Hannah Turner’s Cataloguing Culture is a necessary and timely addition to the expanding body of work that interrogates the colonial legacies of natural history museums. What makes this book particularly refreshing and unique is that, for once, objects and specimens are not the center of attention. Turner focuses, instead, on more banal, yet profoundly influential, apparatuses of museum practice and metadata: recording and registration, museum-published field guides and circulars, the ledger book, the card catalogue and classification system, and the database.
Turner is a scholar of information and museum studies and currently an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Information. Written in accessible and jargon-free language, Cataloguing Culture presents Turner’s extensive ethnographic research at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). She eloquently takes readers through the history of this museum’s descriptive practices for ethnological objects, the rules that govern them, the key figures in...
University of California Press