Abstract
AbstractThis article introduces a special issue on the topic of museum documentation and knowledge production. The articles in this issue address the history of museum catalogues and position the documentation of material culture as a historical epistemological practice. Each article examines how cataloguing practices have evolved over time and how the categorization or classification of ethnographic material culture often depends on specific individuals or preexisting scientific standards. This issue engages critically with emergent discussions concerning the formalization of knowledge about ethnographic material culture as it emerged in the nineteenth century. These articles also contribute to theoretical discussions that consider the material practices of knowledge production and the affective relations that shape this information. As a whole, this issue gives unique insights into how museums have documented material culture through time and provides a way of thinking about how we might engage with such historical practices that still impact much of our present work.
Highlights
Introduction to the Special IssueCritical Histories of Museum Catalogs Influenced by the past thirty years of postcolonial museum work, museum anthropology has balanced an on-going interest in object study with issues of repatriation, digitization, and community collaboration (Bruchac 2010; Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Nash 2012; Harrison, Byrne, and Clarke 2013; Newell 2012; Ngata, Ngata-Gibson, and Salmond A. 2012; Salmond Am. 2012)
In the 1960s and 1970s, when the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) began computerizing the long history of collections documentation, anthropological object records were translated from earlier paper based index systems
Based on the analyses presented within the papers, they can serve as representative examples of larger and more distributed practices that still require further study
Summary
Introduction to the Special IssueCritical Histories of Museum Catalogs Influenced by the past thirty years of postcolonial museum work, museum anthropology has balanced an on-going interest in object study with issues of repatriation, digitization, and community collaboration (Bruchac 2010; Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Nash 2012; Harrison, Byrne, and Clarke 2013; Newell 2012; Ngata, Ngata-Gibson, and Salmond A. 2012; Salmond Am. 2012). The museum catalog, as a set of records, a documentation system, and an embedded practice is the subject of each of the papers in this issue.
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