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Fieldwork provides the ethnographer with ordinary or special objects which become "evidence" of a people and its customs. Collecting such objects is inseparable from the interpretation of these signs of life. Seeing Roman Antiquity in the form of objects brought back from Romania, Eugène Pittard inscribed the population itself in the long time frame of unchanging traditions.
Most of the time, traditional ethnography consider objects to be the anonymous product of a group. The German ethnographer, Hans Himmelheber, took a different approach. He valued innovation and in his fieldwork he tried to demonstrate the inventiveness of individual creators by studying the way motifs varied from one piece to another.
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