The Anthropology of Expeditions: Travel, Visualities, Afterlives eds. by Joshua A. Bell and Erin L. Hasinoff

Abstract

Joshua A. Bell and Erin L. Hasinoff, eds. The Anthropology of Expeditions: Travel, Visualities, Afterlives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 250 pp.Imagine, for a moment, your favorite childhood museum. No matter how many times you visited with the intention of exploring a new exhibit, there was always that one artifact or artwork you had to see. But while the piece's description may have been inscribed in your mind, you still never quite understood exactly how the artifact got there. Joshua A. Bell and Erin L. Hasinoff offer us insight into the past lives of the objects and art we see in museums with The Anthropology of Expeditions: Travel, Visualities, Afterlives, a collection of articles by various anthropologists who not only describe the intricacies of museum politics and expeditions, but also the sociality of the objects themselves and the ways their presences have rebounded through and time.The volume is divided into three sections, with the first chapter acting as an introduction of sorts, setting the tone for the rest of the chapters and defining important anthropological practices and tropes. Overall, three themes stood out from the collection: 1) the mobilization of the adventurer trope by expeditioners to describe and justify their explorations and research, 2) the various interpretations of the objects discovered on expedition and how their meanings and values are visualized, and 3) the analysis of the afterlives of artifacts or art works once they entered the museum, and how they continue to unfold in the present. This volume is an invaluable addition to the literature on material culture, digital anthropology, and museum/archival spaces. The editor of the series, Peter N. Miller, quotes James Clifford to describe the book as [a] sensorium moving through space (ix). Too true, this book builds on a rich anthropological inquiry into museums and their practices of field work, collecting, and displaying objects and artifacts. Each author contributes to the elucidation of not only the object on display, but also the networks of social interaction between people, place, time, things, and professions that surround and define the object. In short, The Anthropology of Expeditions impels us to look at the journey, not only the proverbial ends.Henrika Kuklick, in her chapter entitled Science as Adventure (Chapter 1), starts off the collection with a short linguistic and historical breakdown of the concepts of science and adventure. In doing so, she puts into conversation the figure of the mythic hero or adventurer with the expeditioner-also referred to as pilgrim, colonialist, and researcher. In conflating these two distinct terms, she pushes the reader to acknowledge the expeditioner, not only the expedition or the materials collected. Kuklick then goes into a brief history of the conceptualization of fieldwork and other forces that influence the field-for example, implementing scientific research, soliciting grants, and satisfying competing audiences (37-38). As Kuklick humorously retells, while scientists in the humanities vied for credence, validity, and, most importantly, funding, anthropologists specifically began to incorporate into research practice. Moreover, she clearly lays out the various growth spurts anthropology has undergone as a discipline, as well as the colonial past from which much, if not most of anthropology gained its professional standing (48). Her light tone is a welcome contrast to the heavy questions she puts forth regarding the privileged place of science, the place anthropology has within the scientific community, the politics of fieldwork, and the reflexivity of the researcher (49).The expeditioner as adventurer is a theme carried throughout the first section, entitled Assemblages. Chapters 2 and 3, by Laurel Kendall and Erik Mueggler respectively, delve into adventure through the investigation of particular expedition leaders. …