The ethnological collecting expeditions conducted by museums in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have had impacts on source communities and on the composition and interpretation of museum collections that have been critically examined from a number of perspectives. Although categories such as ethnicity and tribal affiliation are now understood to be situational, relational, and contingent, systems of classification in museums remain in large part rigid and immutable. Concrete approaches to addressing these issues in museum collections have been slower to emerge. This article presents an approach to the description of objects, influenced by attribute analysis and thick description, that has the potential to make salient information about museum collections more accessible to source communities. With two case studies (parfleches and moccasins from the Great Plains collections at the American Museum of Natural History), this article demonstrates how collaborative object-centered inquiry can help to disentangle objects from historical systems of classification in museum settings and “remobilize” them. Moving beyond classification to document the cultural practices documented in historical material culture can aid in reconstructing the complex movements of people, objects, and ideas in the past.

中文翻译：

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大平原上的分类、文化领域和馈赠：在美国自然历史博物馆重新调动交换对象

博物馆在 19 世纪和 20 世纪进行的民族学收藏考察对来源社区以及博物馆藏品的构成和解释产生了影响，这些影响已从多个角度进行了严格审查。尽管种族和部落归属等类别现在被理解为情境性、关系性和偶然性，但博物馆的分类系统在很大程度上仍然是僵化和不可改变的。在博物馆藏品中解决这些问题的具体方法出现得较慢。本文介绍了一种受属性分析和详细描述影响的对象描述方法，该方法有可能使有关博物馆藏品的重要信息更容易被来源社区访问。本文通过两个案例研究（美国自然历史博物馆的大平原藏品中的 parfleches 和软皮鞋），展示了以对象为中心的协作式探究如何帮助将对象从博物馆环境中的历史分类系统中解脱出来并“重新激活”它们。超越分类来记录历史物质文化中记录的文化实践有助于重建过去的人、物体和思想的复杂运动。