- Also known as
-
Bryan A L Cranstone
-
primary name: Cranstone, Bryan Allan Lefevre
- Details
- individual; curator; academic/intellectual; British; Male
- Life dates
- 1918-1989
- Biography
- Bryan Allan Cranstone (1919 – 1989) - an ethnographer, educator, administrator, editor and writer - was for 30 years curator in the Department of Ethnography of the British Museum, 1947 to 76, becoming Deputy Keeper 1969. He was a visiting lecturer at the University College London between 1955 and 1971 and undertook fieldwork for the Museum in New Guinea in 1963-1964, principally in the Tifalmin Valley, Highlands area of Telefomin District, Sandaun (West Sepik) Province) the purpose of which was to form.. ‘a collection to illustrate as completely as possible the material culture of a mountain people whose way of life had not yet been substantially modified by Western influence.’ (Cranstone 1965, pp 111-112).
Cranstone was Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum from 1976 to 1985 and vice-president of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) between 1980 and 1983. His publications include Melanesia: a short ethnography (1961), The Australian Aborigines (1973) and, with Dorota Starzecka (qv), The Solomon Islanders (1974). The British Museum has over 500 objects collected or acquired by Cranstone, over 80% from New Guinea (almost all from the Telefomin area), forming a representative collection of art and material culture illustrated with a large number of photographs taken on the 1963-64 expedition – a photographic record which also includes images of the culture and natural environment.
- Bibliography
- Cranstone, B. A. L., 1965, ‘The British Museum Ethnographical Expedition to New Guinea, 1963-4: A Preliminary Report', The British Museum Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 3/4 (Summer, 1965), pp. 109-118.
Cranstone, B. A. L., 1966, ‘The British Museum Ethnographical Expedition to New Guinea, 1963-4’, Museums Journal Vol. 65: 1965-6, No. (4 March, 1966) pp. 286-291.
Contemporary Authors Online. Bryan Allan Lefevre Cranstone, The Gale Group, 2000. March 1, 2004.
Petch, Alison Bryan ‘Cranstone and Technology’, England: The Other Within:Analysing the English Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum (http://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/englishness-Cranstone-and-technology.html)
