Mobile museums : collections in circulation
Issued Date
Copyright Date
2021
Resource Type
Edition
First Edition
Language
eng
Book
Book
File Type
application/pdf
No. of Pages/File Size
352
ISBN
978-1-78735-514-9
Abstract
This book presents an argument for the importance of circulation in the study of museum collections, past and present. Bringing together international researchers from a wide variety of disciplines (including the history of science, museum anthropology, archaeology, geography and postcolonial history) to consider the mobility of collections, we aim to provide an overview of some urgent themes in the study of museums and collections. From the first chapter to the last, the book seeks to nove between questions of theory and practice, and so our cont include museum curators working with a variety of collections in the UK, Australia, the United States and Austria. The 13 essays that follow combine historical perspectives on the circulation of museum objects in the past with contemporary accounts of their re-mobilisation, most notably in the context of Indigenous community engagement. The authors seek to explore processes of circulation historically in order to re-examine, inform and unsettle common assumptions about the way museum collections have evolved over time and through space.
Table of contents
List offigures : vii / List of tables : xv / List of contributors : xvi / Acknowledgements : xix / Introduction: mobilising and re-mobilising museum collections Felix Driver, Mark Nesbitt and Caroline Cornish : page 1 / Plant artefacts then and now reconnecting biocultural collections in Amazonia Luciana Martins : page 21 / Re-mobilising colonial collections in decolonial times: exploring the latent possibilities of N. W. Thomas's West African collections Paul Basu : page 44 / Circuits of accumulation and loss: intersecting natural histories of the 1928 USDA New Guinea Sugarcane Expedition's collections Joshua A. Bell : page 71 / Kew's mobile museum: economic botany in circulation Caroline Cornish, Felix Driver and Mark Nesbitt : page 96 / Illustrating anthropological knowledge: texts, images duplicate specimens at the Smithsonian Institution and Pitt Rivers Museum Catherine A. Nichols : page 121 / Expeditionary collections: Haslar Hospital Museum and the circulation of public knowledge, 1815-1855 Daniel Simpson : page 149 / Mobile botany: education, horticulture and commerce in New York botanical gardens, 1890s-1930s Sally Gregory Kohlstedt : page 178 / Plants on the move: Kew Gardens and the London schoolroom Laura Newman : page 206 / Circulations of paradise (or, how to use a specimen to best personal advantage) Jude Philp : page 230 / Circulation as negotiation and loss: Egyptian antiquitiesfrom British excavations, 1880-present Alice Stevenson : page 261 / Colonising memory: Indigenous heritage and community engagement Claudia Augustat : page 283/ The flow of things: mobilising museum collections of nineteenth-century Fijian liku (fibre skirts) and veiqia (female tattooing) Karen Jacobs : page 303 / Afterword: what goes around, comes around - mobility's modernity Martha Fleming : page 328 / Index : page 343