The nineteenth-century museum and auction house are seemingly distinct spaces with opposing functions: while the former represents a contemplative space that accumulates objects of art and science, the latter provides a forum for lively sales events that disperse wares to the highest bidders. This contribution blurs the border between museums and marketplaces by studying the Berlin Zoological Museum's duplicate specimen auctions between 1818 and the 1840s. It attends to the operations and tools involved in commodifying specimens as duplicates, particularly the (...) auction catalogue. The paper furthermore contextualizes the museum's sales in a broader history of duplicate auctions across Berlin's collection landscape. (shrink)

The permanent preservation of objects in global custodianship is a captivating ideal that informs countless museums’ corporate identities and governs collection guidelines as well as politics. Recent research has challenged the alleged perpetuity of collections and collected items, revealing their coherence as fragile and dependent on historically, politically and culturally specific conditions. Duplicates offer an instructive point of entry to explore the idea of collection permanence, museum politics, and the mobility of museum objects. The history of duplicates, moreover, comprises a (...) constellation of practises, concepts and debates that can be found in various forms throughout the intertwined histories of natural-scientific, ethnographic and artistic collections. This history, however, has rarely been questioned or explored. By introducing the issue of duplicates, this paper opens up a discussion that not only connects different forms of collections, but also situates the history of collecting institutions across the disciplinary spectrum within broader political, economic and epistemic frameworks. (shrink)

This essay examines the Mission paléontologique française of the 1920s, a series of scientific expeditions into the Ordos Desert in Inner Mongolia in which a team of Jesuit scholar-scientists worked with local collaborators to provide material for the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. The case study shows that the global and colonial expansion of Western science in the early twentieth century provided space for traditional scientific institutions, such as universalizing metropolitan collections and clerical scholarly networks, to extend their research projects. (...) The linking of approaches, agendas, and geographic regions was facilitated by the concepts and practices of the deep-time sciences of geology, paleontology, and human prehistory. These were based on the interchange of expertise, common projects of unveiling the development of life, and the alignment of different regions and specimens. Moreover, the expeditions did not just conduct research based around global movement and transmission. They also conceptualized the ancient development of life in terms of movement, migration, and exchange. The act of forming research networks that linked Asia and Europe also led scientists to conceive of these regions as bound by deep natural processes. Circulation and transfer became important actors’ categories used to understand the origins and history of life. (shrink)