ABSTRACT
The cultural logic of museology—as it developed in stages during the first few decades of the inception of the British Museum—relied in large measure on the elaborate schematics of natural history. The relationship between the dominant culture and the cultures of source materials, the cultures observed and mined, the cultures discovered and studied, remains thus unequal and incommensurate. The cultural logic of museology dictated that, in the interest of science, a sophisticated system of spatialized operations had to be created and these operations came to defy the borders of nation. Natural and artificial productions—a distinction which was important to the cataloguers and corporate managers of the British Museum—are no different in an important respect: shells, in other words, are no different from shoes. In the eighteenth century, modernity remained mired in a sophisticated and scientifically validated system of searching, gathering, consuming, with the British Museum serving as the prime example of progress carrying trace elements of a feudal instinct.
