ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with finding traces of disability in Icelandic museums, mostly the National Museum of Iceland, and how can we understand disability in the past from Museum Studies. The formal objective is twofold: To investigate the material collection and cataloguing system of the National Museum of Iceland between the years 1863–1936. The cataloguing system is created and operated on museological practices and nationalistic ideology (a cultural system) that create questions about presence and interpretation of histories and narratives of disability. The second objective is to gain insights that are the product of entangled knowledge making practices. Mining through the depositories of the National Museum of Iceland has yielded surprisingly meagre results, at least in terms of present material objects: the stuff that museum narratives are made of. What seems, however, to be abundant is absence – an absence of the lived lives and experiences of disabled people throughout the country's histories. Therefore, this chapter engages with matters of absence in relation to museums and dis-/abled people's histories.
