Cataloguing Culture

Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Documentation

By: Hannah Turner

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Paperback | 15 December 2020

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260 Pages

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17.3 x 24.0 x 2.3

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How does material culture become data? Why does this matter, and for whom? As the cultures of Indigenous peoples in North America were mined for scientific knowledge, years of organizing, classifying, and cataloguing hardened into accepted categories, naming conventions, and tribal affiliations - much of it wrong.

Cataloguing Culture examines how colonialism operates in museum bureaucracies. Using the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History as her reference, Hannah Turner organizes her study by the technologies framing museum work over two hundred years: field records, the ledger, the card catalogue, the punch card, and eventually the database. She examines how categories were applied to ethnographic material culture and became routine throughout federal collecting institutions.

As Indigenous communities encounter the documentary traces of imperialism while attempting to reclaim what is theirs, this timely work shines a light on access to and return of cultural heritage.

Industry Reviews

"Turner's work highlights important historical and contemporary considerations about a specific area of museological practice which has often been neglected in the field of museum studies and material culture."

-- Heather George, University of Waterloo * Ontario Historical Society Review *
Turner has made an important contribution in reminding museum professionals and museum enthusiasts alike that institutional memory in all its physical forms can shape collective memory in unexpected ways: museum collections document not only the lives and cultures of their "subjects," but also those of museum staff, whose interests and biases underlie even the most mundane of museological practices. -- Forrest Pass, Curator, Exhibitions and Online Content at Library and Archives Canada * The Ormsby Review *

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