THE OTHER WITHIN : An anthropology of Englishness
Final six-monthly progress report - April 2009
Firstly, one of the researchers on the project had a baby son in January 2009, Frederick. We congratulate Chris and his wife Jo and hope Frederick grows up to be as good a researcher as his father. Chris naturally took some paternity leave during January.
Website http://england.prm.ox.ac.uk
The project
was lucky to attract another freelance web designer, Dan Burt, to work
on the project for the last three months, tidying up the website and sorting
out the mapping which David Harris had not been able to complete before
he left. In addition he prepared new ways of mapping the collections (including
mapping the timelines) and a new interface for the English objects databases.
Work on the web continued apace during this last six months. Many more
object biographies and themed articles were added and the final shape of
the website became clear.
Other Within seminar series
Chris and Alison arranged a very successful series
of 8 seminars held
on Fridays at 1.00 pm at the Pitt Rivers Museum between January and March 2009.
Mandolin: Mandolin played in the First
World War trenches by the donor,
A.A.
Kennedy. 1940.9.21Alison Petch has been researching and
working on the website mainly and also researching and writing some papers
about her research which will be published or given at conferences after
the official end of the project. She prepared a large number of web pages
about the Museum's work on technologies
and materials (a key component of many of the interactions with the
English collections). She also looked at some of the folklorists who
contributed to the collections.
She placed a copy of one
of the papers she
had published during the project with the History of Anthropology Newsletter
onto the website with the agreement of the HAN editor, Henrika Kuklick. She
also produced a series of themed articles on Pitt Rivers and his archaeology in
England (with particular reference to the museum's collections). She also
wrote sections about the teaching and collections documentation at the Museum.
She gave the first of the eight Other Within seminars, on 'Total immersion
or paddling?: the different models of fieldwork in Victorian anthropology'
Chris Wingfield has continued his research and writing
during this period, as well as working with Alison and Dan on aspects of
the web site. He has written and submitted papers entitled 'Is the heart
at home? E.B. Tylor’s collections from Somerset' and 'Placing Britain in
the British Museum: Encompassing the Other', as well as one with Chris Gosden
on 'An Imperialist Folklore? Establishing the Folk-lore Society in London'.
He also completed work on a longer term writing project 'Touching the Buddha:
encounters with a charismatic object'. He proposed the motion
in a debate as
part of the Other WIthin seminar series and gave the last of the seminars
on 'Back
to the Future? Locating and Re-locating England' which
attempted to begin bringing together different strands of his research. He
will be giving papers at the Museum Ethnographers Group's and Association
of Social
Anthropologists' conferences in early April on 'Making Professionals':
The Pitt Rivers Museum 1884-1914' and 'Culture and Civilisation: Untangling
Tylorian Roots'.
Sundial; Pocket compass and sun-dial
donated by Mrs Weldon. 1927.46.14
Peter Rivière paper on the development of English museums
like the Museum of English Rural Life at Reading was accepted by the Journal
of History of Collections and will be published shortly. He also worked on
the London gunmakers who contributed to the English collections.
This is the last of the progress reports for the project. Please note that
the Other Within website will continue
to be updated over the next few months as the final outcomes of the project
become available.
Alison Petch
1 April 2009
