Cataloguing Culture

How does material culture become data? Why does this matter, and for whom? As the cultures of Indigenous peoples in North America were mined for scientific knowledge, years of organizing, classifying, and cataloguing hardened into accepted categories, naming conventions, and tribal affiliations – much of it wrong. Cataloguing Culture examines how colonialism has operated through the technologies of museum bureaucracy: the ledger book, the card catalogue, and eventually the database. As Indigenous communities reclaim what is theirs, this timely work shines a light on the importance of documentation for access to and return of cultural heritage.

Turner has made an important contribution in reminding museum professionals and museum enthusiasts alike that institutional memory in all its physical forms can shape collective memory in unexpected ways: museum collections document not only the lives and cultures of their “subjects,” but also those of museum staff, whose interests and biases underlie even the most mundane of museological practices.

Hannah Turner is an information and museum studies scholar, and is an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of British Columbia. She has published in journals such as Museum Anthropology, Knowledge Organization, and Cataloging and Classification Quarterly. From 2018 to 2019 she was a lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester.