Curators, Hoarders, and Looters: The Long and Curious History of Collecting

What does it mean to collect? What drives human cultures to amass, hoard, steal, select, separate and display objects? This undergraduate lecture course – at the intersection of anthropology, geography, history, and museum studies – examines forms and practices of collecting from antiquity to the present. We will explore museums, archives, libraries, and other less formal institutions from around the globe, probing in the process the disciplinary boundaries by which scholars have sought to understand the implications of collections in different times and distant territories. We will unpack libraries, visit early modern cabinets of curiosities, and gain insights into Indigenous collections: from Polynesia to Mashantucket. And we will address the fraught yet fascinating relationship between the collection, the catalogue, and the archive – and the gathering, registering, and organizing that constitute them.