This special issue is the result of a two-day conference, ‘Held in Trust: Curiosity in Things’, sponsored by the University of Otago’s Centre for Research on Colonial Culture (CRoCC), and held at the Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand, in January 2019. The gathering, which was prompted by the 150th year of the Otago Museum, focused on histories of institutional collections and collectors in Aotearoa New Zealand set within a global intellectual and commercial context. We would like to thank all the speakers and delegates for their individual and collective contribution to the success and stimulation of the outstanding event. The conference deliberately set out to enlarge museum history, which has largely been framed under the rubric of colonial domination or building cathedrals of science. Both notions are somewhat superficial and do not tell us much about the bigger stories that motivated the creation of the collections, particularly in the British colonial context of the colony that became New Zealand. While objects have the capacity to tell stories of lives and communities that are interconnected over space and time, this aspect is largely lost in the tendency to research specific object biographies and recount tales of eccentric collectors. In such approaches, the global context is often missing, especially the critical dimension of commercial trade and how exchange networks contributed to the patterns of knowledge discovery and creation. Objects are the tangible material world of scientific endeavour and during the nineteenth century trade in them boomed. Also overlooked are tales of the political context surrounding the discovery and translocation of objects. Acquisition histories dominate the field of the history of collecting and institutional histories run the risk of becoming bogged down in these empirical, albeit fascinating, approaches. The contributors to this special issue show how museums and collections are the result of a complex interrelationship between people, places and things and how these inform practices surrounding acquisition and knowledge generation. Through an interrogation of the formation of these social, economic and cultural assemblages, we can begin to understand how colonial museums were an integral part of these social and material connections. We also think that these articles about the history and development of museums in one colonial site have an application to colonial museums more broadly.

中文翻译：

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简介：新西兰奥特罗阿的博物馆历史：地方与全球的交汇点

本期特刊是由奥塔哥大学殖民文化研究中心 (CRoCC) 赞助并在新西兰但尼丁奥塔哥博物馆举行的为期两天的会议“信任举行：对事物的好奇心”的结果，于 2019 年 1 月。此次聚会是由奥塔哥博物馆成立 150 周年促成的，其重点是在全球知识和商业背景下，新西兰奥塔罗瓦的机构收藏和收藏家的历史。我们要感谢所有演讲者和代表为这次杰出活动的成功和激励做出的个人和集体贡献。会议有意扩大博物馆的历史，这些历史在很大程度上是在殖民统治或建造科学大教堂的标题下进行的。这两个概念都有些肤浅，并没有告诉我们多少激发收藏品创作的更大故事，特别是在成为新西兰的殖民地的英国殖民背景下。虽然物品有能力讲述在空间和时间上相互联系的生活和社区的故事，但在研究特定物品传记和讲述古怪收藏家的故事的趋势中，这方面在很大程度上丢失了。在这种方法中，全球背景往往缺失，尤其是商业贸易的关键维度以及交换网络如何促进知识发现和创造的模式。物体是科学努力的有形物质世界，在 19 世纪，物体贸易蓬勃发展。同样被忽视的是围绕物体发现和易位的政治背景故事。收购史在收藏史领域占据主导地位，而机构史则有可能陷入这些经验主义的、尽管引人入胜的方法中。本期特刊的撰稿人展示了博物馆和收藏品如何成为人、地点和事物之间复杂相互关系的结果，以及这些如何为围绕获取和知识生成的实践提供信息。通过探究这些社会、经济和文化组合的形成，我们可以开始了解殖民博物馆如何成为这些社会和物质联系的组成部分。