When I became interested in material culture and collecting 25 years ago, I was intrigued by the category of “curiosity”.
In the 18th century, people who were “curious” brought home “curiosities” from their travels.
Museums today reflect a return to curiosity, a preparedness to encounter things that bring unexpected stories to light.
WG Sebald’s bewildering, reflective narrative of a walk around the Suffolk coast takes him via the signs and relics of passages of the past.
Sebald was preoccupied with the vestiges of lost lives and the horror of forgotten histories of violence and exploitation – the rings of Saturn are the frozen fragments of former worlds – but there is something inspiring in his capacity to discover in the artefacts and sites that he comes upon moving and personal histories that complicate our understandings of the present.
An ethnographic museum such as the one I work in is really a history museum of this sort: its collections bear a plethora of surprising, sometimes difficult stories, of the movements of people and objects around the world, suggesting that there is more to both past and present than we had imagined.
In the 18th century, people who were “curious” brought home “curiosities” from their travels.
Museums today reflect a return to curiosity, a preparedness to encounter things that bring unexpected stories to light.
WG Sebald’s bewildering, reflective narrative of a walk around the Suffolk coast takes him via the signs and relics of passages of the past.
Sebald was preoccupied with the vestiges of lost lives and the horror of forgotten histories of violence and exploitation – the rings of Saturn are the frozen fragments of former worlds – but there is something inspiring in his capacity to discover in the artefacts and sites that he comes upon moving and personal histories that complicate our understandings of the present.
An ethnographic museum such as the one I work in is really a history museum of this sort: its collections bear a plethora of surprising, sometimes difficult stories, of the movements of people and objects around the world, suggesting that there is more to both past and present than we had imagined.
