miruna achim | Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (original) (raw)

Books by miruna achim

Objetos en tránsito, objetos en disputa. Las colecciones del Museo Nacional de México, 2023

Hace tiempo, Bruno Latour discurrió acerca de la raíz común de las palabras “cosa” y “parlamento”... more Hace tiempo, Bruno Latour discurrió acerca de la raíz común de las palabras “cosa” y “parlamento” para recordarnos que en el cuerpo político “hay una abundante relación con cosas” y que los objetos convocan o congregan a la gente no porque sus significados sean fijos sino por cómo afectan y dividen a sus usuarios. Siguiendo el ejemplo de Latour, nuestra intención es traer de vuelta al cuerpo político las cosas que se encuentran en las colecciones nacionales de México, con el fin de replantearlas como lugares de parlamento, es decir, lugares de debate y conversación, para reflexionar acerca de su utilidad al momento de repensar la nación y los varios destinos de sus colecciones en la actualidad. En un momento histórico cuando los museos en todo el mundo enfrentan un cuestionamiento amplio en torno al legado colonial de sus colecciones y están, por lo tanto, teniendo que reinventar su lugar y su rol como custodios de objetos vinculados a diversas comunidades –nacionales y de pueblos originarios– que reclaman su repatriación y restitución, nos parece imperativo reimaginar el lugar de las colecciones nacionales en el contexto mexicano, que hasta ahora no ha figurado de manera prominente en estos debates.

Versión en español -- y ampliada -- del libro From Idols to Antiquity: Forging the National Museu... more Versión en español -- y ampliada -- del libro From Idols to Antiquity: Forging the National Museum of Mexico (1825-1867). El libro explora los primeros años del museo así como las configuraciones materiales, políticas, culturales y económicas que hicieron posible la formación del museo. Un hilo conductor del libro explora la construcción de la categoría estética, disciplinaria y científica de antigüedades mexicanas.

Museum Matters. Making and Unmaking Mexico's National Collections, 2021

This is a book about objects. Stones, ruins, bones, mummies, mannequins, statues, photographs, fa... more This is a book about objects. Stones, ruins, bones, mummies, mannequins, statues, photographs, fakes, instruments, and natural history specimens all formed part of Mexico’s National Museum complex at different moments across two centuries of collecting and display.
Museum Matters traces the emergence, consolidation, and dispersal of this national museum complex by telling the stories of its objects. Objects that have been separated over time are brought back together in this book in order to shed light on the interactions and processes that have forged things into symbols of science, aesthetics, and politics. The contributors to this volume illuminate how collections came into being or ceased to exist over time, or how objects moved in and out of collections and museum spaces. They explore what it means to move things physically and spatially, as well as conceptually and symbolically.
Museum Matters unravels the concept of the national museum. By unmaking the spaces, frameworks, and structures that form the complicated landscape of national museums, this volume brings a new way to understand the storage, displays, and claims about the Mexican nation’s collections today.

Ciencias, Jan 6, 2010

En 1781, José Felipe Flores (1751-1824), catedrático en me di cina en la Real Universi-dad de Gua... more En 1781, José Felipe Flores (1751-1824), catedrático en me di cina en la Real Universi-dad de Guatemala, publicó un folleto de quince páginas so bre los usos médicos de la carne de lagartijas. El título no podía ser más prometedor: Específico nuevamente des-cubierto en ...

Papers by miruna achim

The Carte Blanche 2024 talk series gives the floor to some 2023-2024 Paris IAS fellows on a subje... more The Carte Blanche 2024 talk series gives the floor to some 2023-2024 Paris IAS fellows on a subject of their choice. This specific Carte blanche is proposed by Miruna Achim, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa in Mexico City, and Patricia Mindus, Uppsala University, Sweden.
Both of them are 2023-2024 Paris IAS fellows.

Presentation:
Jade is a distinct marker of ancient Mesoamerica. Yet, over the past five centuries, since they first arrived in Europe, artifacts made from this stone have had multiple uses – which have unfolded on global scales and varied over time--, as objects of science, art, politics, and commerce. Reconstructing the post-conquest trajectories of Mesoamerican jade between the sixteenth and the twenty-first century, this project places jade’s sensuous properties (color, texture, translucence, sound, beauty, chemical make-up, and hardness) at the center of analysis to understand how materiality has shaped and actualized interactions, both with the stone itself and among the people who have extracted, worked, trafficked, collected and consumed it. Recently, the location and increasingly large-scale exploitation of jadeite sources in the Motagua River Valley in Guatemala has placed both ancient jade artifacts and raw jadeite at the center of commercial speculation and illicit trafficking, sharpening the (climate-induced) social and environmental degradation of a region already marginalized. By delving into the making and unmaking of a stone, I ask how ancient material culture and its circulations continue to haunt and affect contemporary contexts worldwide.

Dix-huitième siècle , 2024

This paper follows the trails of Amerindian stone axes in the course of the 18th century. First, ... more This paper follows the trails of Amerindian stone axes in the course
of the 18th century. First, I focus on their relevance in refuting an
age-old classification of European stone axes as “jeux de la nature/
jokes of nature” – meaning that, their capricious or suggestive
forms notwithstanding, they had been believed to have formed
“naturally”, without human intervention. Once it was established
that the stone axes dug out across Europe were artefacts, scholarly material, specifically about the kinds of minerals that afforded a
range of uses. Stone axes thus moved in a conceptually and taxonomically
fluid space, between naturalia and artificialia, sometimes
more stone, other times more axe, where the artefact raised questions
about the mineral, and the mineral posed questions about
the technical, and moral, capacities of the people who produced
the artefact. These kinds of crossovers between fields of knowledge
point to the geological and mineralogical underpinnings of anthropology
and archaeology as disciplines.

Centaurus, 2023

In the second half of the nineteenth century, prehispanic jade artifacts from Mexico– especially ... more In the second half of the nineteenth century, prehispanic jade artifacts from Mexico– especially jade celts and votive axes – stood at the center of scholarly debates on the origins of American civilizations. The contradiction between the prevalence of carved jades, on the one hand, and the apparent absence of jade mineral deposits in the Americas, on the other, resuscitated centuries-old theories that placed the beginnings of prehispanic civilizations in China. The increasing availability of Chinese and Mexican jades in the same spaces of commercial exchange, collection, display, and study – following French imperialist interventions in China and Mexico in the 1860s, which resulted in the plunder of a massive number of antiquities—, in a broader context of interest in jade that brought together artifacts from the South Pacific and from Neolithic contexts in Europe, contributed material proof to these theories. The so-called “jade question” was mostly dismissed by the twentieth century, but the debates surrounding jade’s mineralogical identity and provenance provide insight into the kinds of epistemological configurations, material limitations, and geopolitical arrangements that bore upon the emergence of new disciplines, including mineralogy, archaeology, and prehistory, as well as the new sciences of the prehispanic past. This essay explores these processes and reconstructs the dense networks of private and public institutions, scholars, collectors, dealers, and connoisseurs, that made jade artifacts from Mexico – and Central America -- into a scientific, aesthetic, and commercial category.

Objetos en tránsito, objetos en disputa. Las colecciones del Museo Nacional de México, 2023

En este ensayo reconstruyo la extracción, ocurrida en 1843, de dos urnas prehispánicas de cerámic... more En este ensayo reconstruyo la extracción, ocurrida en 1843, de dos urnas prehispánicas de cerámica de la isla de Manopostiac, en el istmo de Tehuantepec, derivada de la visita de una comisión científica patrocinada por el gobierno mexicano que pretendía evaluar la viabilidad de abrir un canal a través del istmo. Exploro las maneras en que esta extracción fue posible al tiempo que reforzó narrativas positivistas construidas sobre la presunta oposición entre barbarie y civilización, superstición y ciencia, improductividad y utilidad, dicotomías que fueron parte integral de la visión del México moderno durante el siglo xix. El capítulo argumenta que el Museo Nacional de Antropología ha hecho muy poco para reflexionar acerca de la violencia que yace en el corazón de sus colecciones tempranas y en las narrativas usadas para justificar su constitución, razón por la cual su relectura del estudio prospectivo en Tehuantepec cavila acerca de las pérdidas y omisiones en que incurrió el proceso mediante el cual las antigüedades prehispánicas se convirtieron en la esencia del pasado de México.

Objetos en tránsito, objetos en disputa. Las colecciones del Museo Nacional de México, 2023

Este capítulo constituye una primera aproximación a las colecciones de falsificaciones arqueológi... more Este capítulo constituye una primera aproximación a las colecciones
de falsificaciones arqueológicas en los museos nacionales
de México, donde se acumularon y perdieron en el curso de casi
dos siglos, mientras el museo peregrinaba de un lugar a otro, con lo
cual, quizá, se aprovechaba cada mudanza como pretexto para deshacerse
de todo aquello que se consideraba una falsificación. Nuestro
interés está en pensar con atención cómo contar la historia del
museo no sólo a través de su personal, sus publicaciones y su selección
de especímenes, sino también a través de su relación con la
falsificación. La relación que vinculó al museo con el mundo de los
falsificadores y traficantes de falsificaciones fue, en primer lugar,
de tipo mundano y práctico, no sólo porque el museo buscó separarse
de este bajo mundo, sino porque también estuvo implicado,
en diversos momentos, en la producción y adquisición de falsificaciones,
a sabiendas o no de que lo hacía. En segundo lugar, existe
una conexión epistemológica entre objetos auténticos y “falsificaciones” en el museo. Lo “auténtico” es aquello que no es una “falsificación”.
Así, mientras que la carga de la prueba ha recaído, la
mayoría de las veces, en demostrar que algo no es una falsificación
(y no en demostrar si es auténtica), los métodos y protocolos
para denunciar una falsificación –muchos de los cuales provienen
de las ciencias naturales– han contribuido a moldear y reforzar los
métodos de estudio de la autenticidad, como, por ejemplo, al generar
taxonomías estilísticas y al examinar marcas de fabricación y
procesos de envejecimiento de diferentes materiales. Por último,
los criterios para distinguir y separar una falsificación han cambiado
en el curso de los últimos 200 años y esos cambios, además
de mejorar y hacer más objetivos los métodos de detección, tienen
que ver con proyecciones y expectativas estéticas, políticas y culturales
acerca del pasado prehispánico. Como lo ha sugerido la historiadora
del arte Esther Pasztory, “las falsificaciones nos dicen lo
que queremos ver en lo auténtico […] Si queremos entender cómo
los coleccionistas vieron el arte azteca, tenemos que interrogar las
falsificaciones que fueron hechas para adaptarse a sus gustos e intereses”. ¿Qué era lo que el museo y, de manera más amplia, los
marchantes, coleccionistas privados y académicos querían ver en
el pasado antiguo de México en un momento específico? ¿Cuáles
eran sus expectativas en relación con la experticia técnica, las prácticas
de fabricación, los ideales estéticos y el origen cultural de los
pueblos antiguos de México?

Communications (Le myth de la science, number coordinated by Antonella Romano), 2023

Two myths shape both the critique and defence of museums : their analogy with the ark, i.e. the s... more Two myths shape both the critique and defence of museums : their analogy with the ark, i.e. the space built to preserve objects, and the capacity to pass on information across different times, geographies, and languages. This paper elaborates on three case studies – Richard Owen’s Museum of Natural History in London ; two museum centres in Kentucky, dedicated to proving the historicity of the Genesis Flood ; and the recent fire that devastated the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro – in an attempt to ponder over the human
and non-human contingencies that shape the coming into being and the ending of collections.
keywords : natural history museums, ark, creationism, disasters

The Invention of Humboldt. On the Geopolitics of Knowledge, 2022

This chapter follows the trajectories of three objects Humboldt took back with him from Mexico: e... more This chapter follows the trajectories of three objects Humboldt took back with him from Mexico: erythronium, a metal; cochineal, the dye made from the body of an insect; and Xochicalco, an archaeological site to the south of Mexico City. These objects travelled in the form of mineral samples, descriptions, and drawings. Our purpose is not to tell
three anecdotes about Humboldt’s Mexican collections. Rather, we propose to look behind the vitrines of the curated displays in Humboldt’s printed texts and in the cabinets in Paris and Berlin, where many of his collections were stored and classified, to ask, more broadly, about the kind of work involved in ferrying things physically, geographically, and conceptually, from one place to another, in this case, from Hispanic America to Europe, from field to cabinet, from cabinet to cabinet, from a Mexican archive to a text designed for a European readership, at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2021

Pas encore classiques: La fabrique des antiquités américaines au xixe siècle Les antiquités préco... more Pas encore classiques: La fabrique des antiquités américaines au xixe siècle Les antiquités précolombiennes sont devenues une catégorie esthétique, scientifique, commerciale et juridique reconnaissable au cours du xix e siècle. Cet article présente les acteurs, les sites et les configurations matérielles et idéologiques qui jouèrent un rôle dans sa construction et son développement. La première section examine la tradition antiquaire ibérique qui, vers le milieu du xvii e siècle, a mis en circulation les artefacts d’avant la conquête en tant qu’objets épistémiques, dans le contexte de la pertinence croissante des vestiges matériels comme objets d’investigation. L’article se penche ensuite sur les scènes de collecte dans les pays d’Amérique hispanique nouvellement indépendants, où les élites créoles, les musées locaux et les étrangers, mus par leurs propres intérêts, se sont disputé les antiquités. La troisième section explore la manière dont, au milieu du xix e siècle, les « technol...

Museum Matters, 2021

This chapter is a first approach to the collections of archaeological fakes accrued and lost at M... more This chapter is a first approach to the collections of archaeological fakes
accrued and lost at Mexico’s national museums over the course of almost
two centuries, as the museum peregrinated from place to place, probably
taking each move as a pretext to rid itself of what it took to be fakes. We are
interested in thinking through how to tell the story of the museum not only
through its personnel, publications, and choice specimens, but through its
relationship with forgery. First, this mundane and practical kind of relation
tied the museum with the world of forgers and traffickers in fakes, not only
because the museum sought to separate itself from this underworld, but
because it was implicated at different times in the production and acquisition of forgeries, both knowingly and unknowingly. Second, there is an epistemological connection between fakes and “authentic” objects at the museum. The “authentic” is that which is not “fake.” So, while the burden of proof has mostly consisted in determining whether something is fake (and not whether it is authentic), the methods and protocols for exposing a forgery—many of which come from the natural sciences—have contributed to shaping and reinforcing the methods for studying authenticity, for instance, by generating stylistic taxonomies and by examining marks of fabrication and processes of aging by different materials. Finally, the criteria for telling a fake apart have changed over the course of two hundred years, and those changes are not just a matter of better and more objective methods but have to do with aesthetic, political, and cultural projections and expectations about the preHispanic past. As art historian Esther Pasztory has suggestively put it, “Fakes tell us what we want to see in the authentic. . . . If we want to understand how collectors saw Aztec art, we have to interrogate the forgery that was made to fit their tastes and interests.” What did the museum, and more widely, dealers, private collectors, and scholars, want to see in Mexico’s ancient past at any specific moment? What were their expectations regarding the technical expertise, manufacturing practices, aesthetic ideals, and cultural provenance of Mexico’s ancient peoples?

Museum Matters: Making and Unmaking Mexico's National Collections, 2021

This paper begins with two antiquities presently held at the National Museum of Anthropology in M... more This paper begins with two antiquities presently held at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. They were collected in the 1840s in Tehuantepec, in the course of a surveying expedition that sought to assess the possibilities of opening a canal through the isthmus and returned to Mexico City with antiquities, mineral and plant smaples, maps and measurements. Here, I bring together
objects and fragments of objects and stories as a way of exploring the premises,
dissonances, and contradictions that shaped collecting in mid-nineteenth century Mexico, to make visible the regimens of exclusion and inclusion that determined what kinds of things were worth gathering in the museum and
to inquire into the contested uses with which these things were invested by
different actors. How some uses came to prevail over others is key to understanding what kind of museum was being built and how it came to be. Ultimately, what drives this essay is not exclusively antiquarian curiosity: indeed, exposing the conceptual and ideological buttresses that fix and sustain things as objects of collections is a way of reminding ourselves that things can be made public again and sustain a multiplicity of viewpoints.

Colonial Latin American Review, 2020

This essay explores the manuscripts produced by Guillermo Dupaix in the context of the Royal Anti... more This essay explores the manuscripts produced by Guillermo Dupaix in the context of the Royal Antiquarian Expeditions (1805-1809), sponsored by the Spanish crown with the aim of recording and studying pre-Conquest ruins in New Spain. While most histories of Mexican antiquarianism are based on published editions of Dupaix’s work, his manuscripts tell a seldom-told story of American antiquarianism at a moment of “indiscipline,” when antiquities did not have the aesthetic, commercial, political or symbolic values they would acquire over the nineteenth century at a time when neither the verbal and visual syntax nor the methods and protocols for studying them were in place. Dupaix’s drafts, drawings, lists and diaries allow a rare glimpse into the material and conceptual conditions that shaped processes of knowledge production at the turn of the nineteenth century. More broadly, this essay addresses questions about the configuration of cultural and scientific objects and collections.

This essay looks at photography not just as the material support for supposedly increasingly trut... more This essay looks at photography not just as the material support for supposedly increasingly truthful representation of antiquity, but as artefacts that, by circulating, produced canons and ways of seeing Mexican antiquities.

Nexos, 2019

Los objetos de Humboldt: una colección para un mundo global cultura.nexos.com.mx/ Como parte de l... more Los objetos de Humboldt: una colección para un mundo global cultura.nexos.com.mx/ Como parte de la actual revaloración historiográfica de la vida y obra de Humboldt, el siguiente ensayo -- una versión de la conferencia magistral celebrando el aniversario 250 de Humboldt en el Humboldt Forum en Berlín -- ilumina el camino tortuoso que tuvo que recorrer su colección y reivindica su trabajo como obra colectiva y bulliciosa, contraria a la de un héroe y científico solitario.

Objetos en tránsito, objetos en disputa. Las colecciones del Museo Nacional de México, 2023

Hace tiempo, Bruno Latour discurrió acerca de la raíz común de las palabras “cosa” y “parlamento”... more Hace tiempo, Bruno Latour discurrió acerca de la raíz común de las palabras “cosa” y “parlamento” para recordarnos que en el cuerpo político “hay una abundante relación con cosas” y que los objetos convocan o congregan a la gente no porque sus significados sean fijos sino por cómo afectan y dividen a sus usuarios. Siguiendo el ejemplo de Latour, nuestra intención es traer de vuelta al cuerpo político las cosas que se encuentran en las colecciones nacionales de México, con el fin de replantearlas como lugares de parlamento, es decir, lugares de debate y conversación, para reflexionar acerca de su utilidad al momento de repensar la nación y los varios destinos de sus colecciones en la actualidad. En un momento histórico cuando los museos en todo el mundo enfrentan un cuestionamiento amplio en torno al legado colonial de sus colecciones y están, por lo tanto, teniendo que reinventar su lugar y su rol como custodios de objetos vinculados a diversas comunidades –nacionales y de pueblos originarios– que reclaman su repatriación y restitución, nos parece imperativo reimaginar el lugar de las colecciones nacionales en el contexto mexicano, que hasta ahora no ha figurado de manera prominente en estos debates.

Versión en español -- y ampliada -- del libro From Idols to Antiquity: Forging the National Museu... more Versión en español -- y ampliada -- del libro From Idols to Antiquity: Forging the National Museum of Mexico (1825-1867). El libro explora los primeros años del museo así como las configuraciones materiales, políticas, culturales y económicas que hicieron posible la formación del museo. Un hilo conductor del libro explora la construcción de la categoría estética, disciplinaria y científica de antigüedades mexicanas.

Museum Matters. Making and Unmaking Mexico's National Collections, 2021

This is a book about objects. Stones, ruins, bones, mummies, mannequins, statues, photographs, fa... more This is a book about objects. Stones, ruins, bones, mummies, mannequins, statues, photographs, fakes, instruments, and natural history specimens all formed part of Mexico’s National Museum complex at different moments across two centuries of collecting and display.
Museum Matters traces the emergence, consolidation, and dispersal of this national museum complex by telling the stories of its objects. Objects that have been separated over time are brought back together in this book in order to shed light on the interactions and processes that have forged things into symbols of science, aesthetics, and politics. The contributors to this volume illuminate how collections came into being or ceased to exist over time, or how objects moved in and out of collections and museum spaces. They explore what it means to move things physically and spatially, as well as conceptually and symbolically.
Museum Matters unravels the concept of the national museum. By unmaking the spaces, frameworks, and structures that form the complicated landscape of national museums, this volume brings a new way to understand the storage, displays, and claims about the Mexican nation’s collections today.

Ciencias, Jan 6, 2010

En 1781, José Felipe Flores (1751-1824), catedrático en me di cina en la Real Universi-dad de Gua... more En 1781, José Felipe Flores (1751-1824), catedrático en me di cina en la Real Universi-dad de Guatemala, publicó un folleto de quince páginas so bre los usos médicos de la carne de lagartijas. El título no podía ser más prometedor: Específico nuevamente des-cubierto en ...

The Carte Blanche 2024 talk series gives the floor to some 2023-2024 Paris IAS fellows on a subje... more The Carte Blanche 2024 talk series gives the floor to some 2023-2024 Paris IAS fellows on a subject of their choice. This specific Carte blanche is proposed by Miruna Achim, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa in Mexico City, and Patricia Mindus, Uppsala University, Sweden.
Both of them are 2023-2024 Paris IAS fellows.

Presentation:
Jade is a distinct marker of ancient Mesoamerica. Yet, over the past five centuries, since they first arrived in Europe, artifacts made from this stone have had multiple uses – which have unfolded on global scales and varied over time--, as objects of science, art, politics, and commerce. Reconstructing the post-conquest trajectories of Mesoamerican jade between the sixteenth and the twenty-first century, this project places jade’s sensuous properties (color, texture, translucence, sound, beauty, chemical make-up, and hardness) at the center of analysis to understand how materiality has shaped and actualized interactions, both with the stone itself and among the people who have extracted, worked, trafficked, collected and consumed it. Recently, the location and increasingly large-scale exploitation of jadeite sources in the Motagua River Valley in Guatemala has placed both ancient jade artifacts and raw jadeite at the center of commercial speculation and illicit trafficking, sharpening the (climate-induced) social and environmental degradation of a region already marginalized. By delving into the making and unmaking of a stone, I ask how ancient material culture and its circulations continue to haunt and affect contemporary contexts worldwide.

Dix-huitième siècle , 2024

This paper follows the trails of Amerindian stone axes in the course of the 18th century. First, ... more This paper follows the trails of Amerindian stone axes in the course
of the 18th century. First, I focus on their relevance in refuting an
age-old classification of European stone axes as “jeux de la nature/
jokes of nature” – meaning that, their capricious or suggestive
forms notwithstanding, they had been believed to have formed
“naturally”, without human intervention. Once it was established
that the stone axes dug out across Europe were artefacts, scholarly material, specifically about the kinds of minerals that afforded a
range of uses. Stone axes thus moved in a conceptually and taxonomically
fluid space, between naturalia and artificialia, sometimes
more stone, other times more axe, where the artefact raised questions
about the mineral, and the mineral posed questions about
the technical, and moral, capacities of the people who produced
the artefact. These kinds of crossovers between fields of knowledge
point to the geological and mineralogical underpinnings of anthropology
and archaeology as disciplines.

Centaurus, 2023

In the second half of the nineteenth century, prehispanic jade artifacts from Mexico– especially ... more In the second half of the nineteenth century, prehispanic jade artifacts from Mexico– especially jade celts and votive axes – stood at the center of scholarly debates on the origins of American civilizations. The contradiction between the prevalence of carved jades, on the one hand, and the apparent absence of jade mineral deposits in the Americas, on the other, resuscitated centuries-old theories that placed the beginnings of prehispanic civilizations in China. The increasing availability of Chinese and Mexican jades in the same spaces of commercial exchange, collection, display, and study – following French imperialist interventions in China and Mexico in the 1860s, which resulted in the plunder of a massive number of antiquities—, in a broader context of interest in jade that brought together artifacts from the South Pacific and from Neolithic contexts in Europe, contributed material proof to these theories. The so-called “jade question” was mostly dismissed by the twentieth century, but the debates surrounding jade’s mineralogical identity and provenance provide insight into the kinds of epistemological configurations, material limitations, and geopolitical arrangements that bore upon the emergence of new disciplines, including mineralogy, archaeology, and prehistory, as well as the new sciences of the prehispanic past. This essay explores these processes and reconstructs the dense networks of private and public institutions, scholars, collectors, dealers, and connoisseurs, that made jade artifacts from Mexico – and Central America -- into a scientific, aesthetic, and commercial category.

Objetos en tránsito, objetos en disputa. Las colecciones del Museo Nacional de México, 2023

En este ensayo reconstruyo la extracción, ocurrida en 1843, de dos urnas prehispánicas de cerámic... more En este ensayo reconstruyo la extracción, ocurrida en 1843, de dos urnas prehispánicas de cerámica de la isla de Manopostiac, en el istmo de Tehuantepec, derivada de la visita de una comisión científica patrocinada por el gobierno mexicano que pretendía evaluar la viabilidad de abrir un canal a través del istmo. Exploro las maneras en que esta extracción fue posible al tiempo que reforzó narrativas positivistas construidas sobre la presunta oposición entre barbarie y civilización, superstición y ciencia, improductividad y utilidad, dicotomías que fueron parte integral de la visión del México moderno durante el siglo xix. El capítulo argumenta que el Museo Nacional de Antropología ha hecho muy poco para reflexionar acerca de la violencia que yace en el corazón de sus colecciones tempranas y en las narrativas usadas para justificar su constitución, razón por la cual su relectura del estudio prospectivo en Tehuantepec cavila acerca de las pérdidas y omisiones en que incurrió el proceso mediante el cual las antigüedades prehispánicas se convirtieron en la esencia del pasado de México.

Objetos en tránsito, objetos en disputa. Las colecciones del Museo Nacional de México, 2023

Este capítulo constituye una primera aproximación a las colecciones de falsificaciones arqueológi... more Este capítulo constituye una primera aproximación a las colecciones
de falsificaciones arqueológicas en los museos nacionales
de México, donde se acumularon y perdieron en el curso de casi
dos siglos, mientras el museo peregrinaba de un lugar a otro, con lo
cual, quizá, se aprovechaba cada mudanza como pretexto para deshacerse
de todo aquello que se consideraba una falsificación. Nuestro
interés está en pensar con atención cómo contar la historia del
museo no sólo a través de su personal, sus publicaciones y su selección
de especímenes, sino también a través de su relación con la
falsificación. La relación que vinculó al museo con el mundo de los
falsificadores y traficantes de falsificaciones fue, en primer lugar,
de tipo mundano y práctico, no sólo porque el museo buscó separarse
de este bajo mundo, sino porque también estuvo implicado,
en diversos momentos, en la producción y adquisición de falsificaciones,
a sabiendas o no de que lo hacía. En segundo lugar, existe
una conexión epistemológica entre objetos auténticos y “falsificaciones” en el museo. Lo “auténtico” es aquello que no es una “falsificación”.
Así, mientras que la carga de la prueba ha recaído, la
mayoría de las veces, en demostrar que algo no es una falsificación
(y no en demostrar si es auténtica), los métodos y protocolos
para denunciar una falsificación –muchos de los cuales provienen
de las ciencias naturales– han contribuido a moldear y reforzar los
métodos de estudio de la autenticidad, como, por ejemplo, al generar
taxonomías estilísticas y al examinar marcas de fabricación y
procesos de envejecimiento de diferentes materiales. Por último,
los criterios para distinguir y separar una falsificación han cambiado
en el curso de los últimos 200 años y esos cambios, además
de mejorar y hacer más objetivos los métodos de detección, tienen
que ver con proyecciones y expectativas estéticas, políticas y culturales
acerca del pasado prehispánico. Como lo ha sugerido la historiadora
del arte Esther Pasztory, “las falsificaciones nos dicen lo
que queremos ver en lo auténtico […] Si queremos entender cómo
los coleccionistas vieron el arte azteca, tenemos que interrogar las
falsificaciones que fueron hechas para adaptarse a sus gustos e intereses”. ¿Qué era lo que el museo y, de manera más amplia, los
marchantes, coleccionistas privados y académicos querían ver en
el pasado antiguo de México en un momento específico? ¿Cuáles
eran sus expectativas en relación con la experticia técnica, las prácticas
de fabricación, los ideales estéticos y el origen cultural de los
pueblos antiguos de México?

Communications (Le myth de la science, number coordinated by Antonella Romano), 2023

Two myths shape both the critique and defence of museums : their analogy with the ark, i.e. the s... more Two myths shape both the critique and defence of museums : their analogy with the ark, i.e. the space built to preserve objects, and the capacity to pass on information across different times, geographies, and languages. This paper elaborates on three case studies – Richard Owen’s Museum of Natural History in London ; two museum centres in Kentucky, dedicated to proving the historicity of the Genesis Flood ; and the recent fire that devastated the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro – in an attempt to ponder over the human
and non-human contingencies that shape the coming into being and the ending of collections.
keywords : natural history museums, ark, creationism, disasters

The Invention of Humboldt. On the Geopolitics of Knowledge, 2022

This chapter follows the trajectories of three objects Humboldt took back with him from Mexico: e... more This chapter follows the trajectories of three objects Humboldt took back with him from Mexico: erythronium, a metal; cochineal, the dye made from the body of an insect; and Xochicalco, an archaeological site to the south of Mexico City. These objects travelled in the form of mineral samples, descriptions, and drawings. Our purpose is not to tell
three anecdotes about Humboldt’s Mexican collections. Rather, we propose to look behind the vitrines of the curated displays in Humboldt’s printed texts and in the cabinets in Paris and Berlin, where many of his collections were stored and classified, to ask, more broadly, about the kind of work involved in ferrying things physically, geographically, and conceptually, from one place to another, in this case, from Hispanic America to Europe, from field to cabinet, from cabinet to cabinet, from a Mexican archive to a text designed for a European readership, at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2021

Pas encore classiques: La fabrique des antiquités américaines au xixe siècle Les antiquités préco... more Pas encore classiques: La fabrique des antiquités américaines au xixe siècle Les antiquités précolombiennes sont devenues une catégorie esthétique, scientifique, commerciale et juridique reconnaissable au cours du xix e siècle. Cet article présente les acteurs, les sites et les configurations matérielles et idéologiques qui jouèrent un rôle dans sa construction et son développement. La première section examine la tradition antiquaire ibérique qui, vers le milieu du xvii e siècle, a mis en circulation les artefacts d’avant la conquête en tant qu’objets épistémiques, dans le contexte de la pertinence croissante des vestiges matériels comme objets d’investigation. L’article se penche ensuite sur les scènes de collecte dans les pays d’Amérique hispanique nouvellement indépendants, où les élites créoles, les musées locaux et les étrangers, mus par leurs propres intérêts, se sont disputé les antiquités. La troisième section explore la manière dont, au milieu du xix e siècle, les « technol...

Museum Matters, 2021

This chapter is a first approach to the collections of archaeological fakes accrued and lost at M... more This chapter is a first approach to the collections of archaeological fakes
accrued and lost at Mexico’s national museums over the course of almost
two centuries, as the museum peregrinated from place to place, probably
taking each move as a pretext to rid itself of what it took to be fakes. We are
interested in thinking through how to tell the story of the museum not only
through its personnel, publications, and choice specimens, but through its
relationship with forgery. First, this mundane and practical kind of relation
tied the museum with the world of forgers and traffickers in fakes, not only
because the museum sought to separate itself from this underworld, but
because it was implicated at different times in the production and acquisition of forgeries, both knowingly and unknowingly. Second, there is an epistemological connection between fakes and “authentic” objects at the museum. The “authentic” is that which is not “fake.” So, while the burden of proof has mostly consisted in determining whether something is fake (and not whether it is authentic), the methods and protocols for exposing a forgery—many of which come from the natural sciences—have contributed to shaping and reinforcing the methods for studying authenticity, for instance, by generating stylistic taxonomies and by examining marks of fabrication and processes of aging by different materials. Finally, the criteria for telling a fake apart have changed over the course of two hundred years, and those changes are not just a matter of better and more objective methods but have to do with aesthetic, political, and cultural projections and expectations about the preHispanic past. As art historian Esther Pasztory has suggestively put it, “Fakes tell us what we want to see in the authentic. . . . If we want to understand how collectors saw Aztec art, we have to interrogate the forgery that was made to fit their tastes and interests.” What did the museum, and more widely, dealers, private collectors, and scholars, want to see in Mexico’s ancient past at any specific moment? What were their expectations regarding the technical expertise, manufacturing practices, aesthetic ideals, and cultural provenance of Mexico’s ancient peoples?

Museum Matters: Making and Unmaking Mexico's National Collections, 2021

This paper begins with two antiquities presently held at the National Museum of Anthropology in M... more This paper begins with two antiquities presently held at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. They were collected in the 1840s in Tehuantepec, in the course of a surveying expedition that sought to assess the possibilities of opening a canal through the isthmus and returned to Mexico City with antiquities, mineral and plant smaples, maps and measurements. Here, I bring together
objects and fragments of objects and stories as a way of exploring the premises,
dissonances, and contradictions that shaped collecting in mid-nineteenth century Mexico, to make visible the regimens of exclusion and inclusion that determined what kinds of things were worth gathering in the museum and
to inquire into the contested uses with which these things were invested by
different actors. How some uses came to prevail over others is key to understanding what kind of museum was being built and how it came to be. Ultimately, what drives this essay is not exclusively antiquarian curiosity: indeed, exposing the conceptual and ideological buttresses that fix and sustain things as objects of collections is a way of reminding ourselves that things can be made public again and sustain a multiplicity of viewpoints.

Colonial Latin American Review, 2020

This essay explores the manuscripts produced by Guillermo Dupaix in the context of the Royal Anti... more This essay explores the manuscripts produced by Guillermo Dupaix in the context of the Royal Antiquarian Expeditions (1805-1809), sponsored by the Spanish crown with the aim of recording and studying pre-Conquest ruins in New Spain. While most histories of Mexican antiquarianism are based on published editions of Dupaix’s work, his manuscripts tell a seldom-told story of American antiquarianism at a moment of “indiscipline,” when antiquities did not have the aesthetic, commercial, political or symbolic values they would acquire over the nineteenth century at a time when neither the verbal and visual syntax nor the methods and protocols for studying them were in place. Dupaix’s drafts, drawings, lists and diaries allow a rare glimpse into the material and conceptual conditions that shaped processes of knowledge production at the turn of the nineteenth century. More broadly, this essay addresses questions about the configuration of cultural and scientific objects and collections.

This essay looks at photography not just as the material support for supposedly increasingly trut... more This essay looks at photography not just as the material support for supposedly increasingly truthful representation of antiquity, but as artefacts that, by circulating, produced canons and ways of seeing Mexican antiquities.

Nexos, 2019

Los objetos de Humboldt: una colección para un mundo global cultura.nexos.com.mx/ Como parte de l... more Los objetos de Humboldt: una colección para un mundo global cultura.nexos.com.mx/ Como parte de la actual revaloración historiográfica de la vida y obra de Humboldt, el siguiente ensayo -- una versión de la conferencia magistral celebrando el aniversario 250 de Humboldt en el Humboldt Forum en Berlín -- ilumina el camino tortuoso que tuvo que recorrer su colección y reivindica su trabajo como obra colectiva y bulliciosa, contraria a la de un héroe y científico solitario.

The history of the National Museum of Mexico during the first half century after its foundation i... more The history of the National Museum of Mexico during the first half century after its foundation in 1825 has been largely ignored. This is partly because at that time the museum failed to meet contemporary ideals of national museums as repositories of a nation’s most representative objects and as forgers of meanings about these objects. This essay argues against reading intrinsic values into the early National Museum of Mexico and proposes paths for reconstructing its history as an emerging entity. Focusing on the Museum’s strategies for collecting, exhibiting, and studying objects, I suggest that, rather than following pre-established protocols, the Museum took shape in practice, in the context of volatile national politics, material limitations, and international competition for collections.

West 86, 2022

bgc.bard.edu/bookreviews/the-invention-of-the-colonial-americas-data-architecture-and-the-archive... more bgc.bard.edu/bookreviews/the-invention-of-the-colonial-americas-data-architecture-and-the-archives-of-the-indies-1781-1844/?fbclid=IwAR0T… 1/4

Letras libres, 2022

Invocar hechos duros ha servido a menudo como pretexto para no devolver objetos a sus comunidades... more Invocar hechos duros ha servido a menudo como pretexto para no devolver objetos a sus comunidades de origen o a los descendientes de esas comunidades. Es este el caso del llamado penacho de Motecuhzoma? Y si fuera devuelto, a quién habría que devolverlo?

West 86, 2022

In The Contested Crown, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll enters a conceptually, legally, and symbol... more In The Contested Crown, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll enters a conceptually, legally, and symbolically fraught space to deliver a plea for the penacho’s repatriation to Mexico. Technicalities, such as the penacho’s fragility or its property status, Carroll insists, are often used to disguise political questions. “Facts” have served to justify holding on to looted artifacts or to artifacts acquired under asymmetrical arrangements of power, reinforcing those very arrangements and leading to the further disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples across the globe. In the end, Carroll avers, it does not matter if the penacho were to crumble on its westward voyage across the Atlantic

Technology and Culture, 2022

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2015

Historia Mexicana, May 11, 2018

Drugs on the Page juxtaposes 12 case studies of pharmacopoeias, broadly defined as printed and ma... more Drugs on the Page juxtaposes 12 case studies of pharmacopoeias, broadly defined as printed and manuscript lists of substances with therapeutic uses. Geographically, this volume spans the Atlantic world-from Quebec to Lima, Angola, and Paris-and its Asian entrepôts in India and China. Chronologically, the studies range from pharmaceutical texts in the Arabic and Galenic traditions (de Vos) to national and imperial pharmacopoeias produced throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries (Crawford, Anderson, Lentacker, Gabriel). Alongside official pharmacopoeias flourished a variegated world of manuscript recipes, lay healers, secret cures, and substances that came in and out of fashion (Beck, Breen, Rivest, Parsons, Wisecup). In its breadth, the book offers a much-needed comparative view of the ways in which pharmaceutical knowledge was produced, organized, and circulated, and into the political, social, material, and epistemic structures that made that knowledge possible. As a textual genre, the pharmacopoeia was a stable and enduring technology for the standardization and transmission of knowledge about substances and the procedures for manipulating them. It also proved to be an incredibly flexible structure. Shaped by the conventions of classical European medical texts, by the 15th century, pharmaco-poeias became "tools for making sense of the encounters with a diversity of peoples and things provoked by the commercial and colonial expansion of early modern Europe" (Crawford & Gabriel, p. 5) and for incorporating and codifying medical information, preventing fraud, and providing states and medical boards with oversight over bodies and substances. Fluid and structured, contingent and stable, novel and traditional, pharmacopoeias constitute a privileged lens through which to reconstruct these efforts as they played out in the relations between metropolis and colony, between competing European political entities, between laypeople and medical authorities, manuscript and print, field and cabinet, things and the endeavors to name them, and across different epistemic and material cultures. The case studies in this volume approach these topics from diverse methodological and analytic perspectives. Together, they share a commitment to dense and nuanced investigation and are informed by common conceptual and theoretical concerns, which ensures the unity and relevance of the collection as a whole. Among the more robust contributions of Drugs on the Page is its intervention in the current literature on "episte-mic genres," a concept coined by the medical historian Gianna Pomata to explain the ways in which textual genres function across social groups. 1 Intrinsically social, genres "develop in tandem with scientific practices and are linked to knowledge-making, however culturally defined" (Ryan, p. 125). As collective enterprises, pharmacopoeias were contingent on specific configurations of needs and ambitions and were forged as site-specific styles of thinking about and laying claims to people, things, and territories. Such configurations were at work in the production of the first Renaissance pharmacopoeia, the Ricettario Fiorentino (1498), to ensure medical authority over manuscript recipe 1 Pomata (2013).

Hispanic American Historical Review, 2020

Esta conferencia traza la construcción de la categoría de antigüedad mexicana entre finales del s... more Esta conferencia traza la construcción de la categoría de antigüedad mexicana entre finales del sg. 18 y finales del 19. Examina sitios (museos, gabinetes, academias), personajes y soportes técnicos (litografía, dibujo, molde, fotografía), para cuestionar las narrativas que insisten en el valor intrínseco de las antigüedades y para matizar su relación con los discursos patrios.