“Objects of speculation to the curious”: Salvage ethnography, survivalism & folklore in late Victorian Britain

This paper will examine material ethnographies undertaken by folklorists in the British Isles during the 1890s. Rather than being viewed as antiquarian curiosities the objects collected reflect a number of themes that were explicit in an emergent anthropology. The formulation of racial typologies, formalization of fieldwork techniques, development of anthropological materialism, as well as economic, social and technological progress. Amateur folklorist Robert Craig Maclagan described such collections as comprising “objects of speculation to the curious. This paper will address two significant elements of this intellectual rhetoric– salvage ethnography and the theory of survivals– and show how fringe participants played a formative role in determining the types of object being gathered, even if they did not influence the ways in which such objects were ultimately interpreted.
Oliver Douglas is a graduate of the University of Oxford. He hold a Masters in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester and worked for five years in the Pitt Rivers Museum. He is currently based in the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, writing a dissertation on “The material culture of folklore: British ethnographic collections between 1890 and 1900”. He is also an affiliated researcher on the Pitt Rivers Museum’s current project “The Other Within: An Anthropology of Englishness.”

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