Epilogue

Abstract

My first encounter with the Missionary Exhibit was with its catalogue entry, and only later with the objects in the collection.¹ After the collection arrived at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) it was accessioned as “1900–31,” and its contents were entered into the Division of Anthropology’s leather-bound manuscript “Catalogue 1” under the handwritten heading “Missionary Exhibit.”² The objects’ associated correspondence was filed in a folder, which grew over time to cover a range of agreements, memoranda, and letters about its uncertain future at the museum. Curious that the accession read Missionary Exhibit, and intrigued that it was neither associated with an individual donor nor a collector, I turned to the single, but unusually thick, folder to get a better grasp of the history of the seemingly fragmentary collection.³

The Archive is this kind of place that is to do with longing and appropriation. It is to do with wanting things that are put together, collected, collated, named in lists and indices; a place where a whole world, a social order, may be imagined by the recurrence of a name in a register, through a scrap of paper or some other little piece of flotsam.

—Steedman, 2001