ABSTRACT
In the terminology of Victorian archaeologist-collectors like Flinders Petrie, second-best objects or items too odd, obscure, or fragmentary to educate the lay public through display were instead ‘reserved’ for museum storage, where specialists could consult them for study purposes. Maintaining a reserve collection became standard museum practice, especially as museums expanded under colonial and imperial regimes. Like their sister institutions, the library and the archive, museums exemplified the acquisitive nature of positivist science, which required ever more data in a totalizing quest for completeness. As source countries like Egypt began to curtail the export of antiquities, however, museum collections – especially those kept ‘in reserve’ rather than on display – became closed data sets, variously curated, neglected, or exploited depending on the interests of individual institutions or changing research trends.
In what ways do these collections, formed for the colonial archive, still manifest its knowledge – and meaning-making structures – and how does this affect the way in which stored collections are variously curated, neglected, or exploited for research today? In this reflective discussion piece, I draw on my own curatorial experience to question the present-day functions of academic and scientific research on collections, using the example of biological investigations into ancient Egyptian human remains. How were the bodies of the Egyptian dead turned into museum objects in the first place, and in what discourses do they remain enmeshed? Human and object at once, these mummified corpses, bare bones, and tissue samples require – yet defy – the museum’s classificatory schemes and storage means.
One issue is the authority vested in biological science, which masks a long-standing presumption of Western intellectual control over the Egyptian past. Another is the destructive or invasive treatment of museum objects: in what state does the ‘true’ object exist, and for what research purposes can that state be altered? Derrida argued that the archival impulse is necessarily a self-destructive one, because the process of selecting and preserving is also a process of eliminating and erasing. Reserving certain objects for analyses that entail their degradation is an example of this archival impulse at work, but so too, I argue, is any collections management effort not informed by deeper questioning of the colonial project and its aftermaths. Only through such questioning can reservations about curating such collections be articulated effectively from the crypt – and brought into the light.
