The Urge to Collect: Motives, Obsessions and Tensions

Why do we collect? Where does the urge to collect come from? This book explores the phenomenon of collecting in various contexts. Collecting is an illustration of a strong human-thing entanglement. It can be caused by psychological incentives that are deeply rooted in human doubts and anxieties. It is also related to building a pleasant, unthreatening, and even paradisical, environment to compensate for the uncertainties of everyday life.

The chapters in this book range from psychological perspectives in the Habsburg empire to Rococo collecting in France, from a fanatic English book collector to a 16th/17th century encyclopedic Dutch collector. And finally the fascinating story of Baron Edmond de Rothschild’s boxes.

The contributions to this book were first presented as papers at the seminar "The Psychology of Collecting" in June 2022, organized by the Interdisciplinary Research Group “Museums, Collections and Society” of Leiden University, Netherlands.

Table of Contents

Foreword

The Urge to Collect: An Introduction
Pieter ter Keurs

What Drives the Collector? The Case of Rococo Collecting
Caroline van Eck

From Hegel to Freud. Imperial Museums and the Rise of Psychology in the History of Culture, between Triumphalism and Criticism
Pascal Griener

Tulips, Rabies and Books
Cécilia Hurley-Griener

How to Form a Wunderkammer in 1600? The Encyclopedic Collection of Bernardus Paludanus (1550-1633)
Marika Keblusek

Storing and Staging: Baron Edmond’s Boxes
Juliet Carey

Holly O’Farrell comes from a PhD at the University of Limerick, Ireland. The focus of her research as a PhD candidate has been to look at nineteenth and early twentieth century exhibitions of Middle Eastern culture and question how social constructs intersect and influence the production of and reaction to such displays. The work questions how constructs such as gender, race and class can be mechanisms for implying, creating or maintaining hierarchies and stereotypes about the Middle East in Western minds and the use of exhibitions in supporting the imperialist project.

O’Farrell’s work with Museums, Collections and Society research group at Leiden University focuses on collectors and their collections during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is currently working on collections in Leiden and hope to expand the project from there.

The project seeks to understand whether collections by women were independent and reflected their own choices or was there a male presence behind the bulk of the collections. In a similar manner, Holly analyses women’s supporting role in expeditions, as companions and silent participants in the work of archaeologists, anthropologists and colonialists.

Working with Museums, Collections and Society, Holly O’Farrell’s work focuses on women collectors during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This lecture is an introduction to this topic and to the idea of photography as a form of collecting which women took part in. A number of women’s collections from the Museum of World Cultures will be explored as part of the lecture, as will some internationally famous collections. Ethnographic photographic collections have often been overlooked and it is important now to highlight their significance and contribution to museums, collections and knowledge.