Assembling and governing cultures ‘at risk’ : centers of collection and calculation, from the museum to world heritage

I begin by bringing together two statements, written just over a century apart, that present arguments for the formation of different kinds of collections. The first was written by Alfred Cort Haddon in his introduction to Head-Hunters: Black, White, and Brown (1901), a popular account of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, New Guinea, and Borneo. The expedition was responsible for the collection of thousands of objects and recordings of indigenous people (including photographs, films, wax cylinder recordings, quantitative observations of physiology, and volumes of hand-written field notes), which were subsequently removed and relocated to the University of Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in England (and elsewhere).