Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Museum & Society
Volume
22
Publication Date
2024
Abstract
Mineral wealth has motivated and funded extractive empires, often at the expense of local communities, workers, natural environments, and public health. Yet those connections are not recorded in traditional mineral catalogues, which divorce specimens from context. This article examines the roots of those omissions and situates mineral cataloguing in the larger body of literature on knowledge organization systems and their relation to power. We examine how colonial ideologies of land and people become entrenched in mineral cataloguing practices, and how this reinforces the ways that contemporary geologists think about their work. We argue that revising mineral cataloguing practices is a necessary first step – both practically and epistemologically – toward addressing histories of violence in our mineral collections and the science of geology.
Citation
Hearth, Selby; Robbins, Carrie; Weldon, Marianne; Anderson, Aha; Bieber-Stanley, Rosa; Chernila, April; Christ, Helen; Cosgrove, Hannah; Hanson-Rosenberg, Morgan; Hill, Carly; Hofstetter, Maya; Lazo, Emily; Ludlow, Izzie; Lyster, Samantha; Myers, Rachel; Nash, Jasper; Reed, Georgia; and Saint- Amour, Julia, "Cataloguing Minerals, Part One: Historical Cataloguing Practices and the Logics of Colonialism" (2024). Geology Faculty Research and Scholarship. 30.
https://repository.brynmawr.edu/geo_pubs/30
