Open Collections

The imagined encounter : reliving and recreating identity in the Exotic World Museum

University of British Columbia

The Exotic World Museum is a small amateur ethnographic museum created by Harold Morgan and founded on his extensive tourist travels with his wife Barbara. It consists of over 500 pictures, photographs, labels and artifacts which cover the walls and ceiling of the back room of Alexander Lamb's Wunderkammer Antiques, where it is currently housed. Through this museum, Morgan has created an identity for himself as a world traveler and a learned man. As such, the collection stands as a narrative of Morgan's life, portraying the identity he has projected for himself. Morgan constructs this identity by establishing authenticity through the Museum and tourist experience, by using the National Geographic as a projection in which to place himself, and by creating an encounter between Self and Other. As such, the study of Exotic World has larger implications in the context of the history of museums and of collecting in general.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-08-06

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/11817

Anthropology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace