When an Old House Whispers: A Canadian Collector

Here's a great little article on a South Sea artifacts collector:

http://househistorian.blogspot.se/2009/10/4698-west-4th-avenue-south-sea.html

Wonderful photos of his collection, wish they would be bigger. In every metropolis, there once was such a Polynesiac who's Tiki fever was often the foundation of the local Ethnographic museum.

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2013-07-06 14:54 ]

Just amazing. It's seems that back then the world was much bigger, troubles were farther away and mystery and adventure was still out there for those willing to find it. Thanks for posting the article.

On 2013-07-05 23:19, bigbrotiki wrote:
Here's a great little article on a South Sea artifacts collector:

http://househistorian.blogspot.se/2009/10/4698-west-4th-avenue-south-sea.html

Wonderful photos of his collection, wish they would be bigger. In every metropolis, there once was such a Polynesiac who's Tiki fever was often the foundation of the local Ethnographic museum.

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2013-07-06 14:54 ]

Mahalo Sven!

Good stuff. Thanks Sven.

Here's one of the many photos from the article.

Here ya go Bigbro. They're nice and big here:

http://searcharchives.vancouver.ca/;search?query=dr.+frank+burnett+collection

Click on the thumbnail, when it takes you to the page with the photo, click on the photo and it will get big. Click on the photo again and it gets REALLY BIG .
The pages load slow, so be patient.

GROG miss Tiki-Kate

[ Edited by: GROG 2013-07-09 00:11 ]

On 2013-07-08 23:58, GROG wrote:
Here ya go Bigbro. They're nice and big here:

http://searcharchives.vancouver.ca/;search?query=dr.+frank+burnett+collection

Click on the thumbnail, when it takes you to the page with the photo, click on the photo and it will get big. Click on the photo again and it gets REALLY BIG .
The pages load slow, so be patient.

---

GROG miss Tiki-Kate

[ Edited by: GROG 2013-07-09 00:11 ]
Mahalo to you too Ernie-You one awesome cave man!

Holy hell.

Cool Story!

I stumbled across some of the photos of this man, while trying to research the origins of an I Ula tavatava that I acquired.
Never did find any info about the club....

Thanks for posting!

On 2013-07-08 23:58, GROG wrote:
Here ya go Bigbro. They're nice and big here......

Thanks G-man. I really wanted to see the details in these photos:

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?

One example: The Stockholm Ethnographic museum currently has a show about their "Magazin" - their storage: As in all the other museums, they can only display a small percentage of their collection, so they decided to pull out a much larger number to illustrate what is there:

They managed to squeeze 6000 artifacts into the show....

...but they have 250 000 in their storage. And this is a low number for some museums. This was the "fever" that Karl Woerman was talking about, and to which Tiki mug collecting pales in comparison.

Some more pictures of Franks collection can be seen here.

http://collection-online.moa.ubc.ca/collection-online/search/person?person=402

Although I don't think that is the whole collection.
Digging through here I have found more of his items.

http://collection-online.moa.ubc.ca/collection-online/explore/cultures/6559

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.

I may be in the minority here, but I find the above to be FAR more Tiki than this...

WD: If only all our homes could look like his. The place is amazing, and I hope to someday be that crazy old man in the photo.