Popular Collecting and the Everyday Self: The Reinvention of Museums?

Folklore, April, 2001 by George Monger

Popular Collecting and the Everyday Self: The Reinvention of Museums? By Paul Martin. London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999. 179 pp. 11 illus. 39 figures and tables, index. 45.00 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-7185-0170-5

Collecting is a very difficult pastime to intellectualise. The museum curator collects because it is part of the job. But this is not personal collecting; it is an almost dispassionate accumulating of material culture in whatever form, to teach, to chronicle, to challenge and to enliven. But personal collecting--that is another matter. Why do people collect things and what do they collect? Popular Collecting and the Everyday Self tries to address these questions

Some of the things which people become fascinated with may seem trivial, but we should remember that very often the trivial is part of a wider story. A focus by an individual on, say, Goss china, will provide more in-depth information on that subject than a wide-ranging museum collection, which may contain a few examples with no related in-depth knowledge. The explosion of popular/private collections seems to be a product of the late twentieth century where, to a greater or lesser extent, the commodification of objects has increased. Commercial organisations have also latched on to the collecting mentality by producing items specifically for people to collect, or as "limited editions," or giving items away as a marketing tool.

Paul Martin has attempted to explore the reasons for collecting and, using case studies of individual collectors and collectors' clubs, has identified motivational differences in collecting between the genders. Martin points out the dichotomy between the "professional" (museum) collector, whose public collection was perhaps started by a private individual. The relationship between collectors focusing often on a single subject and museums has also been examined. Here there appears to be a certain amount of respect tinged with a large pinch of suspicion on each side. However, bridges have been built by museums by, for example, putting on "People's Shows," where individual collectors are given public space in which to display their material. The accounts from collectors and observation of collectors' clubs are illuminating; so is the consideration of sources of collectables with the range of material collected, the commercial use of the collecting habit through the sale of "limited editions" and the organisation of collectors' clubs.

Problems arise when the author tries to put the academic, intellectual or

psychological spin on reasons for collecting. It almost seems that "I like it" or "It/they fascinate me" is not always reason enough. The magpie/jackdaw syndrome inherent in some collecting behaviour is touched upon, though not explored, in some of the case studies of collectors with multiple collections. However, there is a collecting instinct in the way people collect ornaments as mementoes of holidays or special occasions. Indeed, specially produced mementoes--such as Goss china items--have become collectable items in their own right.

This book is important as a contribution to the debate about the relationship between collectors and museums. This debate is important within the development of the virtual museum and the context of museum services such as that at Croydon (where the museum holds little or nothing in the way of three-dimensional collections). There is also a debate about collecting being an expression of the wish for the "real thing," or what is perceived as such, and that museums should be repositories of the real thing and the real experience (which is not always the case).

Within the museum world, we can see a shift, obliquely suggested in this book, in the role of museums and curators. Often the curator is not necessarily a subject specialist but a manager of a museum. However, publicly, the museum is still seen as a repository of specialist and local knowledge.

Despite its shortcomings in the more analytical parts of this work, it provides a good springboard for those in the museum sector to consider their role and question what is being collected and why. This book provides food for thought within the field of folklore studies regarding relationships between individual collectors and institutions.

As in the collecting outlined in Martin's book, there are many individuals collecting and studying defined individual subjects which are fragments of a cultural whole rarely satisfactorily brought together.

George Monger, Folklore Society