Coloniality and collecting

The making, ordering and display of collections has long been central to the production of knowledge in Europe. It is no coincidence that age of European colonial expansion also gave rise to the so-called ‘museum age’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As materials were brought back from newly claimed colonial territories, so they were transformed into epistemic objects. Separated from their original contexts, rocks, plants and artefacts became geological, botanical and ethnological specimens. As scientific reference collections they were divorced from both the context and circumstances in which they were obtained. In this presentation, Prof. Dr. Paul Basu discusses the making and unmaking of such disciplinary collections. While many anthropological museums have sought to address the coloniality of their collections for decades now, this is a recent turn in natural history, botanical and geological museums.