Power and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Collecting

Abstract

Both The Ferment of Knowledge and Geoffrey Cantor’s essay review defined the “eighteenth-century problem” in terms of the lack of a totalizing vision. Forty years on, the problem has shifted to the appropriation of eighteenth-century science by both the political left and the right. As historians grapple with the legacies of slavery and colonialism, an emerging theme is material culture and its “entanglements.” The subject of this essay, collections and collecting, is central to this new historiography. Collections included antiq­uities, natural history, anatomy, and ethnographic objects. My focus will be on human skeletal collections. Historians who have considered skeletal collec­tions have focused mainly on the later eighteenth century and on developing concepts of race and geological time. But their significance is much broader. Collecting entailed entanglements both of cultures and of genres. Such collections could be medical, geological, aesthetic, taxonomic, or all or none of these. Case studies of collections of human bones, skeletons, and skulls reveal a different eighteenth century from that which the historians of 1980 envisaged, and bring questions of value and values to the centre of our reading of history.