Ming Qing Yanjiu 24 (2020) 1–10
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Introduction to Special Issue on “Collecting,
Collections, and Collectors”
Phillip Grimberg
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department for Chinese Studies,
Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and Visiting
Research Fellow at the International Consortium for Research in the
Humanities (ICRH/IKGF) “Fate, Freedom, and Prognostication”,
Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
The contributors to this special issue of Ming Qing Yanjiu have brought togeth-
er diverse and original scholarship on various aspects of our topic that reflects
upon the complexity of collecting as a concerted social act. Broadly defined
as the selective acquisition and maintenance of an interrelated set of objects,
collecting has long played a prominent role in different strata of society across
time and cultures.1
In the introduction to their edited volume on Cultures of Collecting John
Elsner and Roger Cardinal identify “[the] urge to erect a permanent complete
system against the destructiveness of time” as one of the most compelling in-
centives for collecting.2 Thus, in keeping, maintaining, and safeguarding objects
that carry multiple meanings—personal, historical, social, political, cultural,
or other—while simultaneously ascribing a certain value and a biographical
dimension to these objects based on historic and/or social contingency,3 the
collector functions as a transmitter of material evidence of human creative
and mimetic acts.4 The fruit of these acts might eventually feature in a cata-
logue or an inventory of a given collection that provides information about
the objects collected. However inchoate and vestigial, the practice of recording
a collection’s contents evidently points to an intent not only to itemize, but
1 Belk 1994: 318.
2 Elsner and Cardinal 1994: 1.
3 Kopytoff 1986.
4 Adorno 1970.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/24684791-12340040
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, 2 Grimberg
also to categorize and classify the collected objects. Accordingly, Elsner and
Cardinal state that
Collecting is classification lived […]. The history of collecting is thus the
narrative of how human beings have striven to accommodate, to appro-
priate and to extend the taxonomies and systems of knowledge they have
inherited.5
Collecting, therefore, expatiates on the collector’s endeavour of ordering the
world and the objects he collects. Accordingly, collecting can be regarded as
a cultural system that produces and maintains its very prerogative: handing
down knowledge and preserving its physical remnants as tangible proof of a
past that may function as a model for the present and the future.6
Objects imbued with meaning—ascribed by individuals as well as social
groups and institutions—thus become documents that need to be contextual-
ized, properly ‘read’, interpreted, and understood as would be the case with
any written historical record. Therefore, object-related knowledge or ‘mate-
rial literacy’, that is, the capacity to thoroughly contextualize and interpret an
object,7 as well as its distribution through objects is, of course, closely linked
to the material aspects of memory culture and its inherent interpretations of
the past. Following Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) and his concept of collec-
tive memory, collecting and the objects themselves not only pertain to indi-
vidual memories or a personally charged motivation for collecting, but also
to a collective public sphere of collecting cultures that is best exemplified by
modern museum collections.8 As such, museums function both as repositories
of material culture and related systems of knowledge as well as (new and ar-
tificial, yet essential) frames of reference for the objects they house. Museum
collections and other publicly accessible collections in general thus function
as archives of cultural memories that may be shared among social groups.9
Museums preserve and disseminate knowledge that goes beyond the material-
ity of the collected objects, pointing to their inherent faculties of representing
and evoking collectively shared memories.
Not only does the idea of preserving and safeguarding objects as memen-
tos and tokens of the past lie at the very core of the concept of collecting, it
5 Elsner and Cardinal 1994: 2.
6 Baudrillard 1994: 7–24.
7 Grimberg 2019a: 25.
8 Halbwachs 1952.
9 Pearce 2017; Greenhill 1992.
Ming Qing Yanjiu 24 (2020) 1–10
Downloaded from Brill.com05/24/2020 04:00:42PM
via free access
brill.com/mqyj
Introduction to Special Issue on “Collecting,
Collections, and Collectors”
Phillip Grimberg
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department for Chinese Studies,
Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and Visiting
Research Fellow at the International Consortium for Research in the
Humanities (ICRH/IKGF) “Fate, Freedom, and Prognostication”,
Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
The contributors to this special issue of Ming Qing Yanjiu have brought togeth-
er diverse and original scholarship on various aspects of our topic that reflects
upon the complexity of collecting as a concerted social act. Broadly defined
as the selective acquisition and maintenance of an interrelated set of objects,
collecting has long played a prominent role in different strata of society across
time and cultures.1
In the introduction to their edited volume on Cultures of Collecting John
Elsner and Roger Cardinal identify “[the] urge to erect a permanent complete
system against the destructiveness of time” as one of the most compelling in-
centives for collecting.2 Thus, in keeping, maintaining, and safeguarding objects
that carry multiple meanings—personal, historical, social, political, cultural,
or other—while simultaneously ascribing a certain value and a biographical
dimension to these objects based on historic and/or social contingency,3 the
collector functions as a transmitter of material evidence of human creative
and mimetic acts.4 The fruit of these acts might eventually feature in a cata-
logue or an inventory of a given collection that provides information about
the objects collected. However inchoate and vestigial, the practice of recording
a collection’s contents evidently points to an intent not only to itemize, but
1 Belk 1994: 318.
2 Elsner and Cardinal 1994: 1.
3 Kopytoff 1986.
4 Adorno 1970.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/24684791-12340040
Downloaded from Brill.com05/24/2020 04:00:42PM
via free access
, 2 Grimberg
also to categorize and classify the collected objects. Accordingly, Elsner and
Cardinal state that
Collecting is classification lived […]. The history of collecting is thus the
narrative of how human beings have striven to accommodate, to appro-
priate and to extend the taxonomies and systems of knowledge they have
inherited.5
Collecting, therefore, expatiates on the collector’s endeavour of ordering the
world and the objects he collects. Accordingly, collecting can be regarded as
a cultural system that produces and maintains its very prerogative: handing
down knowledge and preserving its physical remnants as tangible proof of a
past that may function as a model for the present and the future.6
Objects imbued with meaning—ascribed by individuals as well as social
groups and institutions—thus become documents that need to be contextual-
ized, properly ‘read’, interpreted, and understood as would be the case with
any written historical record. Therefore, object-related knowledge or ‘mate-
rial literacy’, that is, the capacity to thoroughly contextualize and interpret an
object,7 as well as its distribution through objects is, of course, closely linked
to the material aspects of memory culture and its inherent interpretations of
the past. Following Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) and his concept of collec-
tive memory, collecting and the objects themselves not only pertain to indi-
vidual memories or a personally charged motivation for collecting, but also
to a collective public sphere of collecting cultures that is best exemplified by
modern museum collections.8 As such, museums function both as repositories
of material culture and related systems of knowledge as well as (new and ar-
tificial, yet essential) frames of reference for the objects they house. Museum
collections and other publicly accessible collections in general thus function
as archives of cultural memories that may be shared among social groups.9
Museums preserve and disseminate knowledge that goes beyond the material-
ity of the collected objects, pointing to their inherent faculties of representing
and evoking collectively shared memories.
Not only does the idea of preserving and safeguarding objects as memen-
tos and tokens of the past lie at the very core of the concept of collecting, it
5 Elsner and Cardinal 1994: 2.
6 Baudrillard 1994: 7–24.
7 Grimberg 2019a: 25.
8 Halbwachs 1952.
9 Pearce 2017; Greenhill 1992.
Ming Qing Yanjiu 24 (2020) 1–10
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