How Collections End: Objects, Meaning and Loss in Laboratories and Museums - I

Abstract

Collecting is a fundamental human activity. From childhood we curate the flow of objects through our lives, honing skills of discrimination, expression, pleasure and self-fashioning. Grander collections hold sway in academic and popular imaginations: national museums and libraries, archives of governance, and digital data. Nations and empires have their own logics of acquisition: objects are as important as territory in establishing authority over a population. But in the excitement of creation and expansion, it is easy to overlook the constant work required to stave off erosion, failure and loss.

In fact, collecting and ending often travel together. Since the nineteenth century, threats to environments, cultures, and animals has prompted collection before it is ‘too late’. Institutional collections are usually intended as an end-point for the objects that fall into their care. Near-obsolete objects often find a safe end as ‘collectables’ that illustrate something worth remembering. But little attention has been paid to how collections themselves end. Historians have traced the positive achievements of collectors and curators, but we shift the focus from acquisition to erosion, loss, absorption, repurposing and repatriation. To pay attention to ending is to analyse the changing fortunes of things, to the labour of their maintenance, and to dispersal as both a negative and positive force.

This open panel will collect STS scholarship on the ends of collections. We share stories of collections and endings: from beetles, blood, skulls, embryos, artworks, flies, and genomic data, to things that might never have been intended for collection.

Chair

• Jenny Bangham, University of Cambridge

Individual Presentations

• De/post/colonial Legacies and Futures: The Surprising Afterlife of a Statue of Biologist and Ethnologist Baldwin Spencer - Emma Kowal, Deakin University

• Frozen Futures: Crafting Natural History in a Genomic Age - Adrian Van Allen, UC Berkeley / Smithsonian NMNH

• The Passing of the Paleoamericans: Kennewick Man/The Ancient One and the End of a Non-Indian Ancient America - Ann Kakaliouras, Whittier College

• Reimagining Collections of Skulls and Measurement Instruments: The Shifting Fortunes of Objects in the Circulation of Anthropometric Knowledge - Thiago Pinto Barbosa, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient

• Murky Provenance: The Retreat of an Anatomical Collection - Kathryn Holihan, University of Michigan

Session Organizers

• Jenny Bangham, University of Cambridge

• Emma Kowal, Deakin University