ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Collection Stories and Indo-Pacific worlds 3

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This symposium gathers scholars working on diverse histories of “collections” – botanical, zoological, ethnographic, and beyond– tracing itineraries through which they moved across museums, laboratories, libraries, markets and other repositories. Together, we examine how “collection stories” serve as active sites where epistemic orders are made, unmade, and remade, while attending to the errors, omissions, and desires embedded within them. Through these inquiries, the symposium explores how collection practices both reflected and reconfigured the plural worlds of the Indo-Pacific. In doing so, it reconsiders the region’s contributions to the making of global science, highlighting the embodied labors and entangled networks that sustained it. By treating “collections” as critical mediators of historical understanding, this symposium reveals how the histories of science are themselves collections of contested stories, replete with misreadings, misunderstandings, mistranslations, and mis-orderings that underwrite knowledges in, about, and from Indo-Pacific worlds.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chairs

• Anthony D. Medrano, Brown University

• Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Harvard University

Individual Presentations

• Collecting bezoars across Indo-Pacific worlds, c.1700: Judgment, authority, and contested knowledge - Sebestian Kroupa, McGill University

• Fishing Stakes of Science: Singapore’s Kelongs in the Late-20th Century - Kathy Poh, Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum

• Storying holes: marine woodborers in material and memory of British imperialism along Pacific coasts - Kate Stevens, University of Waikato, Pacific Circle

• From words to worlds: a history of Tagalog ichthyology, 1613-1794 - Anthony D. Medrano, Brown University