Contenu du sommaire : Collections mixtes

Around the time of the French Revolution, and more particularly during the major (re)organisations of 1793–1795, Parisian collections were rapidly beginning to specialise in one of the four main areas of physical objects, namely nature, antiquities, technology and fine arts. By around 1800, collections that were rejecting this specialisation model and combining naturalia and artificialia had come to be devalued in the same way that private and institutional provincial collections were. Although the provincial collections were still combining natural and artificial objects by around 1810, the latter were different from those exhibited in the 1780s. The exotic artefacts had either become invisible, or they had been organised into a history of human industry. The pairing of shells (or minerals) and medals (or antiquities) had therefore become the norm. This mixing of heterogenous objects should not be interpreted as the manifestation of an intellectual project that formed connections between different areas of knowledge but rather, somewhat more prosaically, as contingent assemblages that were linked to the very history of collections itself.

During his mission in 1876 on the northern coast of New Guinea, the entomologist Achille Raffray compiled three collections. The first was, unsurprisingly, dedicated to insects and birds. Somewhat more surprisingly though, the second was dedicated to ethnographic objects and the third, to human skulls. On his return to France, the three collections were purchased by the state, and the items were deposited in the Musée du Trocadéro. To date, this latter collection of around one hundred pieces has received no attention from researchers. However, it is a remarkable example of a collection for its time. Raffray's account of his travels, published in Le Tour du Monde, affords us an understanding of how he compiled the collection in light of the debates in the world of anthropology at the time on the question of art and aesthetics.

Based on three case studies drawn from the history of Swiss ethnography in the first three decades of the 20th century, this article calls into question the validity of a chronology that is suggested by a section of historiography, which implies that the establishment of ethnography as a discipline led to the disappearance of mixed collection practices and their replacement with discipline-based collections. The article also questions the validity of the concept of mixed practices. In the first section, the discipline-based processes underpinning the historiographical explanation of the transformation of practices are identified. This is followed in the second section by a presentation of three mixed expeditions, which took place at different times during the development of ethnography as a discipline. The first expedition occurred at the beginning of the process in Sulawesi (Celebes) between 1893 and 1896. The second took place in the New Hebrides, between 1910 and 1912, when the development of ethnography as a discipline was well underway, and the third came at the end of the process in Angola in 1933. Noting a perpetuation of mixed practices, the final section explores the local and institutional motives for this persistence.

During the Brussels World's Fair in 1897, King Leopold II set up a Congolese section in Tervuren in a building that was to become the colonial museum. Fitted out by Art Nouveau architects, like Paul Hankar and Henry van de Velde, it brought together ethnographic collections, imported and exported products and live animals. It also had a reception room housing ivory statuettes produced by Belgian artists. Ivory was displayed in all its forms at the exhibition, including the Belgian ivory artworks, Congolese ethnographic objects and even tusks and teeth incorporated into both the decor and the staged Congolese scenes involving real Congolese people. A true total work of art, the exhibition owed its coherence to a profound connection between Art Nouveau – referred to as ‘Congo style' for its vitalistic use of exotic materials and primitivistic forms – and the sponsors' colonial ideology.

Eurocentric works of art are historically defined as unique visual objects. From the 1960s onwards, however, this model was shattered by artists who were turning living things into art and revealing the artistic significance of the nature and culture or human and nonhuman dichotomies. What do these mixed media works that combine living things with objects become the moment they enter a collection? Drawing on four recent case studies comprising mould, insects, animals and even human bodies, this article aims to understand how conservators maintain these mixed media entities in a collection and to what extent their liveness can be preserved. With reference to the paradoxes of the objectualisation of art and its consequences, it considers the roles of exhibition duration and protocol in the bricolage of these works' provisional, pluralist ontologies.

Collecting both primitive art and natural specimens establishes relationships with these two types of objects that are more similar than might be supposed. The ethnographic approach goes beyond the objects' disparities to uncover the discursive, physical and conceptual continuities that collectors establish between the different elements in these categories. These are evident in the ways collectors show their collections as well as in their aesthetic preferences, the spatial arrangements of their pieces, their analogisms, their fusional projections and even in their reflections on the fragment, selection and time. All these different aspects, which are put into perspective here, fall under the same inclusive gaze. They portray an imagination that is both intimate and cosmological, which pertains to the construction of a subjective and therefore inevitably singular relationship with the world.

This article analyses Ernesto de Martino's unfinished final research project. His notes from the project were published posthumously under the title The End of the World. The article goes right back to the distant sources of the project, when Primitive Magic was conceived in the 1940s and when De Martino was discovering the works of Sergei Shirokogoroff on the Tungusic shamans and – through Wilhelm Mühlmann, a Nazi researcher in folklore and anthropology – Martin Heidegger's thinking. This was the context in which De Martino developed his fundamental thesis on the loss of presence. It was not until the beginning of the 1960s, however, that his thesis became linked to the theme of the end of the world through Michelangelo Antonioni's 1962 film – or rather the closing minutes of it – The Eclipse.