Paper short abstract:

After years lying dormant, our department's collection of ethnographic objects is being recurated. We confront the many things these objects become when they are deliberately exposed to reconsideration and reorganisation by multiple publics.

Paper long abstract:

The anthropology department of the University of Edinburgh holds a collection of objects that we could call 'ethnographic'. Although their origins are often unclear most appear to have been collected and placed within the department by staff and students of anthropology over many years, possibly since the founding of the subject area in the 1960s. After the department moved into a new office block in 2008 an organised curation of the objects fell into disarray. They now sit together, haphazardly collated, on a dusty set of shelves. This paper describes our ongoing project of engaging with this collection, work which aims to disorder, reorder, inscribe, expunge and ultimately recurate. We have encouraged meetings between these objects and a broader public, including anthropologists, museum and archive professionals, artists, and a wider community of staff and students within the university. In many ways, the character of this collection is attuned to recent tensions within anthropology regarding the subjects link with colonialism, as well as related turns and (re)turns in the study of materiality.

This collaborative project intends to exploit that uncertainty, in as much we also hope to the objects appropriate display and renewed relationality. Finally we hope to question the nature of the objects themselves and their meaning in the contemporary academic space. What ethnographic objects might emerge from our project? How might the objects rebel or conform? What will the glass case reveal or conceal? What do the objects want?