ABSTRACT
Many early modem museums gave pride of place to collections of objects designated as 'artificial' (that is, man-made) and 'exotic' (that is, not from the West). Almost inevitably, the attention paid to these objects tended to draw its parameters from well-established categories. Examples of common and familiar indigenous objects clearly provided the most obvious points of comparison - the very necessary 'windows' through which to squint and try to make some sense of what was after all a flood of new, sometimes shockingly new, objects. It was this comparative process that allowed any understanding at all of the exotic foreign cultures from which these objects came.
