Descriptive analysis and documentation of ethnographic collections.

Abstract

The documentation of ethnographic collections in museums requires a reflexive process which starts from a contextual definition of the ethnographic object. We present here an example for the construction of standardized descriptive languages and a model of register that arises from the analysis of a corpus of masks. In this way we put into focus the vinculation of the primary data (direct observation) with secondary data (the ethnographic text) which allows for discriminating the most significant traits, and distinguishing levels of information according to the analytical depth adopted by the researcher.