The "shuffle of things" and the distribution of agency

I take the first part of this chapter's title from Francis Bacon's reference to cabinets of curiosity as places where "whatsoever singularity and the shuffle of things hath produced ... shall be sorted and included" (Henare 2005:60). I do so in order to establish a connection with Bruno Latour's discussion of the similarities between bureaus of statistics, the storerooms for maps produced by La Perouse's Pacific voyages, and the collections of natural history museums. These are all places whose occupants can "combine shuffle around, superimpose and recalculate" the relations between the statistics, texts, and things they gather together to end up with, respectively a '"gross national product'...'Sakhalin Island,' or 'Lhe taxonomy of mammals"' (Latour 1987:227). Latour makes the point by way of stressing the importance for those engaged in scientific expeditions of producing "immutable and combinable mobiles": that is, objects and texts that, no matter how old they are or how far distant from the sites at which they were collected, are "conveniently at hand and combinable at will" (1987:227; see also Harrison, chapter 4, this volume). It is through their pliable "combinability that such texts and objects can be assembled into new networks that, although produced at a distance-spatial and temporal-from their points of origin, may nonetheless make possible varied forms of action back on those points of origin, and elsewhere.