Academic IELTS Reading Practice - 119 - The Department of Ethnography
The Department of Ethnography
The Department of Ethnography was created as a separate department
within the British Museum in 1946, after 140 years of gradual
development from the original Department of Antiquities. If is concerned
with the people of Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Pacific and parts of
Europe. While this includes complex kingdoms, as in Africa, and ancient
empires, such as those of the Americas, the primary focus of attention
in the twentieth century has been on small-scale societies. Through its
collections, the Department’s specific interest is to document how
objects are created and used, and to understand their importance and
significance to those who produce them. Such objects can include both
the extraordinary and the mundane, the beautiful and the banal.
The collections of the Department of Ethnography include approximately
300,000 artifacts, of which about half are the product of the present
century. The Department has a vital role to play in providing
information on non-Western cultures to visitors and scholars. To this
end, the collecting emphasis has often been less on individual objects
than on groups of material which allow the display of a broad range of a
society’s cultural expressions. Much of the more recent collecting was
carried out in the field, sometimes by Museum staff working on general
anthropological projects in collaboration with a wide variety of
national governments and other institutions. The material collected
includes great technical series - for instance, of textiles from
Bolivia, Guatemala, Indonesia and areas of West Africa - or of artifact
types such as boats. The latter include working examples of coracles
from India, reed boars from Lake Titicaca in the Andes, kayaks from the
Arctic, and dug-out canoes from several countries. The field
assemblages, such as those from the Sudan, Madagascar and Yemen, include
a whole range of material culture representative of one people. This
might cover the necessities of life of an African herdsman or on Arabian
farmer, ritual objects, or even on occasion airport art. Again, a
series of acquisitions might represent a decade’s fieldwork documenting
social experience as expressed in the varieties of clothing and
jewellery styles, tents and camel trappings from various Middle Eastern
countries, or in the developing preferences in personal adornment and
dress from Papua New Guinea. Particularly interesting are a series of
collections which continue to document the evolution of ceremony and of
material forms for which the Department already possesses early (if nor
the earliest) collections formed after the first contact with Europeans.
The importance of these acquisitions extends beyond the objects
themselves. They come to the Museum with documentation of the social
context, ideally including photographic records. Such acquisitions have
multiple purposes. Most significantly they document for future change.
Most people think of the cultures represented in the collection in terms
of the absence of advanced technology. In fact, traditional practices
draw on a continuing wealth of technological ingenuity. Limited
resources and ecological constraints are often overcome by personal
skills that would be regarded as exceptional in the West. Of growing
interest is the way in which much of what we might see as disposable is,
elsewhere, recycled and reused.
With the Independence of much of Asia and Africa after 1945, it was
assumed that economic progress would rapidly lead to the disappearance
or assimilation of many small-scale societies. Therefore, it was felt
that the Museum should acquire materials representing people whose art
or material culture, ritual or political structures were on the point of
irrevocable change. This attitude altered with the realization that
marginal communities can survive and adapt .In spite of partial
integration into a notoriously fickle world economy. Since the
seventeenth century, with the advent of trading companies exporting
manufactured textiles to North America and Asia, the importation of
cheap goods has often contributed to the destruction of local skills and
indigenous markets. On the one hand modern imported goods may be used
in an everyday setting, while on the other hand other traditional
objects may still be required for ritually significant events. Within
this context trade and exchange attitudes are inverted. What are
utilitarian objects to a Westerner may be prized objects in other
cultures - when transformed by local ingenuity - principally for
aesthetic value. In the some way, the West imports goods from other
peoples and in certain circumstances categories them as ‘art’.
Collections act as an ever-expanding database, nor merely for scholars
and anthropologists, bur for people involved in a whole range of
educational and artistic purposes. These include schools and
universities as well as colleges of art and design. The provision of
information about non-Western aesthetics and techniques, not just for
designers and artists but for all visitors, is a growing responsibility
for a Department whose own context is an increasingly multicultural
European society.
Questions 1-6
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 119?
In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet write
TRUE if the statement is true according to the passage
FALSE if the statement is false according to the passage
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage
In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet write
TRUE if the statement is true according to the passage
FALSE if the statement is false according to the passage
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage
The Department of Ethnography replaced the Department of FALSE
Antiquities at the British Museum.
1 The twentieth-century collections come mainly from mainstream societies such as the US and Europe.
2 The Department of Ethnography focuses mainly on modern societies.
3 The Department concentrates on collecting single unrelated objects of great value.
4 The textile collection of the Department of Ethnography is the largest in the world.
5 Traditional societies are highly inventive in terms of technology.
6 Many small-scale societies have survived and adapted in spite of predictions to the contrary.
Questions 7-12
Some of the exhibits at the Department of Ethnography are listed below (Questions 7-12). The writer gives these exhibits as examples of different collection types. Match each exhibit with the collection type with which it is associated in Reading Passage 119.
Write the appropriate letters in boxes 7-12 on your answer sheet. NB You may use any collection type more than once.
Example Answer
Boats AT
Collection Type:
AT Artifact Types
EC Evolution of Ceremony
FA Field Assemblages
SE Social Experience
TS Technical Series
7 Bolivian textiles
8 Indian coracles
9 airport art
10 Arctic kayaks
11 necessities of life of an Arabian farmer
12 tents from the Middle East
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