Browsing by Subject "http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p22616"

The subject of this master’s thesis is private collectors, their collections and the life of those collections, i.e. things. The main research question is why do we collect things? Through this question this study hopes to gain insight into our general relationship to things and the life of things, i.e., what is it to be human among things. The collectors in this study are ones who have established a private museum around their collections. Anthropological studies about collectors and private museums are relatively scarce, although the image of the collector and the question of the accumulation of possessions are both of great contemporary relevance. The museum as an institution fuses these two aspects into a formalized endeavor to collect, to save, to keep and accrue objects indefinitely and seemingly without limits. Museums are institutional collectors bound for limitless accumulation with taxonomy. All of this merits further anthropological scrutiny. The object of this study is to think with the collections, to learn from them, and attempt to discern from collectors and museum proprietors what purposes and needs things fulfill beyond their strictly utilitarian roles and the obvious meanings we give to them, and what sort of transformational potential is immanent in the museum, the collector and the collection, if any. The material for this study was collected in the form of semi-structured interviews and participant observation, where the “observing” and “participating” happened within and with the collections and museumscapes, often a very tactile dialectic through which the object and the subject are revealed as processes rather than strictly separate aspects, the lived world of things revealed as a state of becoming rather than being. These perspectives were opened up through a phenomenological approach to the study. The fieldwork was conducted during three months in the summer of 2019, as part of a larger project focused on so-called “micromuseums”. Sixty museums were visited around Finland from Lapland to the southern archipelago. Interviews were conducted with the proprietors of 37 museums. The locations and collections were also photographed extensively. The results of this study were that the reasons for collecting are an endeavor to grasp the past, to preserve things for others, to create a collection, an assemblage or coming-together of things that would outlast the collector. Collecting and the museum show themselves to be profoundly relational and collective. Being human among things is revealed as an ambivalent existence and our relationship to things challenging and contradictory.