Collections as Relations: Contestations of Belonging, Cultural Heritage, and Knowledge Infrastructures

This book explores anthropological and global art collections as a catalyst, a medium, and an expression of relations. Relationsbetween and among objects and media, people, and material and immaterial contextsdefine, configure, and potentially transform collection-related social and professional networks, discourses and practices, and increasingly museums and other collecting institutions themselves. The contributors argue that a focus on theoften contestedmaking and remaking of relations provides a unique conceptual entrypoint for understanding collectionsand their objects and mediascomplex histories, contemporary webs of interactions, and potential futures. The chapters examine the local, translocal, and transregional relations of collections with regard to their affective, aesthetic, performative, and socio-moral qualities and situate them in the larger geopolitical constellations of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial settings. Together they investigate ongoing shifts in the relations of collections and collecting institutions by identifying alternative approaches to conceive of, and deal with, anthropological and global art collections, objects, and media in the future. The book is of interest to scholars from anthropology, global art history, museum studies, and heritage studies.