Lucie Carreau
SRU Phd 2009
Education
2003. Diplôme de 1er cycle de l'Ecole du Louvre. Ecole du Louvre, Paris
2004. Diplôme de 2ème cycle de l'Ecole du Louvre. Ecole du Louvre, Paris
2005. MA. Sainsbury Research Unit, Norwich.
Research interests
Anthropology, art history, history of collections, history of colonialism, pacific material culture, history and ethics of collecting, contemporary pacific arts.
Phd Thesis
My thesis focuses on the private collection of Pacific objects gathered by British brewer Harry Geoffrey Beasley between 1895 and 1939. The collection was transformed into a private museum (the "Cranmore Ethnographical Museum", Chislehurst, Kent) in 1928.
Combining museum-based collections work and archival research, my research aims to virtually reconstruct Beasley's collection (through the creation of an object database recording over 6,000 objects) and reveal the complex networks of relationships instrumental to its formation. I hope to show that the various disciplines and professions of anthropology and museology were, at the time, influential to and influenced by private collecting, and that such entanglements were of crucial importance in defining boundaries between public and private institutions and practices.
A closer look at Beasley's collecting practices also helps think through the concepts of collecting and collection and reassess private collectors' contribution to our modern museums. The concept of bricolage (Lévi-Strauss), the relationships between parts and wholes (Strathern) as well as the notion of embodiment and distributed personhood (Gell) are useful tools to re-evaluate our perceptions of a collection's boundaries, completeness and meaning – as a whole, or after dispersion in new historical and cultural perspectives.
General view of the Cranmore Ethnographical Museum, Chislehurst (Kent). Photographer and date unknown. Published in Ethnologia Cranmorensis No II, 1938.
Portrait of Harry Geoffrey Beasley. Photographer and date unknown. Published in Ethnologia Cranmorensis No IV 1939.