Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Sarah Anne Carter, Ivan Gaskell, Sara Schechner, and Samantha van Gerbig, Tangible Things: Making History through Objects

Abstract

Museum collections across the globe hold billions of objects deliberately collected, usually listed, sometimes catalogued, a proportion visible online. Despite the fact that research is a routinely listed function of these collections, most of their objects are not available to immediate inspection by the curious, even if the majority of them are at least retained in relatively stable environments and subject to systematic monitoring. Collecting itself has a history so that the knowledge, research and pedagogical regimes under which these assemblages were accumulated are often no longer current. There would be a sense of crisis were it not for the persistent general popularity of museums and galleries and also, it must be said, for the currency of material culture in parts of the Academy, especially those that themselves hold collections or those, often growing out of materially-founded university disciplines such as archaeology, art history, anthropology and ethnography, that have engaged with public collections over recent decades. Beyond ‘museum’ and ‘collection’ disciplines, the material turn is also being felt, in disciplines as diverse as book history, cultural studies and science and technology studies (STS). In short, there are in the universities many more who could enjoyably and fruitfully engage with the collections of museums and galleries, creating new historical narratives appropriate to our age, and opening to scrutiny and understanding the old ideologies that created the collections in the first place. The question is: can that be made to happen now? The works under consideration here can help us to think that through.