Abstract
In Science and Technology Studies ‘immutable mobiles’ refers to things which retain their material properties as they move through and make connections between different points in a network. The ‘thingness’ of such things, though, is conceived as a relational property, a result of the capacities that are folded in to them by the networks through which they are connected to other things, texts, and persons. Museums are sites at which both the mutability and the immutability of the things they collect and exhibit are in play. They are, on the one hand, centres at which things gathered from diverse points of collection are conscripted as material actors in a range of museum practices; their immutability here is a condition of their mobility. On the other hand, as a consequence of the orderings and re-orderings of their relations to other things that they undergo during their museum careers, such things take on new properties and become the sites of changing relational effects while staying (broadly) in the same place. This chapter applies this perspective to museum practices generally but also with particular regard to the mutability of ethnographic things. It does so with reference to Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum’s ‘Cloak made of woven bark’ collected by James Cook from Vancouver Island in 1778; Franz Boas’s life groups at the American Museum of Natural History; and the mutable politics of Indigenous things as exemplified by British Museum/National Museum of Australia Enduring Civilisation exhibition.
Translated title of the contribution | Mutable, immutable mobiles : museum things |
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Original language | German |
Title of host publication | Wörterbuch der Gegenwart |
Editors | Bernd Scherer, Olga von Schubert, Stefan Aue |
Place of Publication | Germany |
Publisher | Matthes & Seitz Verlag |
Pages | 130-139 |
Number of pages | 10 |
ISBN (Print) | 9783957574183 |
Publication status | Published - 2019 |
Keywords
- museums