ABSTRACT The early twentieth century saw the proliferation of museum-sponsored expeditions seeking to collect footage, artifacts, and specimens to expand museum collections. These expeditions were faced with obstacles that rendered the process of collecting at the least constrained, and often haphazard, with ramifications for the African material culture accessioned from collecting expeditions, and held by research museums today. This paper considers what such objects can still tell us, despite the uncertainties they concretize. I situate my discussions in relation to the travels of the Smithsonian-Universal African Expedition that commenced a year-long journey of scholarship, filming and collection, from Cape Town to Cairo, in 1919. Attending to such objects might allow us to understand the breadth of motivations, desires, and constraints that animated the past better, and to establish new terms through which to understand the postcolonial present.

中文翻译：

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不确定的对象和人种学的可能性：通过史密森尼环球非洲探险队的思考

摘要二十世纪初，博物馆赞助的探险活动激增，他们希望收集镜头，文物和标本以扩大博物馆收藏。这些探险面临着障碍，这些障碍使收集的过程至少受到限制，而且常常是偶然的，而从收集探险中加入的非洲物质文化的后果则由今天的研究博物馆举办。本文考虑了这些对象尽管具体化的不确定性仍然可以告诉我们什么。我将就1919年从开普敦到开罗开始为期一年的奖学金，摄影和收藏之旅的史密森尼环球非洲探险之旅的讨论进行讨论。参加此类活动可能使我们了解其广度动机，欲望，