ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Collection Stories and Indo-Pacific worlds 4

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

• Neil Safier, Brown University

Individual Presentations

• The Love of Possession: H. Otley Beyer’s Ethnographic Records - Jonathan Victor Baldoza, Princeton University

• Pandanus-leaf textiles and their material ontologies in late nineteenth-century Vanuatu - Adèle Miranda Wright, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, Hamilton Kerr Institute

• Lost Cylinders: Sound Recording, Physical Anthropology, and Ethnozoology in the Malay Peninsula, c. 1900 - Katherine Enright, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, University Museum of Zoology, Pacific Circle

• Interpreting Borneo in Britain: interrogating the Charles Hose collections - Jennifer R. Morris, British Museum

Session Organizer

• Anthony D. Medrano, Brown University