Anthropology, Opportunity, and Empire: Collecting Expeditions in Sarawak and the Philippines, 1898–1909

Abstract:This article examines several collecting expeditions to the Philippines and Sarawak, Borneo between 1898 and 1909. Collectors on these expeditions collected Indigenous cultural objects, human remains, anthropological data, and natural specimens in order to build up museum collections in Sarawak, England, and the United States. This article argues that to varying degrees, these expeditions were all directly or indirectly supported by imperial power, through funding, logistical aid, protection, or by the use of Indigenous labor. These collectors were informed by imperial ethnographers and collecting guides and shaped their collecting goals accordingly. They attempted to preserve objects and specimens they deemed to be in threat of disappearing due to increasing Western imperial influences. These collectors utilized this salvage rhetoric and the structures of empire to attempt to gain social mobility and professional prestige as anthropology developed as a discipline in the early twentieth century.