IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB427316675

Civilizing mummies: An adventure of technicians in archaeological collections (2022)

Felipe Raglianti (Author)

Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society
Volume: 5
Issue: 1

DOI: 10.1080/25729861.2022.2068332

URI: https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2022.2068332

Publication Date: 2022
Physical Details: Digital journal
Language: English

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Ontology Museum curators Technoscience; science and technology studies Archaeology Mummies Semiotics and archaeology 21st century Chile Whitehead, Alfred North

In this article, I follow the work of technicians organizing a collection of mummified materials in a university of Chile. In doing this, I translate some points of laboratory studies into another context: a deposit of archaeological collections. By following how technicians sort out the collections and exploring their roles in the making of knowledges tinged by hands-on experience, I unravel with a “Whiteheadean twist” how conservation practices are a matter of concern in archaeology. Insofar the mummies are preserved as “material heritages” and witnessed in public as “carriers of civilization,” these “ambassadors of the past” are haunted in turn by their histories. But in the hands of technicians, I speculate that mummified materials become archeological objects imbued with a particular mode of existence. Through their work, they get to know the life-histories of mummies and in such stories, I focus on a sense of permanence, felt as an ideal purpose of conservation in archaeological collections. I analyze this with Whitehead’s notion of civilization to underscore how conservation processes aim at attaining everlasting things. In this sense, I develop the point that civilizations function as lures for collecting and preserving things.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB427316675/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Maite P. Salazar; Daniel Valenzuela; Manuel Tironi; Rodrigo A. Gutiérrez; (2019)
The ambivalent regulator: The construction of a regulatory style for genetically modified crops in Chile (/isis/citation/CBB036000701/)

Article Marcelo González Gálvez; Fernanda Gallegos; Valentina Turén; (2021)
Unfinished extinction and the velocities of capitalist sacrifices in the woodlands of central Chile (/isis/citation/CBB772337866/)

Article Manuel Tironi; (July 2015)
Disastrous Publics: Counter-enactments in Participatory Experiments (/isis/citation/CBB113467535/)

Article Sebastián Ureta; (2018)
Selling the sociotechnical sublime: Critical reflections on introducing STS to managers of a Chilean mining corporation (/isis/citation/CBB990711903/)

Article Jorge Castillo-Sepúlveda; Francisco Tirado; Ana Gálvez; (2023)
Biopolitics and speculative objects in Chilean health projects (/isis/citation/CBB679456149/)

Article Tomas Ariztia; Aline Bravo; Ignacio Nuñez; (2023)
Baroque tools for climate action. What do we learn from a catalogue of local technologies? (/isis/citation/CBB596078043/)

Article Sebastian Ureta; (January 2021)
Ruination Science: Producing Knowledge from a Toxic World (/isis/citation/CBB500426002/)

Article Sebastián Rojas-Navarro; Francisco Moller-Domínguez; Samanta Alarcón-Arcos; María-Alejandra Energici; Nicolás Schöngut-Grollmus; (2022)
Care during exceptional times: results of the CUIDAR study on the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile (/isis/citation/CBB983603829/)

Article Sarah Pink; Juan Francisco Salazar; Melisa Duque; (2019)
Everyday mundane repair: Banknotes and the material entanglements of improvisation and innovation (/isis/citation/CBB927398238/)

Book Pierre Léna; (2020)
Astronomy’s Quest for Sharp Images: From Blurred Pictures to the Very Large Telescope (/isis/citation/CBB331621161/)

Article Manuel Tironi; Denisse Vega; Juan Roa Antileo; (2021)
Bude uncommon: Extractivist endings and the unthinkable politics of conservation in Lafkenche territory (/isis/citation/CBB823680537/)

Article Amy E. Slaton; Alice L. Pawley; (2018)
The Power and Politics of Engineering Education Research Design: Saving the ‘Small N’ (/isis/citation/CBB348947780/)

Article van Heur, Bas; Leydesdorff, Loet; Wyatt, Sally; (June 2013)
Turning to ontology in STS? Turning to STS through ‘ontology’ (/isis/citation/CBB199076323/)

Article Anna Molas; Laura Perler; (2020)
Selecting women, taming bodies? Body ontologies in egg donation practices in Spain (/isis/citation/CBB375247286/)

Article Jorge Alexander Daza-Cardona; Juliana Vargas-Ramírez; María Alejandra Guapacha-Sánchez; (2021)
Doing odontograms and dentists in the classroom. Materiality and affect in dental education (/isis/citation/CBB069630581/)

Article Casper Bruun Jensen; (2022)
Emerging Potentials: Times and Climes of the Belt and Road Initiative in Cambodia and Beyond (/isis/citation/CBB553812676/)

Article Manuel Tironi; (June 2018)
Hypo-interventions: Intimate activism in toxic environments (/isis/citation/CBB039926828/)

Article Catalina Amigo-Jorquera; María José Guerrero-González; Jorgelina Sannazzaro; Anahí Urquiza-Gómez; (2019)
Does energy poverty have a female face in Chile? (/isis/citation/CBB520214421/)

Article Papadopoulos, Dimitris; (April 2011)
Alter-ontologies: Towards a constituent politics in technoscience (/isis/citation/CBB185760393/)

Article Clémence Pinel; Barbara Prainsack; Christopher McKevitt; (April 2020)
Caring for data: Value creation in a data-intensive research laboratory (/isis/citation/CBB399588537/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}