ISSN:
0892-8339
Language:
English
Titel der Quelle:
Museum anthropology : journal of the Council for Museum Anthropology
Publ. der Quelle:
Arlington, Va. : American Anthropological Assoc.
Angaben zur Quelle:
Vol. 39, No. 2 (2016), p. 111-129
DDC:
100
Abstract:
This article investigates the classification and record‐keeping history of a medicine man model in the Wellcome Library archives and the Science Museum archives in London, and the multifarious ways that information is constructed or lost in the history of a museum collection. First, attending to the affective turn in information scholarship, I argue that people's relationships and idiosyncratic preoccupations are formative in the histories of records and yet obscured in them. Second, I argue that broader “epistemic cultures” and “ecologies of standards”—belief systems, histories of disciplinary thought, and institutional histories—are formative in the legacy of information systems. A “trace ethnographic” approach to the history of one ethnographic piece illuminated the formation of authoritative knowledge as it played out in the acquisition and classification of the object and its institutionalized records.
Note:
Copyright: © 2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
URL:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/muan.12119/abstract
URL:
http://search.proquest.com/docview/1817085753
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