Abstract
In 1956 an assortment of approximately 232 objects, photo albums, books, and personal papers were donated to the Sacramento State College Department of Anthropology. The Beardsley Collection, as it is now known, was amassed around the turn of the 20th century by George F. and Alice W. Beardsley of San Francisco and Carmel, California, and comprises ethnographic, natural history and decorative art objects from Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, the Pacific Islands and North America. My research traces and analyzes the shifting sociohistorical significance and value of the Collection through three phases of its commodified career: first as a privately developed collection that reflects the lives and subjectivities of the Beardsleys, second as a museum acquisition and embodiment of mid-twentieth century disciplinary concerns, and lastly as, itself, a museum “artifact” worthy of ethnographic inquiry. An analysis of the collection's social biography—its life history—in this way contributes to a wider corpus of scholarship and comparative data concerned with the relationship between museums and imperialism, collecting, and materiality.