Pitt Rivers Museum - University of Oxford

Research Projects
Research continues to be an integral part of many aspects of the Museum’s work, ranging
from that carried out with the aid of externally funded projects to the detailed investigations
that are carried out as part of accessioning procedures and cataloguing (see above). Much of
the Museum’s activity in this area was again focused on the projects funded by major
research grants successfully applied for in recent years that enable the institution to stay at the
cutting edge of contemporary, particularly collections-based, research. This section outlines
just some of the major research carried out by Museum staff during the year.
‘Recovering the Material and Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological
Resource’, funded by a grant of £224,668 to Jeremy Coote and Elizabeth Edwards from the
Resource Enhancement Scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, began on 1
October 2003. The project focused on the Museum’s collections from an area of central
importance for anthropology in general, and British anthropology in particular, through the
work of a number of people including Oxford anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Each of
the 1,200+ objects and 5,000+ photographs in the collection was recatalogued, with detailed
descriptions and transcripts of existing documentation, and digital images of all objects were
created. During the reporting year, further cataloguing work was carried out, and the website
completed. The project came to an end in October 2006, by which time all the material
created, including related biographical and cultural databases, was available online.
The research project ‘Tibet Visual History, 1920–50’, funded by a grant of £238,000 to
Elizabeth Edwards and Clare Harris (and Richard Blurton of the British Museum) from the
Arts and Humanities Research Council, began in May 2004. Mandy Sadan, Krystyna Cech,
and Gabriel Hanganu continued working on the project until October 2006. The project
continued to attract researchers to the Museum with interests in various aspects of Tibetan
studies and the completed website, which was launched in late 2006, has been received with
great enthusiasm, particularly in the Tibetan exile community in India and in Lhasa, Tibet. It
is anticipated that the website will be launched publicly in May 2008.
The research project ‘The Other Within: An Anthropology of Englishness at the Pitt
Rivers Museum’, funded by a grant of £370,500 to Chris Gosden and Hélène La Rue from
the Economic and Social Research Council, began work in April 2006. The three-year project
aims to analyse the collections of the museum, together with the history and motives of the
people making the collections, to throw new light on what was being collected and how this
was used through display and/or writing to throw light on ‘survivals’ within English culture,
which were taken to be the mark of long-term histories. The overall aim of the project is to
use the Museum’s collection, with its connected documentation, to illuminate the modern
construction of Englishness. The changing structure of the English ethnographic collections
will be analysed, focusing on the counties of Essex, Somerset, Yorkshire, and Oxfordshire,
and on Greater London. Archival resources will be used to provide rich contextual
information about the artefacts and the people who collected them. Researcher Alison Petch
was joined on the project by Chris Wingfield in September 2006.
Research Visitors
There were 191 recorded research visits to the Museum during the year requiring retrieval of
material from the displays or reserve collections. Of these, 139 were to the object collections
and 52 to the photographic and manuscript collections (the latter totalling 65 study days).
While the number of research visits to the object collections increased slightly (from 107),
the number of visitors to the photographic and manuscript collections decreased (from 115).
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