The Ethnographic Collection
One's Culture
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The Will to Live and to Cherish
Mirjana Menković, Beograd/ Serbien und Montenegro
The meaning of an ethnographic object, the substance of a col-lection representing the sum total of the meanings of its constituentparts, the continual reinterpretation born of an inexhaustible urge toregenerate the individual and the collective, and the insight whichtradition gives us into the individuality and identity of a particularcollectivity cannot be conveyed by mere enumeration and presenta-tion of percentages regarding new acquisitions and the expansion ofcollections. The traditions deeply embedded in the very tissue ofmodern European society will survive not as something anachronousa specificity bearing no relation to time and space but as an or-ganic part of that society's ethno- physical, historical, social, societaland political being.
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In order to be able to put forward a viable framework for ourfuture cooperation- which is the object of every meeting and discus-sion, including the present one- we feel we must bear in mind theessential meaning of the ethnographic object, our attitude towardsour own tradition, the degree of preservation of that tradition and,especially, the content of the ethnographic collection in the contextof research and exhibition work and vice versa.
Our subject matter is the study of everyday life, set within aframework determined by ethnology; and we shall use the traditionalcostume as a paradigm in drawing our concrete conclusions. Thereasons for this are manifold: costume collections absolutely pre-dominate in our ethnographic museum collections;
The Ethnographic Museum of Serbia, one of the foremost cul-tural establishments in South East Europe, possesses 51.000 objectsin basic collections as well as some 47.000 printed pages, negatives,photographs, drawings, archival items, film and video recordings andnewspaper clippings; the House of Manak, which forms part of theMuseum, houses 2.600 objects, 1.600 negatives and 23.000 pages ofmanuscript; and the Museum Library has 57.000 books and periodi-