ABSTRACT
The first part of my title echoes Francis Bacon’s reference to cabinets of curiosity as places where ‘whatsoever singularity and the shuffle of things hath produced ... shall be sorted and included’. It establishes a connection to Bruno Latour’s discussion of the redistribution of agency effected by bureaux of statistics, the storerooms for the maps produced by Lapérouse’s Pacific voyages, and the collections of natural history museums. Latour’s purpose was to examine the role of varied collecting practices in producing ‘immutable and combinable mobiles’: objects and texts which, no matter how old or how far distant from the sites at which they were collected, are ‘conveniently at hand and combinable at will’. It is through their pliable ‘combinability’ that such texts and objects can be assembled into new networks which, although produced at a distance – spatial and temporal – from their points of origin, make possible varied forms of action back on those points of origin, and elsewhere. My discussion applies this perspective to the networks through which the materials that were assembled in museums during the early fieldwork phase of anthropology were brought together from varied sites of collection and mobilised as parts of both civic and biopolitical programmes.
