Choices that admit things to, or omit things from, museum collections rely on institutional and individual assumptions about value, ownership, skill, history, and people. Historical decisions about what was worth collecting, how collections should be organized, who would oversee collections care, and what uses collections could serve reverberate through the years, affecting museums’ abilities to research, exhibit, and engage collections. Using recent research into one Balinese slendang in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, this essay examines how the Museum’s frameworks and curatorial assumptions enabled the neglect of nearly 200 Indonesian textiles for decades. It examines how the Museum parsed collection categories, how Indonesian textiles complicated and confounded those categories, and how the ensuing inattention inadvertently enabled a well-preserved collection. By attempting to weave the textiles’ collecting histories into narratives of their embedded colonial and institutional histories, it hopes to rekindle their usefulness for scholars, for communities, and for the Museum.

中文翻译：

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追溯历史线索：在布鲁克林博物馆重新发现印尼纺织品

允许博物馆藏品收藏或遗漏收藏品的选择依赖于机构和个人对价值、所有权、技能、历史和人的假设。关于什么值得收藏、应该如何组织藏品、谁来监督藏品管理以及藏品可以用于什么用途的历史决策，这些决定多年来都会产生反响，影响博物馆研究、展示和参与藏品的能力。利用最近对巴厘岛slendang的研究在布鲁克林博物馆的藏品中，这篇文章探讨了博物馆的框架和策展假设如何使近 200 件印度尼西亚纺织品在几十年内被忽视。它研究了博物馆如何解析藏品类别，印尼纺织品如何复杂化和混淆这些类别，以及随后的疏忽如何无意中促成了保存完好的藏品。通过尝试将纺织品的收藏历史编织成对其嵌入的殖民和制度历史的叙述，它希望重新点燃它们对学者、社区和博物馆的有用性。