Hoyle 1903: 236). As a result of this new law, museums began their‘object lessons’ in earnest. At the Whitechapel Museum, objects ‘were taken out of casesand placed upon tables’ for the children to examine, since it ‘was a working museum –the objects must do their work, and, if they were spoiled, they must find others toreplace them’ (Hall 1903: 238). An ‘object lesson’, argued the Director of the ManchesterMuseum, ‘is a form of science teaching’, and museums were ‘now no longer merelystore-houses of material for investigation by specialists’, but also ‘occupy a neutralterritory, where private school, board school and voluntary school may meet upon acommon ground’ (Hoyle 1903: 229).

The advocation of museums in the late nineteenth century as progressive social andeducational spaces, termed by William Flower ‘the new museum idea’ (1898: 37), washeralded as early as 1864 by the naturalist J. Edward Gray, who argued that publicmuseums had a two-fold purpose: ‘1st, the diffusion of instruction and rational amuse-ment among the mass of the people; and 2nd, to afford the scientific student everypossible means of examining and studying the specimens of which the museum con-sists’ (quoted in Flower 1898: 37). The differing audiences catered for, argued the Editorof the Museums Journal in 1902, meant that ‘museums are nowadays the most demo-cratic and socialistic possessions of the people. All have equal access to them, peer andpeasant receive the same privileges and treatment ... each has a feeling of individualproprietorship’ (Howarth 1902: 76). The display of Pitt-Rivers’s original collection inLondon in the 1870s, after all, had coincided with a period of social and economicdepression and increased unemployment, accompanied by political agitation andunrest (van Keuran 1984: 187). With the rise of socialist ideologies and the subsequentmobilization of a large section of the working class through the Social DemocraticFederation and other socialist organizations, and with support from the liberal middleclass, the museum sector became a target for the early twentieth-century electoralcampaigns of both the Liberals and the Conservatives, who eagerly sought to promotethem as representing and propagating a heady mix of social reform and imperialistsentiment (Coombes 1992: 63-4).

Ironically, although Pitt-Rivers’s collection had started out as an educational tooldirected at a popular city audience, and then as a teaching and research collection



within a major university, his subsequent museum in Farnham, Dorset (also knownas the Pitt-Rivers Museum), was located in a rural area with a small population. Itwas filled with agricultural implements and peasant handicrafts, as well as ethno-graphic artefacts, and explored their historical antecedents around the world. It wasthereby intended to educate a rural population in much the same way as Pitt-Rivers’searlier collection had done among the working classes in London in the 1870s. Toencourage educational visits to his museum, he developed a recreation area on hisestate (the Larmer Grounds), where free entertainment, such as music, took place atweekends. As he wrote,

If no more good came of it than to create other interests, which would draw men’s minds away frompolitics, that greatest of all curses in a country district, good would be done. If only a more scientificknowledge of the arts of life, and of the laws of nature affecting the development of those industriesby which the working classes gain their living, the results would be beneficial (1891: 120).

The development of cultural comparativism in the nineteenth-century ethno-graphic museum was therefore underpinned as much by the notion of the museum asa didactic educational space, and with progressive social ideals, as it was by scholarlytheses about the evolution and diffusion of culture. This is not to say that the overlap-ping of scientific and social ideals was not a prominent characteristic of Victorianrhetoric – it was – but rather that anthropological analyses of museums in this periodoften curiously neglect their wider social contexts, seeing them rather as metonymic ofnineteenth-century science. The crucial area in which the ethnographic museum over-lapped both social and scientific purposes was in its visible presentation of demon-strable theses. In the nineteenth century, walking along an ethnographic gallery was anembodied movement through cultural evolutionary time. In the Museum today, onecan still follow the development of the firearm, a display that partly serves to illustratethe original development of Pitt-Rivers’s ideas on cultural evolution.11

By comparing similar types of objects, the Museum acted as a series of interrelated,tangible diagrams. The diagrammatic nature of Pitt-Rivers’s series was captured in a(yet unlocated) series of thirty-two photographs that he had taken of the South Kens-ington displays before their transfer to Oxford, most of which he also had lithographedfor potential publication.12 Importantly, in the early years, artefacts were frequentlyused in hands-on teaching by Balfour with his students; ‘doing anthropology’ in theMuseum was then both tactile and visual, since ethnographic hypotheses on technol-ogy frequently involved experimentation and replication. But to make the leap fromwriting about culture in a comparative way to actually exhibiting the thesis to a visitingpublic was one underpinned, I would argue, not just by a developing notion of scien-tific anthropology, but by the broader, overlapping, social and educational contextswithin which museums existed.

The Pitt Rivers Museum’s Deed of Gift of 1884 specified two conditions: that thetypological arrangement be retained (albeit with modification as science advanced);and that a lecturer be appointed to work with the collection. Although Edward BurnettTylor was appointed to do just that, it was Henry Balfour who reworked the displays,and began to rethink the principles behind them. Pitt-Rivers, wrote Balfour, did ‘notappear sufficiently to have realized that, in the main, progress in culture is broughtabout by changes due to hybridization, so to speak, of ideas, or to the grafting of oneidea upon another and thus arriving at a new variant’ (1919: 8). Balfour’s own work in



the Museum was focused primarily on comparative technology, and during his time thedisplays were added to with numerous further examples of variation and hybridization,and a markedly lesser emphasis upon what he saw as ‘ “end-on” evolution, the succes-sive morphological changes following one another in simple unilinear series’ (Balfour1919: 8). Although we know very little about Balfour’s attitude towards public educationin the Museum, some of his contemporaries, such as Alfred Cort Haddon, played aprominent role, acting as Advisory Curator to the Horniman Museum between 1902

and 1915, when he gave regular Saturday morning lectures to South London schoolteachers (Byrne 2011).

Collecting photographyAfter it was transferred from Bethnal Green Museum to three large rooms in the WestGalleries at the South Kensington Museum at the end of 1878, one reviewer noted thatPitt-Rivers’s collection consisted of four distinct parts,13 the first of which was

a collection of photographs of the various races of mankind which is not as yet far advanced, thoughit contains large and instructive series of portraits of Danes, Scandinavians, the people of Brittany, andJapanese; whilst together with the photographs is a small series of those skulls which show the bestmarked racial characteristics ... (Anon. 1880: 490).

Most of these photographs were purchased by Pitt-Rivers during a visit to the Europeanmainland with George Rolleston in the summer of 1879, such as those he acquired fromthe Museum Godeffroy in Hamburg, including many from the Pacific islands as well asa series of ten photographs from Queensland (Morton 2010-11), originally collected byAmalie Dietrich in the 1860s (Sumner 1986), and eleven screens showing over threehundred cartes-de-visite collected from studios in Germany, Denmark, and Sweden.Another large series of cartes-de-visite was collected during his solo trips to northernFrance in late 1878 and early 1879.14 Also displayed were photographs acquired byPitt-Rivers from E.H. Man in 1878 of the Andaman Islanders. After the collection wastransferred to Oxford, photographs and prints continued to be displayed in the Muse-um’s galleries to illustrate material culture and racial characteristics, and to illustrateartefacts not in the collection but important to the series. Space precludes a moredetailed discussion of Pitt-Rivers’s photograph collection here, which will be thesubject of a forthcoming article.15

Henry Balfour was an enthusiastic collector of photographs for the Museum, fre-quently corresponding with those willing to send prints, and purchasing collectionshe deemed of ethnological interest, for instance a collection of 118 prints by theGerman Trappist Missionaries at Marianhill (near Durban, South Africa) which hevisited in the summer of 1899. ‘Photos I find are so important an adjunct to aMuseum’, he wrote to W.B. Spencer in 1896, ‘that I try to beg all I can for a series I ammaking for the Museum’.16 The photographs that Balfour collected were either keptfor research, or mounted for display in the Museum to contextualize or demonstratethe use of objects, much as they continue to be used today. By 1920, the number ofphotographs that Balfour had gathered in this way can be estimated at over fourthousand.17 During the 1920s, however, an ever-increasing number were beginning toaccumulate within the Museum, partly owing to technological developments in hand-held cameras and film, but also partly owing to Balfour’s central position in a networkof Oxford-trained colonial administrators. Added to this was the fact that the first



generation of fieldworking anthropologists were beginning to generate large, well-documented archives of ethnographic images, such as Beatrice Blackwood, whocarried out fieldwork in Papua New Guinea in 1929-30. It was perhaps Blackwood’sreturn from the field to Oxford in 1930 with a large collection of field images thatprompted Balfour’s decision the following year to initiate a project to deal with themsystematically. In the Museum’s annual report for 1931, he noted that ‘[t]he extensivecollection of ethnological photographs, which have gradually accumulated, was takenin hand, and a start was made to have them uniformly mounted and classified forarrangement in a series of cases. When completed this collection will be very valuablefor reference’ (Balfour 1931: 1).

Following the arrangement of the Museum’s displays, and his own interest in com-parative technology, Balfour’s starting-point seems to have been to devise a cross-cultural thematic series for the photographs, including such topics as ‘Food quest’,‘Deformations / Diseases’, ‘Tattooing / Cicatrization’, ‘Land travel & transport’, ‘Danceand drama’, and ‘Magic & religion’.18 Within the thematic grouping, photographs takenby a wide variety of photographers between the 1860s and 1931 were brought together.A further series – a mixed geographical one – was created by Balfour and his assistantE.S. Thomas to run alongside the typological one (see Edwards & Hart 2004). Presum-ably this arrangement meant that researchers would in future be able to examine thecollections both geographically and thematically. This archival procedure was inkeeping with the Museum’s displays of artefacts, arranged according to object type withgeographical subsections, but probably more importantly it also mirrored Balfour’sown research methodology.

Such processes of archival restructuring self-consciously play with photography’sinherent mutability in order to impose new layers of institutional meaning – in thisinstance the creation of a thematic archive based on visual content – in which theindexicality of the image is used to ‘read’ both the cultural and physical surface, as wellas embodied practices. In doing so, Balfour intentionally de-emphasized both thehistorical contexts and photographic intentions of the photographic encounters rep-resented, and emphasized the evidential and indexical potential of the images todescribe culture – albeit that circular and paradoxical vision of ‘traditional’ culturestruggling to survive in the face of modernizing influences, yet from whence emergedthe visual language of ‘traditional’ culture in the first place.

Pasted on to a uniform series of large cards (Fig. 2) to fit a series of green solanderboxes,19 these card series contain numerous gaps and beginnings, presumably to beadded to and completed as more examples came to hand, with often a single photo-graph heralding the beginning of a sub-theme. That such gaps and false starts still existin this thematic card series today is partly due to the fact that, shortly after completingthe project, both Balfour and his assistant E.S. Thomas became ill, and both died withinseven years of finishing the work. With the death of its long-serving Curator, theMuseum lost its last serious student of comparative culture and the intellectual under-pinning of its comparative method of display. In fact, it could be argued that thetypological arrangement of the Museum’s photograph collection in 1931-2 was the lastsignificant act of Victorian anthropology in the Museum, since Balfour’s long Cura-torship essentially extended Victorian anthropology in Oxford until 1939. As Gosden,Larson, and Petch discuss (2007b: 39), Balfour represented the end of a broadly con-stituted natural science tradition that had coalesced in Oxford since at least the 1850swith Henry Acland and the foundation of the University Museum. Radcliffe-Brown’s



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appointment to the Chair in Anthropology in Oxford in 1936 heralded a major shift inthe direction of the subject, something that the Museum’s Beatrice Blackwood consid-ered ‘a major disaster to anthropology in Oxford’ (Mills 2007: 83). Whilst Balfour wasin agreement with Radcliffe-Brown about the need for a Final Honours School inanthropology, he had quite different ideas about what a degree should consist of,especially in its material, physical, and archaeological dimensions. Balfour’s ownapproach to the subject accommodated the new intellectual and political directions ofthe discipline by considering the fieldworking anthropologist as the spinner of threadsof ethnographic knowledge, whereas his own role was to weave them together (Balfour1938). For him, any attempt to narrow the breadth and depth of the subject within theUniversity was fundamentally flawed.

After Balfour’s death, no subsequent staff at the Museum, including Beatrice Black-wood, added to his archival arrangement of photographs, which is a possible indica-tion that it was not used much either, and presumably languished in poor conditionsin the ‘iron building’ out-house, rarely consulted by visiting researchers or staffmembers. Although the Museum’s accession records suggest that over one thousandphotographs were received during both the 1940s and 1950s, none of them were addedto the cross-cultural series, and instead they seem to have been kept separately andintact as discrete collections, rather than broken up and inserted into the thematicseries. But why was this, given that new artefacts were still incorporated into thecomparative displays in the Museum? Certainly the post-war era of decolonizationmeant that many of the assumptions underlying cultural comparativism were seen asinvidious. Decolonization shook the foundations of the ethnographic museum, andthe ‘typological’ system, once in the vanguard of Victorian education and science, wasnow perceived as out of step with the times. With anthropology’s relationship tocolonialism under scrutiny and suspicion, the discipline eagerly sought new agendasfor research, and distance from its past. The fact of the survival and reinterpretationof the comparative method in the Pitt Rivers Museum is something that I will returnto shortly, but it is here important to point out that the 1940s and 1950s were a periodof adaptation of the comparative method under the banner of ‘technology’ whichsought to position the Museum as a research laboratory on material processes, espe-cially in relation to archaeology. Curator T.K. Penniman and Demonstrator BeatriceBlackwood initiated an Occasional Papers on Technology series in 1944, which ran tonine volumes by 1960. The focus upon technological processes meant that the com-parative method had a new intellectual rationale, partly derived from archaeologicalnomenclature, as in Blackwood’s Technology of a modern Stone Age people in NewGuinea (1950). Although the acquisition by Museum staff of collections of original orhistorical photographic material continued in a somewhat passive mode, the perioddid see the establishment of a large and systematic collection of teaching slides, drawnfrom the Museum’s photograph collections, as well as those of University colleaguesand illustrations from publications. Ironically, although archival photographs werenot being as actively collected as before, photography became much more embeddedwithin anthropological teaching itself. Whereas Henry Balfour had conducted muchof his teaching in the Museum’s galleries, handling objects and demonstrating tech-niques, in the post-war period the Museum staff taught mostly through formal lec-tures, illustrated by slides. Instead of walking students around the Museum to look at,and handle, objects on display as Balfour had done, the shift into the lecture theatrein the post-war period meant that objects had to be removed from their typological



contexts. Audrey Butt Colson, a lecturer at the Museum from 1955 to 1986, remembers,for instance, that ‘Mr Penniman organized special storage for the major cultures welectured on, the relevant objects being stored together in one place’ (pers. comm., 27

August 2009). By shifting the Museum’s identity to a predominantly technologicalmuseum, Penniman and Blackwood thereby reaffirmed the early connection in theMuseum between ethnography and archaeology, and forged a new justification withinthe University for the teaching of ethnology, as well as material culture studies withinthe human sciences, one that would by the 1970s be transformed once again throughthe prism of humanism.

‘Funerary’ – a box of comparative photographsIn order to appreciate the comparative role that hitherto unassociated photographswere asked to perform within Balfour’s archival series, I now examine one in moredetail – a box titled ‘Funerary’.20 As with a number of the other series, one of the firstnoticeable things is the attempt to make comparisons across time as well as space, notin terms of iconography (as I will discuss below in the context of an art historicalarchive), but in much broader cultural and historical terms. In this box one finds, inkeeping with the Museum’s object displays, a visual comparison drawn betweenancient Egyptian funeral processions – with followers carrying offerings on their heads(Fig. 3) – and a photograph taken in Accra of the funeral procession of a Ghanaianchief, in which people carry baskets of goods in a similar manner (Fig. 4). For Balfour,as well as Pitt-Rivers, archaeology and ethnology were ‘the past and the presentof the same subject of study, of “man as he was, and as he is” ’ (Penniman 1946: 73).Interestingly, these photographic reproductions of redrawn ancient Egyptian imagesare the only additions made by Balfour to the series after the project began, having beentransferred from the Ashmolean Museum in 1935. Such a direct comparison betweencultural practices across both space and time is, surprisingly given its purpose as acomparative archive, rare in both this box and the series as a whole, and for the mostpart the photographs illustrate widely differing funerary practices that evidentlyproved difficult to bring into direct formal comparison. Tombs and graves from various

Figure 3. Photographic reproduction of an illustration showing ancient Egyptian people carryingfuneral offerings in baskets on their heads, intended to show the antiquity of contemporary culturalpractices. (Courtesy Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford [1998.174.4.2].)



locations are pasted side by side, with brief captions, such as ‘Moslem graves nearSingora: ornate pillars = female monuments’, and ‘Tomb, Yoritomo, Kakamura, Japan’(Fig. 5). The loose comparison invited between Muslim grave markers on the MalayPeninsula and a tomb in Japan is one that Balfour would have readily acknowledged asbeing both incomplete and based on the happenstance of such photographs beingavailable to him. Consistent with his statements on the other series he establishedwithin the Museum, it should be assumed that it was considered a starting-point; asystem for the future arrangement of photographs that came into the Museum, onethat would eventually broaden the range of comparisons available for reference.

Across two further cards are pasted a series of seven photographs from 1893 ofAboriginal tree burials on an island in a South Australian lagoon, each with the donor’shandwritten notes pasted onto the reverse of the card explaining the photograph inmore detail. It is an uncomfortable series of images, strongly suggestive of Europeanintrusion into sacred Aboriginal space. Further on we meet a number of quite differentphotographs of Aboriginal people taken by the Medical Officer for the NorthernTerritory, Mervyn J. Holmes, depicting mourning ceremonies on Bathurst Island.Nearby are pasted some photographs from the fieldwork of W.B. Spencer andF.J. Gillen, including one of the best known, and most arresting, of all anthropologicalfield photographs, of Warumungu women huddled together in mourning (Fig. 6).21

This sub-category of mourning practices is complemented with photographs takenin Melanesia by Beatrice Blackwood of a woman with white paint on her face. Forthe photograph series to be useful in a comparative way, Blackwood’s contextualinformation was highly valued, and Balfour was usually careful to transcribe suchinformation as was available (frequently from the back of a print) near the photographon the card.

Figure 4. Funeral procession of an Accra chief with women carrying baskets with fruits, rolled mats,and other goods on their heads. (Ensor Collection, purchased 1935. Courtesy Pitt Rivers Museum,University of Oxford [1998.174.4.1].)



Figure 5. Tomb in Kamakura, Japan. This 1870s copy print, by Carl or Frederick Dammann, wasproduced from an earlier photograph by an unknown photographer. (Purchased from the Dammannestate in 1901. Courtesy Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford [1998.174.26.2].)

Figure 6. Two groups of Warumungu women at a mourning ceremony, embracing in a huddle andwailing after cutting their scalps with their yam-sticks, which lie on the ground beside them. TennantCreek, Northern Territory, Australia. (Photograph by Francis James Gillen, August 1901. Donated byDorothy Young in 1932. Courtesy Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford [1998.174.14.1].)



Many of the photographs in the Funerary (C1/17) box are field images taken by thefirst generation of anthropologists to undertake significant or long-term fieldwork,from whom the well-connected Balfour was able to obtain images for the Museum. Anexample of this is a photograph by A.M. Hocart taken in Fiji in 1912, titled ‘Coffin ofMosese’s child’ (Fig. 7). As with the other photographs in this box, the level on whichit gains activation as a comparative illustration involves the photograph in a process ofdecontextualized archival ‘performance’, which utilizes photography’s mutability ofmeaning to do different work from the original photographic intention. Such points ofcontextual fracture are keenly felt in the caption to this photograph, ‘Coffin of Mosese’schild’. Who is Mosese? This isn’t explained, but is presumably one of the women sittingbehind the coffin, which is draped with cloth. Why isn’t the caption ‘Mother withchild’s coffin’? The answer to this presumably lies in Balfour’s faithfulness in transcrib-ing notes written on the reverse of prints sent to him, and that this was Hocart’s ownannotation. But as a caption in a comparative series it personalizes and contextualizesthe photographic encounter, when in fact the image has been chosen to illustratefunerary practice in a cross-cultural perspective. Mosese should be a representativeof her culture; but no, she remains Mosese, mourning her own child, not just aFijian child.

Because of the fieldwork credentials of many of the photographs in the Funeraryseries, it is perhaps surprising that several commercially produced prints are included,such as one by Fiji-based commercial photographer Thomas Andrew titled ‘Draggingcorpse to oven, Fiji’, which purports to show a group of cannibals (Fig. 8). In his letterto W.B. Spencer in 1896, quoted earlier, Balfour complains that ‘[m]y funds don’t allowof my buying many on the open market, and the trade ones are apt to be unsatisfactoryand made up’.22 That Balfour was aware of the staged and stereotypical nature of such

Figure 7. Women sitting behind the coffin of a child, identified as ’Mosese’s child’. (Photograph byArthur Maurice Hocart, 1912. Courtesy Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford [1998.174.20.2].)



images is therefore clear, but however ‘unsatisfactory’ their evidential value, they werenone the less incorporated within the disciplinary archive to illustrate real Fijiansdemonstrating, however artificially and directed by a commercial photographer, apractice that many authors had reported as occurring historically in Fijian culture.From Balfour’s comments we know that such images were not considered as ‘scientifi-cally’ useful as field photographs, but were not rejected, since they were considered tocontain sufficient ethnographic information to remain useful at some descriptive level.The re-enactment or performance of culture was arguably less problematic in a cross-cultural context, where certain elements of image content – such as material culture –were foregrounded for comparison. In the context of museum practice, such photo-graphs were arguably given somewhat more scientific credibility if donated byrespected academic figures, in this case William Johnson Sollas, the noted geologist andanthropologist, who had written Ancient hunters and their modern representatives(1911). In other commercial examples, the question of authenticity is more complex,such as a photograph by North Island photographer M.A. Clooney from the 1880s ofseveral Maori keeping vigil with a deceased person, a funerary process known as tangi.Unlike the Fijian cannibal image by Thomas Andrew, this image may well have beentaken in association with an actual tangi event, albeit with the scene manipulated by thephotographer to suit commercial conventions.

A further twist to the comparative funerary series is the presence of an extendedsequence of fieldwork images of the funeral of a man in the D’Entrecasteaux Islands(off the east coast of Papua New Guinea) by Diamond Jenness in 1911-12. The sequence(Fig. 9) begins with a photograph of a widow lying beside a dead man, who is coveredwith mats, followed by one of a mourner being led away by another man, the carryingof logs used in the preparation of the grave, the digging of the grave, the carrying of thedeceased to the grave, and finally the placing of the body in the grave. The sequence

Figure 8. Men dressed in barkcloth and carrying clubs posed in cannibal scene, purportedlydragging a corpse to be consumed. (Photograph by Thomas Andrew, about 1890. Donated byWilliam Sollas, by 1932. Courtesy Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford [1998.174.20.1].)



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bears all the hallmarks of the published guidance given to anthropologists for photo-graphic work in such circumstances, as published in the handbook Notes and querieson anthropology (Haddon & Garson 1899), in which ritual activity was interpretedas consisting of discrete and meaningful stages, which could then be captured in arepresentative sequence of images. Such ritual sequences could then be comparedcross-culturally.

Whilst the sorts of photography found within the ‘Funerary’ box can be seen as across-section through the histories of both anthropology and photography between1870 and 1930, the fact that the series was put together at a certain point in time – theearly 1930s – also means that it stands as an example of early twentieth-centurydisciplinary classification that can be put into a wider context.

Iconology and the comparative archiveBalfour’s thematic classification of photographs grew out of both the typologicalorganization of artefacts in the Museum as well as his own interests in comparativetechnology. And yet in a broader archival context, it can be seen as forming part of ahistorical tradition of comparative classification. In October 1933, the Warburg Institutewas invited to relocate to London from Hamburg after the National Socialist Party cameto power in Germany. The Institute’s sixty thousand books, thousands of slides, photo-graphs, and furniture were packed onto steamers and arrived in December of that year.

The Warburg Institute was named after its founder, Aby Warburg (1866-1929), whohad pioneered the study of iconology in art history, involving the identification andclassification of (especially classical) motifs in artistic images. Warburg’s iconologicalapproach involved a highly comparative approach to art history, crossing both time andspace in search of common motifs. In pursuit of this intellectual approach, the Insti-tute’s library was arranged into four zones: Action (the survival and transformation ofancient patterns in social customs and political institutions); Orientation (the gradualtransition, in Western thought, from magical beliefs to religion, science, and philoso-phy); Word (the persistence of motifs and forms in Western languages and literatures);and Image (the persistence of symbols and images in European art and architecture).Writing in 1934, the Assistant Director of the Institute, Gertrude Bing, wrote that:

The manner of shelving the books is meant to impart certain suggestions to the reader who, lookingon the Library holdings for one book, is attracted by the kindred ones next to it, glances at the sectionsabove and below, and finds himself involved in a new trend of thought which may lend additionalinterest to the one he was pursuing (1934: 266).

Bing’s explanation of the principles underlying the Warburg Library’s classificationsystem were echoed the followed year by Edgar Wind, an art historian based at theInstitute. ‘Within that specialized field of cultural history and psychology which iscircumscribed by the “Survival of the Classics” ’, he wrote, ‘the library endeavours to beencyclopaedic ... accordingly, the system which follows is calculated to ... make inter-connections easily visible’ (Wind 1935: 193).

This description of the intellectual benefits of bringing diverse material togetherthematically echoes what we know of Balfour’s intentions in creating a comparativephotographic archive, weaving together the visual evidence of similar types of culturalpractice from diverse cultural areas. The Warburg Institute’s photograph collectionwas begun by Aby Warburg, who also began to collect photographs systematically in



the 1880s, and already numbered some fifteen thousand images at his death in 1929.Originally, this collection had been organized topographically, in such categories asUmbrian painting, or Florentine sculpture. When the Institute moved to London in1933, however, the entire collection was reorganized iconographically, with a system ofsubject categories devised by Rudolf Wittkower and Edgar Wind. In doing so, by 1934

they had created an archive ‘in which reproductions of all kinds of pictorial docu-ments from the most elaborate works of art down to ornamented tools and imple-ments of daily use are arranged according to the themes represented on them’ (Bing1934: 265). The mounted prints in the collection were all annotated on the reverse, andorganized within major categories (large folders) and then sub-categories (medium-sized folders). Some of the major iconological categories echo those devised byBalfour, such as ‘ritual’, ‘magic and science’, ‘social life’, ‘gestures’, architecture’, or‘ornament’. Within a major category such as ‘ritual’ are found such sub-categories as‘sacrifices’, ‘initiation’, or ‘libation’, all containing images illustrative of such themesacross art history. ‘One of the advantages of the system’, Wind wrote, ‘is that it isflexible enough to adjust to any forthcoming development of research. New sectionscan be inserted without destroying the arrangement of the old ones’ (1935: 195).Although we know little of Balfour’s intentions for his comparative archive, thenumerous gaps and sub-categories bespeak of a similar vision for the expansion andaugmentation of sections as new photographs arrived.

Aby Warburg’s mytho-psychological approach to art history bears interesting com-parison to Balfour’s approach to technology. Warburg’s 1891 dissertation on Botticelliemployed one of the notions that would continue to interest him throughout his career,namely the transmission of classical iconography to other cultures, in particular theRenaissance. Warburg’s approach also bears interesting comparison within the historyof anthropology to the diffusionism of Elliot Smith and others, which advanced atheory of the transmission of ancient Egyptian iconography around the world. War-burg’s interest in the psychological principles of art led to studies in medicine in Berlin.Interestingly, for both Warburg and Elliot Smith (who was a celebrated anatomist andexpert on the brain), an interest in psychology led to anthropology. In 1895, Warburgvisited the territories of the southwestern United States in order to observe Navaho andPueblo traditions, and their relevance to his iconological theory. In later years, hefocused on the role of memory in civilization, research that resulted in an uncompletedimage collection termed the Mnemosyne Atlas (which in German meant rather analbum or compilation of images), consisting of forty large canvases to which almostone thousand images were affixed (Fig. 10). Warburg chose this format in order todemonstrate visually the relationships between iconographic motifs. Groups of repre-sentations, under categories such as ‘pathos’, ‘human sacrifice’, ‘redemption’, and ‘Ori-ental astrology’, were juxtaposed in order to suggest visual definitions; a visible thesis,after the manner of Pitt-Rivers. Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas and Balfour’s series ofcomparative photographs certainly bear interesting comparison, not least in theirattempt to trace connections across both space and time.

Wittkower and Wind’s 1934 reorganization of the Warburg photograph collection asa comparative resource was not just an extension of their institution’s founding intel-lectual principles, but, as with Balfour’s project, also fitted their own methodologicalpreoccupations. Wind’s research on allegory and the use of pagan mythology duringthe fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, for instance, led to his important work Paganmysteries in the Renaissance (1958). Wittkower’s Architectural principles in the age of



humanism (1949) sought to overturn hedonistic interpretations of architecture whichprivileged a sensuous aesthetic reception by the viewer, and posited an intellect-drivenapproach which understood Renaissance architecture as aimed at conveying meaning,and hence at the mind rather than the senses. His exegesis drew on Warburgianconcepts such as symbolism, as well as the appropriation of forms.

Although Balfour’s creation of a comparative photographic archive in the 1930s hasmostly been seen as a continuation of the typological legacy of the Pitt Rivers Museum,with its roots firmly in nineteenth-century socio-cultural evolutionism, it is importantto place the project in an intellectual context of its own time. As demonstrated by thecase study of the Warburg Institute photograph collection, the 1930s was a period inwhich a critical mass of visual data, produced in large amounts since the late nineteenthcentury, was being critically engaged with in a universalizing intellectual environment,although with differing disciplinary orientations and reference points.

A humanist agendaAs earlier mentioned, subsequent curators at the Pitt Rivers Museum did not add to thearchival series established by Balfour in 1931-2. Indeed, aside from a few reproductions of

Figure 10. Panel 32 from Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas project, which brought together visualmaterial to explore iconological connections within art history. (Image courtesy of Warburg Institute,University of London.)



AncientEgyptianartin1935,neitherdidBalfour.Theseriesinsteadremainedasanarchivalproject around which new collections accumulated; not typologically, but in accordancewith ‘registry order’ – the pre-existing organization of a collection as determined by itscreator, or donor. No one has attempted to unpick Balfour’s thematic series, soak thephotographs off the boards, or otherwise rearrange them. Instead, researchers andMuseum staff have worked across their intellectual grain, so to speak, negotiating theirway around the awkwardness of their physical placement. To ever attempt to unravelthe series would not only be to lose an interesting historical moment of museologicalinterest, it would undoubtedly further damage prints that already bear the scars of theirprevious rearrangement. Working with the inconveniences and inflexibilities of anearlier archival arrangement is no different from that faced by the Museum as a whole,since staff who curate objects also have to negotiate the typological legacy on a daily basis.In 2010, new solander boxes were made for the series, and each card was placed in apolyester archival sleeve, further consolidating Balfour’s organization of the material.

The fact that this comparative archive seems not to have played any sort of activepart in Museum research after the 1930s is arguably a result of the significant intellec-tual shift that took place in both museums and anthropology in the middle of thetwentieth century. The new political and intellectual landscape that accompanieddecolonization from the 1940s challenged the concept of an ethnographic museum, andespecially a typological one like the Pitt Rivers. So vigorous was the intellectual con-sensus away from perceivedly colonial institutions that it is worth asking how such amuseum survived. There are two strands to follow in response to such a question,which apply to the Museum in its roles as both a ‘research’ and an ‘educational’institution, as Pitt-Rivers termed it. As a research museum or repository, the politics ofdecolonization were arguably less critical to its continued value as a collection ofhistorical and ethnographic importance. But since Balfour’s archival project remainsintact today as a museum resource shown to visiting researchers, it has been necessaryin this essay to understand its inherent comparativism in the context of the Museum’soutward-facing public identity. Decolonization issued a significant challenge to theMuseum’s identity – what it represented and how it understood itself. If we examinestatements made about the Museum by every Curator since Balfour, we see the intel-lectual justification for cultural comparativism reinterpreted as a humanistic method(humanism in the sense of a sympathetic concern with common human needs, etc.),and the Pitt Rivers Museum as a collection that attests to human creativity andproblem-solving. During the 1950s, Audrey Butt Colson remembers ‘Mr Pennimanoccasionally remarking that a major objective was to show that others did not act asthey did simply to annoy us – that is, our objective overall was to explain how and whyother peoples and cultures lived as they did (and may still do)’ (pers. comm., 27 August2009). In the 1960s, Curator Bernard Fagg drove forward ambitious plans for a Museumof Man in Oxford, arguing that ‘[t]he Pitt Rivers Museum embraces the study of manand his works throughout the world’. Here he set out a vision for the resituating of theMuseum in the humanist context ‘of her academic potential in the Human Sciences ...linked to the Humanities through complementary interests with the AshmoleanMuseum and to the Science Area through the scientific institutions which would sharethe same group of buildings’.23 This new museum was to house the various departmentsrelated to the study of humanity, with a system that combined typological seriesin concentric circles, and geographical zones as spokes of a wheel, all centred on anambitious greenhouse called – in wonderful 1960s parlance – a ‘Climatron’, which



demonstrated humanity’s cultural relationship to the natural world. Perhaps inevita-bly, and perhaps also thankfully, the scheme failed, although proposals to abandonthe old Museum site continued well into the 1980s.24

In 1984, Curator Bryan Cranstone (who, as a comparative technologist, was perhapsBalfour’s true heir) wrote that:

[T]he exhibitions are arranged ... by a comparative or typological method. They illustrate, not wholecultures, but problems which have presented themselves to man from the earliest times and thesolutions which man has devised ... This method raises some difficulties in providing a service toresearch workers, who nowadays usually study a culture or a period rather than a technology ... [but]the juxtapositions can be interesting and revealing ... (1984: 1-2).

The significant thing to note in this context about such statements is that the com-parative method is recast as the exploration of human problems and solutions, with nohint of evolution or developmental comparison. David Attenborough, a patron of theFriends of the Pitt Rivers Museum, writing in the Museum’s guidebook, noted that

you begin to interact by making comparisons and contemplating the different hands and minds thatdevised such differing solutions to a single problem, and you are led to delight in the versatility andingenuity of the extraordinary species of which you are a member ... this museum, to a unique andunrepeatable degree, celebrates the multitudinous ways that once existed of being human (1993: i).

The reinterpretation of the comparative method of display through a more generalhumanist agenda in the post-war period is today fully exploited by the Museum in itsongoing attempt to find relevance as a public museum in the contemporary world.Partly this striving for relevance has come from members of staff, such as Audrey ButtColson, who, with Francis Huxley and Nicholas Guppy, helped found the PrimitivePeoples’ Fund in the 1960s, a grouping that later led to the establishment of SurvivalInternational. Cranstone’s reinterpretation of the comparative method continues to bepromoted by the Museum on its website, suggesting that the objects in its displays are‘all displayed in groups to show how the same problems have been solved at differenttimes by different peoples’.25 In 2005, the current Director, Michael O’Hanlon, echoedCranstone’s interpretation, stating that ‘[t]here’s an underlying humanity in seeingdifferent solutions to common human problems; an opportunity to think ourselves outof cultural “boxes” ’ (Lunnon 2005: 24).

The continuing reinterpretation of the comparative method as a politically neutralexploration of human technological endeavour over space and time means that audi-ences today engage with the galleries in a multitude of different ways. As has beendiscussed earlier, the original uniform developmentalism of Pitt-Rivers’s seriesbecame atomized at an early date in the Museum, meaning that notions of culturaldevelopment and progression have long been absent in any didactic sense. Balfour’sphotographic archival project exists to remind us of the way in which institutionalframeworks give photographs part of their meaning and their activation. And indoing so, we learn more about the institutional impact on disciplinary knowledgeformation. The post-war humanist agenda within the Museum could have led to theunravelling of Balfour’s comparative archive. The fact that it didn’t says somethingabout institutional processes of neglect, particularly in respect to the perceivedusefulness of historical photography in post-war anthropology, and more recentprocesses of respect, through the preservation of a moment of archival history.



ConclusionThis article has taken a necessarily wide historical sweep to examine the shiftinginstitutional and intellectual contexts for a comparative series of photographs in anethnographic museum. I have argued that the creation of a thematic series of photo-graphs in 1931-2 was one of the last significant acts of Victorian anthropological clas-sification in the Pitt Rivers Museum, and that within a few years it lay redundant, itsexpectant gaps left unfilled, its promise of cross-cultural research still-born. Thereasons for this are complex, but include such factors as the perceived redundancy, inthe post-war period, of historical photographs within mainstream anthropology, theemergence of a new visual literacy that challenged the use of decontextualized visualevidence in anthropological research, the challenge of decolonization and subsequentshifts in the political and intellectual context for ethnographic museums, and a meth-odological movement away from the universalizing projects of the 1930s, such as thoseby Henry Balfour, Aby Warburg, and the Diffusionists. Although it has been essential toplace Balfour’s project in the context of its period, it is worth considering briefly afurther context – the systematic aggregation of sociological data compiled from the late1860s onwards by theorists such as Herbert Spencer and E.B. Tylor; a parallel history oftypological classification and comparativism that ran alongside Pitt-Rivers’s culturaldevelopmentalism, but focused on the development of social institutions. In 1867,Herbert Spencer hired assistants to go through extant travel literature and compileinformation about the customs of indigenous peoples, which he published gradually ina series of tables in folio volumes titled Descriptive sociology (Spencer 1873-81). Histheoretical synthesis of this material, The principles of sociology (1874-96), whilst hismajor statement in the area of socio-cultural evolutionism, lost much of its impact,argues Stocking (1987: 137), in arriving on the anthropological scene too late. A moreimportant project of this type was Tylor’s later systematic comparison of data relatingto 350 societies according to their social customs, in an attempt to ‘show that thedevelopment of institutions may be investigated on a basis of tabulation and classifi-cation’ (1889: 245). The main thrust of this research was to demonstrate the ‘adhesions’of each custom – which customs often existed in correspondence with each other,beyond what would be expected according to chance. Among the examples of ‘adhe-sions’ Tylor suggests are the ceremonial avoidance by a husband of the wife’s family,and his residence among them after marriage (1889: 247), since they occurred togetherin fourteen instances whereas chance suggested nine. What unites both Tylor’s andBalfour’s classificatory work is suggested in Tylor’s statement that the ultimate aim wasto investigate ‘causes acting over the whole range of mankind’ (1889: 246). Just as withTylor’s systematic investigation of ‘adhesions’, Balfour’s attempt was to bring a criticalmass of comparative visual evidence to bear on questions of cultural diffusion andindependent invention.

Tracing its roots in nineteenth-century socio-cultural evolutionary thought, as wellas the often neglected role of ethnographic displays in nineteenth-century publiceducation, I have argued that cultural comparativism has been constantly rethoughtand reinterpreted throughout the Pitt Rivers Museum’s history, but that a movementtowards comparative technology in the 1950s has continued to this day, with theMuseum reinterpreting its displays by type in the universal context of human problem-solving. Through an analysis of a single box of photographs formed as a result ofBalfour’s archival project, I have argued that not only are such institutional pro-cesses important to our understanding of disciplinary knowledge formation and the



accretion of photographic meaning; their very survival also attests to phases of insti-tutional neglect and intellectual denial.

NOTES

This article is based on a paper given at the ‘Humanising Photography’ conference held at the DurhamCentre for Advanced Photography Studies, University of Durham, in September 2009. I am grateful to theorganizers of the conference (Jonathan Long, Andrea Noble, and Edward Welch) for inviting me to presentthe paper and allowing me the opportunity to explore and expand on this topic. I am grateful to the otherconference participants for their comments, in particular Sharon Sliwinski. The paper was also presented tocolleagues in Oxford at the Pitt Rivers Museum Seminar in Material and Visual Anthropology in December2009. I would like to acknowledge the support of the Friends of the Pitt Rivers Museum organization, and thePitt Rivers Museum itself, for financial assistance towards my attendance at the DCAPS conference inDurham. I am extremely grateful to my colleague Jeremy Coote for his comments on an earlier draft of thisarticle, and to Eckart Marchand of the Warburg Institute for his assistance. I am also grateful to the twoanonymous reviewers of the article for their helpful comments, and especially to the Editor for his.

1 In their 2004 essay, Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart explore the theoretical implications of a single boxof photographs from the parallel geographical series created by Balfour at the same time as the thematicseries discussed here. Edwards and Hart demonstrate the importance of a consideration of archival (andinstitutional) processes to the generation of anthropological meaning over time, an understanding thatunderpins this article also.

2 ‘Arrangement by type’ should be distinguished from ‘typological’ in the sense that Pitt-Rivers used theterm, which referred specifically to the development of ‘series’ that demonstrated the formal affinities,evolution, or degeneration of artefacts. None of these series remain in the current Museum’s displays.

3 Augustus Henry Lane Fox added the surname Pitt-Rivers in 1880 when he inherited the Cranborne Chaseestate from his great uncle. For the sake of clarity I have referred to him as Pitt-Rivers throughout. The PittRivers Museum has not conventionally hyphenated its name, although Pitt-Rivers himself often did.

4 Although a significant amount of Pitt-Rivers’s collection contained what we would now consider archae-ology rather than ethnography, for Pitt-Rivers archaeological material was principally ethnographic in itscontribution to his thesis on cultural development. For a useful history of the Pitt Rivers Museum up to 1945,see Gosden, Larson & Petch (2007a). For published research on Pitt-Rivers and the typological museum,see Chapman (1991) and Petch (1998; 2002).

5 It is important to point out that Pitt-Rivers never advocated a principal role for race and intelligence indetermining cultural development, but did accede to a limited influence:

The Australians are found in some cases to be not only capable, but even quick in receivinginstruction. It is evident, therefore, that we should be wrong if we were to attribute theextraordinary retardation of culture on the Australian continent to racial incapacity alone;racial incapacity is one item, but not the only item to be considered in studying the develop-ment of culture (Lane Fox 1872: 161, original emphasis).

6 Text from display label in British Museum Enlightenment gallery, case 14. Braunholtz records that out of1,169 objects catalogued in the ‘Miscellanies’ section of Sloane’s collection, some 350 were ethnographicobjects, presumably used for comparative purposes (Braunholtz 1970: 19).

7 At the end of 1890, Pitt-Rivers sent Balfour a letter asking that he desist from publishing on his collectionuntil he had first lectured upon its principles at Oxford. In a drafted (but unsent) reply, Balfour notes that

[t]he collection, when it came into my hands, was in very great confusion, it was distributed indifferent parts of Oxford, many of the series were completely disarranged and the componentelements scattered. In undertaking the work of rearranging and adapting the collection in itsnew home, I did not dream that it would be intended that the collection, as it existed at SouthKensington, complete though many of the series were, was to be considered complete and itsarrangement final. I gathered from reading your papers ... that the collection was to beprogressive, even as it illustrates progress; that all endeavours were to be made to render it ascomplete as possible, and to increase its educational value ... (Draft letter dated 2 December1890, Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Pitt Rivers Museum Papers, Box 1/84).

8 Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Pitt Rivers Museum Papers, Box 1, letter from A.H.L.F.Pitt-Rivers to Augustus Franks, 1 July 1880.



9 It seems that the 1874 catalogue of the collection, which deals with only the weaponry section of thedisplays, does act as a record of how these objects were arranged in the Bethnal Green displays.

10 This poster was probably written to accompany Lane Fox’s displays at the South KensingtonMuseum after the end of 1878, since a reviewer seems aware of the poster text in an article in the journalNature (Anon 1880).

11 The ‘evolution’ of the firearm was displayed in the Court of the Museum from 1964 to 2008, and thenexpanded and re-displayed in the Upper Gallery in 2010.

12 Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Pitt Rivers Museum Papers, Box 1, letter from A.H.L.F.Pitt-Rivers to Henry Balfour, 13 December 1887.

13 The reviewer at first states that there are three parts, and then goes on to describe four. The secondsection dealt with weaponry (with a detailed catalogue produced), the third with ‘musical instruments,ornaments, sculpture, painting and artistic design of all kinds’, and the fourth with ‘the developmentof implements, utensils, houses, ships, machines, and strictly useful appliances of all kinds’ (Anon 1880:490-1).

14 Although the Museum Godeffroy and Scandinavian photographs were transferred to the new museumin Oxford, it appears that the large collection of French cartes-de-visite never was. It is perhaps surprising thataround 58 per cent of the Pitt Rivers Museum’s founding collection was from Europe, some 11,426 objects(see Petch 2010).

15 See interim web article on the founding collection of photographs and gallery of images (Morton 2011).16 Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Spencer Papers, Box 4, Balfour 5.17 This estimate is a summation of catalogue records for the years 1884-1920, as of March 2010.18 The complete list of titles for Balfour’s thematic ‘C’ series boxes is as follows:

C1/1 Land travel & transportC1/2 Water transportC1/3 Buildings (Africa, North America, South America)C1/4 Buildings (Pacific)C1/5 Buildings (Europe, Asia, Indonesia)C1/6 Buildings (North America)C1/7 Buildings (Australia, New Zealand, Oceania)C1/8 Agriculture, pastoralism & related activitiesC1/9 Food quest / Hunting / FishingC1/10 Agriculture / Food preparationC1/11 Clothing / OrnamentC1/12 Ceramics technologyC1/13 Textile technologyC1/14 Miscellaneous industries / Basketry / MetalworkingC1/15 Magic & religionC1/16 Magic & religionC1/17 Funerary / MagicC1/18 Music & gamesC1/19 Dance & dramaC1/20 Dance & drama (Africa and Asia)C2/1 Prehistoric technologyC2/2 Architecture in stone / TemplesC2/3 Graphic design / Painting / Bark cloth decoration / Engraving / Textile designC2/4 Sculpture & carving (excluding America)C2/5 Sculpture & carving (Maya & Central America)C2/6 Ceramics & sculpture (North America)C2/7 Archaeology & art (South America)C2/8 Japan prehistory (Munro Collection)C2/9 Weapons (Oceania)C2/10 Weapons (America, Asia, Africa)C2/11 Deformations / DiseasesC2/12 Tattooing / CicatrizationC2/13 Miscellaneous technologies (fire-making, tree-climbing, baby carriers, etc.)C2/14 Views & landscapesC2/15 Views & slandscapes (New Mexico & Arizona: Powell Collection)



19 In the Museum’s Annual Report for 1932, Balfour states that ‘[i]n order to associate together all theclassified photographs, a cabinet of portfolios was transferred to the Book-room in the iron building’(Balfour 1932: 1). This building was latterly known to Museum staff as ‘the green shed’; a corrugated ironout-building immediately to the south of the Museum, dismantled in 2006 to make way for the Museum’sextension.

20 The comparative series are referred to within the Museum as the C Box series, after their historical boxlabels, C1/1, C1/2, and so on. The A series of photographs was the album collection, and the B Box series themixed geographical one. It is not known when the series were labelled in this way, although it may havebeen in the early 1980s when the original 1930s solander boxes were replaced.

21 This image is published in Spencer & Gillen (1904) as Fig. 139, and also in Spencer & Gillen (1912) asFig. 309. The published image in both books contains the monogram ‘FJG’ in the bottom-left corner,suggesting that this photo was taken by Frank Gillen.

22 Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Spencer Papers, Box 4, Balfour 5.23 Proposal for the development of the Pitt Rivers Museum into a Museum of Man, Pitt Rivers Museum

Manuscript Collections, Pitt Rivers Museum Papers, Box 14. In 1965, Fagg redeveloped the west end of theCourt of the Museum to incorporate a new temporary exhibition gallery, possibly to demonstrate thebenefits of re-displaying the collections in a more ‘modern’ manner (see Coote & Morton 2000).

24 As suggested, for instance, in Cranstone’s comment written in 1983 that ‘[t]he University’s long-termplan is that the Museum and all its activities will eventually move to a new site at numbers 60-64, BanburyRoad, new buildings being erected on the gardens behind and the Victorian houses being retained foradministrative use’ (1984: 4).

25 http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/pittrivers.html (accessed 3 February 2012).

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Photographie et méthode comparative : la construction d’archivesanthropologiques

Résumé

En 1931-1932, Henry Balfour, conservateur du Pitt Rivers Museum à l’Université d’Oxford, décida de créerdes archives systématiques à partir de la collection de photographies ethnographiques qu’il avait recueillieau fil des années pour son musée. Le résultat tient dans une série de boîtes classées par thèmes, censéesconstituer une ressource pour les recherches interculturelles. Les regroupements ainsi archivés posent unesérie de questions sur l’héritage du comparativisme culturel au XXème siècle, tel qu’il est né del’évolutionnisme socioculturel victorien et de la classification typologique, et la manière dont il a étérepensé plus récemment, avec l’évolution du cadre de justification intellectuelle du musée ethnographique.L’article examine spécifiquement la généalogie de la méthode comparative et, plus largement, son contextehistorique, au Pitt Rivers Museum lui-même et dans le contexte d’autres projets d’archivage des années1930. Une comparaison avec la collection photographique de l’Institut Warburg, réorganisé vers la mêmeépoque et selon des principes similaires, fait apparaître le projet de Balfour non plus simplement commeune simple efflorescence de l’anthropologie muséographique victorienne, mais aussi comme un élémentd’un mouvement d’archivage plus large, universalisant, pendant l’entre-deux-guerres. L’article cherche àcomprendre pourquoi la série d’archives créée par Balfour n’a pas été continuée par les conservateurssuivants du musée. Selon l’auteur, la période postcoloniale a fortement remis en question l’identité et lerôle des musées ethnographiques et notamment les fondements intellectuels du comparativisme culturel,et la réponse à cette remise en question a pris la forme d’une réinterprétation de la classificationtypologique au sein d’un système global humaniste.

Christopher Morton is Curator of Photograph and Manuscript Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum,University of Oxford. He studied anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology,University of Oxford, conducting fieldwork in Botswana. He is the co-editor (with Elizabeth Edwards)of Photography, anthropology, and history: expanding the frame (Ashgate, 2009).

Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford OX1 3PP, UK. [email protected]



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Photography and the comparative method: the construction of an anthropological archive