Ethnography

A few years ago, I participated to the Annual General Meeting of the Ethnography

Museum of Geneva in which we started a discussion about the objects chosen

for ethnographic exhibits. The issues revolved around the difficulty of choosing

the objects to be exposed. One of the difficulties mentioned was on the plethora

of objects that the ethnographer would either have to borrow from different

sources like museums or private collectors or specialised antiquarian markets

when I suggested that an important criterium would be the artistic value

of the object observed according to the harmony of its shape, colour, the preciosity

of its raw material like the quality of the wood or the purity of the metal coupled

with the idiosyncratic moulding capacity of the artist.