Diving Back In

 I return to the archives this summer after devoting a semester to learning how to teach American history.  Admittedly, a part of me is apprehensive to dive back into my project, having grown comfortable in my routine.  And yet, I love research and writing.  The unmistakeable smell of archival documents will no doubt trigger some of the more sensitive synapses in my brain.  Unfortunately, my passion for my research is not yet reflective in my scholarly writing, which is still a work in progress.   

UC Berkeley's Department of History has asked us to complete a pre-dissertation prospectus. Our goal for this summer is sort of analogous to accepting a promise ring.  After this summer we will all be somewhat like a high school cheerleaders; we won't quite be engaged to our projects, but will certainly take a step in that direction.  

My planned dissertation, Making the Modern Museum in the United States: Art, Anthropology and the Desire to Understand Human Culture, intends to examine the history of anthropology and art museums in America past their foundations up to the post-Second World War Era. This summer, I will be conducting research at the National Anthropological Archives, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution.  The overarching theme of my research is to examine how the operation of institutions influence and shape ideas.  

This summer, I will specifically be looking at an archival collection documenting the transfer of human skeletal remains from the U.S. Army Medical Museum to the Smithsonian.  I have, for some time, been interested in the process of building museums collections and, moreover, deciding what types of collections belong where.  Does a Moche statue belong in an art museum or a natural history museum?  While these questions are pertinent to the process of founding museums, I am more interested in how museums continued these debates after they were already established. 

I am particularly sensitive to the idea of constructing collections of human remains in museums, having worked with these types of collections first-hand in several museums.  This summer, I don't anticipate any need to work with the remains themselves, instead attempting to understand the historical process of their collection and care over time.  

The collection could serve as a jumping off point for my dissertation.  The U.S. Army Medical Museum, in attempting to build an encyclopedic collection of the various kinds of battle injuries experienced by troops, starting collecting human skeletal remains around the time of the Civil War.  The institution eventually requested that Army field surgeons send skeletal remains from around the globe.  The museum was especially interested in obtaining examples of human remains from the Native Americans of the American West.   

After building a vast collection of human skeletal remains, the Army Medical Museum grew to be more interested in soft tissue samples.  The collection of skeletal remains was transferred to the Smithsonian between 1898 and 1904.  This summer, I will be studying how this process took place.  What was the rhetoric surrounding the transfer?  Who made these decisions and why?  How did the operation of these institutions shape the type of research that was conducted?  What type of legacy do these remains possess?

For more about my work, I'll point readers in the direction of my webstite, click here.