ABSTRACT
Ultramar was a proto-ethnographic museum for objects from Spain's overseas possessions. Nanigo objects graduated from case evidence to imperial booty, now-dead artifacts of supposed imperial successes in bringing order and civilization to the colonies. The modern moment of the professional scientist had already arrived. Just as professional anthropologists edged missionaries, colonial administrators and travel writers out of ethnography's domain between around 1900 and 1922, the institution of forensic science and modern penal theory in Cuba seized analysis, identification and interpretation out of the hands of cops. A group of scientists and lawyers, Israel Castellanos and Fernando Ortiz among them, stood as the professional vanguard of the new fields of legal medicine, forensic pathology, dactyloscopy, anthropology and criminal ethnology. Virtually all of the Abakua objects studied by Fernando Ortiz and Israel Castellanos during the first half of the twentieth century were housed in the aforementioned anthropology and legal medicine collections following their accession there, likely in the mid- to late 1910s.
