The Formation of the African Collection at the Pennsylvania Museum of Archaelogy and Anthropology, Late 19th Century

Abstract

This essay deals with the first acquisitions of the African collection of the Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania, a striking example of the formation of anthropology museums in the United States and their connections with European imperialism in Africa. The documentation consulted on the formation of the Penn Museum’s collection is in the Penn Museum Archives. I critically examine the archives, vocabulary, and organization of the foundational narrative to denaturalize colonial categories of knowledge produced in the past that remain as choices of the present. The imperial criteria involved in collecting and analyzing African material culture consolidated a distorted narrative about symbols of power, transformed into museum objects. Consequently, museums miseducated generations about the objects’ artistic production and social context. So, I offer an analysis of the creative output of an ivory bracelet from the ancient Kingdom of Benin that belongs to the Penn Museum African Collection.