ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Love of Possession: H. Otley Beyer’s Ethnographic Records

• In Event: Collection Stories and Indo-Pacific worlds 4

English Abstract

The paper examines the Philippine Ethnography Series (PES), a multivolume compilation of historical and ethnographic sources assembled by anthropologist H. Otley Beyer in the early twentieth century. While the PES consists primarily of student papers and published studies Beyer collected as anthropology professor in the University of the Philippines, it also incorporates documentary materials generated during his earlier tenure as ethnologist of the Bureau of Science (1905–1913), including correspondence, memoranda, inventories, travel reports, and assorted enclosures. By duplicating and reformatting these documents as part of his broader ethnographic system, Beyer transformed administrative records into a curated institutional archive that can be used to reconstruct the activities, routines, and conceptual frameworks of U.S. colonial ethnologists. I analyze Beyer’s PES as a collection structured by Beyer’s documentary habits, classificatory preferences, and what his student the anthropologist E. Arsenio Manuel described as his “love of possession.” Specifically, I attend to his drive for completeness and his impulse to embed sources within his own organizational and classificatory schema. Examining this aspect of the PES highlights both its evidentiary value and its interpretive limits, for while the collection illuminates the racial ideologies, scientific assumptions, and institutional practices of U.S. colonial ethnology, it also bears the imprint of Beyer’s selective preservation and reordering. Situating the PES within broader histories of collecting ultimately shows how such personal archives mediate the historical narratives scholars can reconstruct about knowledge production in U.S. colonial Philippines.

Author

• Jonathan Victor Baldoza, Princeton University