ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Collection Stories and Indo-Pacific worlds 1

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

Chair

• Janet Browne, Harvard

Individual Presentations

• Shifting Empires, Changing Landscapes, and a “Dragnet” Collection of Malaysian Viral Worlds, 1940s to 1970s - Jack Greatrex, Singapore Management University

• Where Land and Sea Meets: Imperial Science and the Making of a Zamboanga Environment, 1792–1888 - Felice Noelle Rodriguez, Universidad de Zamboanga

• Entangled Organisms: Classificatory Challenges and Ecological Objects in Natural History Collections - Elaine Ayers, Yale University

• Feral territories: The suburbanisation of nature in late 20th century Bangkok - Samson Lim, Monash University

Session Organizer

• Anthony D. Medrano, Brown University