Abstract
Abstract Early modern European collectors proclaimed that their cabinets contained ‘the world’. What do collections from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveal about the ways in which those who assembled, owned and visited them understood objects from other regions and cultures? Inventories, catalogues and descriptions of European collections from the period reveal that the reception of non-European objects was characterized, above all, by practices of geographical and cultural indeterminacy, most notably: (1) empty attribution, (2) misattribution, (3) unstable attribution, and (4) lack of attribution. When considered as early versions of museums of ‘world cultures’, cabinets functioned not as sites for the production of knowledge but as sites of worldmaking, which absorbed, recontextualized and repurposed objects with specific geographical and cultural origins and meanings to create undifferentiated, fungible foreignness.
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