ABSTRACT

In the edition of his poems entitled The Memory o f War and Children in Exile, James Fenton included a piece entitled ‘The Pitt Rivers’ which brings together the themes of exile and the particular kind of exotic material of which the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, is a prime example.1 The poem says:

Beware. You are entering the climate o f a foreign logic And are cursed by the hair Of a witch, earth from the grave o f a man Killed by a tiger and a woman who died in Childbirth, ...