Information Infrastructures in the Museum: Documenting, Digitizing, and Practising Ethnographic Objects in the Smithsonian's Department of Anthropology

This dissertation investigates how documentation, categorization, and computerization affect our understanding of Indigenous cultural heritage. Perceived as authoritative documentation, museum catalogs fundamentally shape the relationship between ethnographic knowledge and cultural heritage. By examining the seemingly mundane internal mechanisms of museum work at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), this dissertation constructs an understanding of catalogs as information practices. Using the concept of "information infrastructure," I probe the heterogeneous assemblage of material technologies and work practices that impinge upon the documentation of ethnographic objects. To compose this history of documentation, I undertook archival research, completed staff interviews, and conducted object biographies. Several theoretical models provide the framework for understanding the meaning inherent in these work practices and information systems. First, material culture knowledge is historical and arises out of epistemological standpoints that change through time. Second, the ways in which practices and technologies become embedded in the construction of object catalogs has ethical consequences. These are particularly acute when seen in the context of the repatriation of ethnographic collections to communities of origin, and I illuminate this relationship through a detailed analysis of a repatriated collection from Hoonah, Alaska. Third, the emergent and generative nature of information infrastructures comes into focus within this research. Modes of cataloging cultural objects are performed and become part of an ethnographic information infrastructure. Material technologies and epistemologies of ethnographic object description therefore mediate museum knowledges of Indigenous cultures. The construction of information infrastructures shape not merely how objects are described and documented, but also how they are exhibited and displayed, and how they contribute to public knowledge. This dissertation addresses the cultural, social, and political nature of these systems, an area of increasing research focus. Within the context of museum studies, it provides the theoretical grounding necessary to dismantle colonial rhetoric.