Notes from the Archive: Epistolary Collecting in the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Abstract

Reproduced here is an exchange of letters between Anatole Von Hügel, first curator of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University and E.G McAfee, a trader and missionary living and working on the island of Malakula, in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). This correspondence documents a form of anthropological collecting that might be called “epistolary” in which museum curators engaged directly, through postal correspondence, over vast spatio-temporal distances, with people living within colonial outposts, without the intermediary of trained field collectors. The exchange provides a valuable insight into the non-academic forces that moulded early museum collections, shows the role of amateur collectors in forging “ethnographic” knowledge, and provides a body of work pertaining to the collection methods of early anthropology museums.