Daan--

I'm always leery of recommending texts, for fear of the reader thinking
"sheesh, of course, that's where I started from.."  But, with that risk in
mind, you might try Arjun Appadurai's The Social Life of Things
(1986:Cambridge), Phyllis Mauch Messenger's edited Ethics of Collecting
Cultural Property:  Whose Culture?  Whose Property? (1989:  University of
New Mexico), and works by (especially On Collecting:  An Investigation into
Collecting in the European Tradition [1995: Routledge] and Museums, Objects
and Collections: A Cultural Study [1992: Smithsonian Institution Press]) or
edited by (Interpreting Objects and Collections [1994: Routledge]) Susan
Pearce.

There's a wealth of literature on some of these topics, from varying
perspectives and with varying agendas--volumes by Deetz, Kaplan, Campbell,
Rudmin, Bayley, Bourdieu, Douglas and Isherwood, Karp and Levine, Elsner and
Cardinal, and Hermann may be useful, and are cited in the texts mentioned
above. Schama's volume on Dutch culture in the Golden Age as it relates to
material goods may also be useful.

Going further afield, you might also want to consider the work of Jean
Baudrillard (esp. The System of Objects, or The Mirror of Production), who
approaches not only objects but their commodification and contextualization
from a different perspective.  In some ways these works treat objects
differently than some earlier works, like Political Economy of the Sign,
which may be of interest as well, depending on the theoretical approach you
adopt.

There's also a journal, Journal of the History of Collections, which may be
useful (as an aside, if anyone has information regarding this journal, I'd
be interested in getting an update on its status).

Sorry to rattle on.  Hope some of the above helps, and good luck with your
research project.

AB
____________________________________

Alex W. Barker
Curator of Archaeology
Dallas Museum of Natural History
PO Box 150349 Dallas, TX 75315-0349
(214) 421-3466 ext. 244 [log in to unmask]

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