Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums and Liberal Government

The concerns of this study are located at the intersections of museum studies and the history of anthropology. Our primary interest with regard to the former focuses on the varied ways in which museums act on social worlds. These include, but are not limited to, their exhibition practices, which we consider alongside the ways in which museums obtain and order their collections. Our interest relating to the latter concern how its practices have been shaped by its relations to mechanisms for the governance of populations. We bring these two sets of questions together to examine the connections between museums and anthropology associated with the articulation of a new set of relations between the practices of collecting, ordering, and governing that characterized the development of anthropological fieldwork in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.