How did the process of the circulation re-examine, inform, and unsettle common assumptions about the way museum collections have evolved over time and space? Mobile Museums presents an argument for the importance of circulation in the study of museum collections, both past and present. It brings together a diverse array of international scholars and curators from a variety of disciplines to consider the mobility of collections, especially in the context of Indigenous community engagement. By foregrounding the question of circulation, the book represents a paradigm shift in the understanding of the history and future uses of museum collections. Taking on a global perspective and addressing a variety of types of collection, including the botanical, ethnographic, economic, and archaeological, the book helps us to understand why the mobility of museum collections was a fundamental aspect of their history—and why it continues to matter today.
372 pages | 76 colour plates | 6.14 x 9.21 | © 2021
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
History:
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: mobilising and re-mobilising collections Felix Driver, Mark Nesbitt and Caroline Cornish
1. Plant artefacts then and now: reconnecting biocultural collections in Amazonia Luciana Martins
2. Re-mobilising colonial collections in decolonial times: exploring the latent possibilities of N. W. Thomas’ West African collections Paul Basu
3. Circuits of accumulation and loss: intersecting natural histories of the 1928 USDA New Guinea Sugarcane Expedition’s collections Joshua A. Bell
4. Kew’s mobile museum: economic botany in circulation Caroline Cornish, Felix Driver and Mark Nesbitt
5. Illustrating anthropological knowledge: texts, images and duplicate specimens at the Smithsonian Institution and Pitt Rivers Museum Catherine A. Nichols
6. Expeditionary collections: Haslar Hospital Museum and the circulation of public knowledge, 1815-1855 Daniel Simpson
7. Mobile botany: education, horticulture and commerce in New York botanical gardens, 1890s-1930s Sally Gregory Kohlstedt
8. Plants on the move: Kew Gardens and the London schoolroom Laura Newman
9. Circulations of paradise (or, how to use a specimen to best personal advantage) Jude Philp
10. Circulation as negotiation and loss: Egyptian antiquities from British excavations, 1880–present Alice Stevenson
11. Colonising memory: Indigenous heritage and community engagement Claudia Augustat
12. The flow of things: mobilising museum collections of nineteenth-century Fijian liku (fibre skirts) and veiqia (female tattooing) Karen Jacobs
Afterword: What goes around, comes around: mobility’s modernity
Martha Fleming
Index