Post #685352 by White Devil on Wed, Jul 10, 2013 5:47 AM

I am fascinated with the turn of century "field collecting" craze, that obsession to amass native artifacts on expeditions into exotic lands: It populated Western museums with countless native items, but what did it do to native cultures?

In some cases, it enriched them in like manner. It's an anachronistic standard that we apply retroactively to automatically assume that plundering the stockpiles of indigenous cultures was de facto victimization. Regardless of what the politically correct choose to believe, however, it's inarguable that these exchanges expanded and corrected Western insights into the hitherto-undiscovered. It took us from sensationalistic, ubiquitous cannibal exposes to NatGeo fact-finding. The world is better off for these caches, which almost inevitably became museum collections: catalogued, preserved, conserved and celebrated in ways that never would've occurred had they not been taken elsewhere.