Provenance and historical warrants: histories of cataloguing at the Museum of Anthropology
| Date | 24 July 2024 |
| Pages | 1419-1441 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2024-0037 |
| Published date | 24 July 2024 |
| Author | Hannah Turner,Nancy Bruegeman,Peyton Jennifer Moriarty |
Provenance and historical
warrants: histories of cataloguing
at the Museum of Anthropology
Hannah Turner
School of Information, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Nancy Bruegeman
Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, Canada, and
Peyton Jennifer Moriarty
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Abstract
Purpose –This paper considers how knowledge has been organizedabout museum objects and belongings at the
Museum of Anthropology, in what is now known as British Columbia, and proposes the concept of historical or
provenance warrant to understand how cataloguing decisions were made and are limited by current museum
systems.
Design/methodology/approach –Through interviews and archival research, we trace how cataloguing
was done at the museum through time and some of the challenges imposed by historical documentation
systems.
Findings –Reading from the first attempts at standardizing object nomenclatures i n the journals of private
collectors to the contemporary practices associated with object documentation in the digitalage, we posit that historic
or provenance warrant is crafted through donor attributionor association, object naming, the concept of geo-cultural
location and the imposition of unique identifiers, numbers and direct labels that physicallymarkbelongings.
Originality/value –The ultimate goal and contribution of this research is to understand and describe the
systems that structure and organize knowledge, in an effort to repair the history and terminologies moving forward.
Keywords Historical warrant, Provenance, Museum documentation, Cataloguing
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
In a 1979 internal report of the Museum of Anthropology (MOA), a University Anthropology
Museum on the University of British Columbia’s campus, visitors critiqued the museums’new
visible storage strategy for exhibiting its anthropological collection: “The visible storage area is
spacious, airy and neat, and many people think they are in the midst of an exhibit area. ‘Your
displays are too crowded,’some have said. ‘Why do you have junk next to that priceless China?’”
(Scott Consultants Ltd, 1979, p. 12). These divisions, seemingly naturalized to the public, are part of
what ethnographic museums have been struggling to untangle since their origins as storehouses
for colonial collecting practices and theft (Barringer and Flynn, 1998;Bennett, 2004;Clifford, 1997;
Cole, 1995;Geismar and M€
uller, 2022;Sleeper-Smith, 2009). However, these divisions are not
natural or given, and are part of a longer history and colonial ontological approach that separates
and reinforces the distinction of people from their belongings, and cultural history from the land,
particularly from Indigenous communities in Canada (Atleo, 1991;Clapperton, 2010;Gordon-
Walker, 2016,2019;Roy, 2018;Wilson, 2015). They are indicative of a colonial, Eurocentric and
othering approach to understanding belongings, that continues to do harm through epistemic
Journal of
Documentation
1419
We would like to thank the generous contributions of Ann Stevenson. This research is supported by the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Funding Number: 430–2021–00595. UBC
Research Ethics Number: H21-03369.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 15 February 2024
Revised 1 May 2024
Accepted 14 May 2024
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 80 No. 6, 2024
pp. 1419-1441
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-02-2024-0037
violence and that is being actively resisted from within and outside of these institutions
(Bloomfield, 2024;Fortney, 2001;Gordon-Walker, 2018;Gray, 2022;Harrison et al., 2013;
Harth, 1999;Kreps, 2003;Leischner, 2022;Montenegro, 2019;Phillips, 2011;Rowley, 2013;Rowley
et al., 2010;Schneider and Hayes, 2020). Understanding the way that Eurocentric epistemological
commitments become privileged in museum recordkeeping is only a small part of a wide range of
reparative work being conducted in museums and with collections broadly (Allison-Cassin and
Seeman, 2022;Gray, 2022;Gupta et al., 2023;Johnson, 2016;Krmpotich et al., 2016;Luker, 2017).
Part of the work that needs to be done is to address the kinds of distinctions made obviousby the
quotation included earlier –how have records privileged some forms of knowledge over others, and
how are these naturalized, yet non-neutral assumptions about what counts embedded in the way
we describe and record material culture? What, exactly, is this “junk,”and what makes “China”
priceless? This paper takes the case study of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC to understand
how provenance is crafted, and how certain information is warranted in the recordkeeping system
of this museum. To do this, we look at the history of recordkeeping at MOA, from early collectors’
catalogs, to museum ledgers and card catalogs, to the modern digital collections system. Our
objective in this research is to understand and describe the systems that structure and organize
knowledge, but also to understand how this history affects efforts to repair the catalogue moving
forward. We have chosen to investigate these questions through a broadly descriptive historical
case study. Using interviews with staff and primary source research with museum documents, as
well as secondary source research through the MOA library collections; we have used thematic and
historical analysis to trace the history of recordkeeping at the museum and how this affects the
current practice of collections management.
We come to this work as settler academics and a museum practitioner. For Hannah, a
white 5th generation Canadian of Norwegian, German and British ancestry, my interest lies in
histories of museum documentation, that were first raised to my consciousness by
community collaborators during my time working with the Reciprocal Research Network and
the RRN steering committee (Rowley, 2013;Rowley et al., 2010). I have spent the last several
years thinking about how museum knowledge becomes authoritative, and how catalogs
inherit colonial ideologies, and what that means for those who care for cultural collections.
Nancy Bruegeman, also a white Canadian of British and German ancestry, is the collections
manager at the Museum of Anthropology, who has gained intimate knowledge of the
collections and methods for cataloging, both historically and today, by having worked in
the MOA collections department for almost thirty years. For this current project, much of the
primary archival work and staff interviews were completed by Peyton Moriarty, a white
American of Irish and German descent, and graduate student in the School of Information at
UBC. Our positions have determined the interest in this work and the methods we have
chosen - squarely in a western institutional context. For us, critiquing infrastructural systems
of power is still important, and we are interested in how these systems continue to reinsert
and re-inscribe values through time; how they build worlds of meaning and set aside others.
Reparativework in museums is oftenhindered or affected by pastpractices, and the legacies
of colonialism that are inherent in the way museums document, categorize and classify
collectionsand information. Recent developments in critical cataloguingand critical metadata
studies,often situated in the field of knowledgeorganization (Allison-Cassin and Seeman, 2022;
Bullard et al., 2022;Canning et al., 2022;Decker and Wood, 2024;Doyle, 2013;Turner, 2015,
2020) and critical work regarding taxonomic reparation and ethical documentation or
reparative description in the archival field (Adler, 2016;Anderson and Christen, 2019;Doyle
et al., 2015;Woodet al., 2014) are centralto our analysis. The goal isto reveal how description in
museums works in practice, and document the struggles of working with century-old data,
while also supporting important work on the history ofmuseum practice in British Columbia.
Throughout the paper, we use the concept of warrant, widely discussed in the field of
Information studies, to understand how authority is crafted in museum records. Warrant is
JD
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