Reassembling the social life of a Medicine Man: Reassessing otherness, agency and authorship in the Wellcome archives

Abstract

This article traces the social life of a Medicine Man in a life-size diorama at the London Science Museum. While the author shows that the representations the model has perpetuated throughout its social life, largely due to its particular material and social contexts, were often laden with misperception and exoticization, she also argues that the model came to be on contemporary view through an unusual set of actions, spaces, and happenings which, first, question the notion of curatorial authorship, and second, expand the growing body of work that considers the wide-ranging kinds of networks and agencies that shape the life histories of things. She begins by describing the context for the model, including its relationship to colonial histories of display and more recent work on agency and technologies of representation. Next, she describes the model’s early life in the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum and its relationship to early ethnography in Ibibioland and London. Then, she describes its shifts in representation amidst changes to the network of associated objects, spaces, events and persons that made up its representational framework over a 30-year period, before recounting its most recent move to the Science Museum in the late 1970s. Thus detailing this model’s social life, the article illustrates the ways in which authorship, colonial relationships, and representation emerge as complex and distributed amidst networks of material and social contexts. The author therefore argues for a particularist (rather than broad discursive) approach to tracing the associations and networks by which displays come to exist in museum spaces and become embedded with complex histories of colonial involvement.