A Review of Hannah Turner, Cataloguing Culture: Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation.Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2020, XIII+243 pp.

Abstract

The book under review is a critical examination of the history of the description system of the Smithsonian Institution’s anthropological collections, from ledger books (access books) and card catalogs to electronic databases. Each chapter of the book focuses on a specific information technology: a field inventory, a ledger book, a card catalog, a computer database, modern digital data. The author shows that these are not neutral bureaucratic technologies for collection recording, but repositories of frozen structures of colonial knowledge which still serve to reproduce colonial hierarchies. The trajectory of an ethnographic item—from requests to a collector in the field to a line in a spreadsheet—is reconstructed in detail both in the specific context of the institutional history of the Anthropology department of the Smithsonian Institution—and in the broader context of the current processes of the repatriation of objects in the United States. Describing the material infrastructures and daily routines of knowledge production in a museum, the author identifies two main vectors of tension which are typical of any ethnographic museum. This is the tension between, on the one hand, the standardization of the museum form and the mutability of information about objects, and, on the other, between researchers and “technicians”; in other words, between science and record keeping. This work will be interesting not only to ethnographic museum staff but also to historians of science and media researchers.