Introduction to Special Issue on “Collecting, Collections, and Collectors”

Abstract

The contributors to this special issue of Ming Qing Yanjiu have brought together 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 incentives 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 catalogue 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