Paper Short Abstract:

This paper focuses on arctic and subarctic ethnographic collections stewarded by two Estonian museums and explores the different knowledge infrastructures that these collections reference. While the belongings in these collections are part of Indigenous knowledge systems, access to them is mediated by digital infrastructures rooted in past epistemic practices that shaped them into museum objects. This paper aims to explore how understanding the hybridity of these collections can help reframe historical narratives and foster relationships that contribute to a more equitable future.

Paper Abstract:

Drawing on Alessandro Rippa’s analytical framework of ‘environing infrastructures,’ which emphasizes the historically specific, dynamic, and co-creative relationship between humans and their environments (2024: 27), this paper examines ethnographic museum collections in relation to the knowledge infrastructures they are embedded in. Focusing on the ‘foreign ethnology’ or ‘world cultures’ collections acquired by Baltic-German explorers, administrators, and scientists in the mid-19th century from Siberia and Russian-America—now held by the Estonian History Museum and the Estonian National Museum—this paper explores the forms of engagement with the environment that these collections trace and afford.

I investigate the different epistemic systems these objects are part of and the roles they have played within these systems. I then consider how making visible the "invisible"—the embodied Indigenous knowledge embedded in these objects, as well as the Western systems that have shaped them into epistemic objects—can help rewrite historical narratives and create possibilities for more nuanced representations of different ways of relating to the world.