About

This project aims to contribute to a critical museum studies theory to explicate White, middle-class tastes in the ethnographic objects collected on the Northwest Coast of Canada and Alaska in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project will examine the value of an object to a collector as not intrinsic but constructed, and initially ask if the construction of this value is directly linked to the violence of the collecting encounter on the frontier. It will then go on to ask if and how violence functioned in the broader contemporary art market, examining the trade in these ethnographic objects in metropolitan contexts. In analysing how violence and consent function in these contexts, the author aims to more fully theorise the triangular relationship between gendered White colonial identities, gendered violence as experienced by colonised peoples, and the structures of knowledge that shape our contemporary anthropological museums.