Colonial Objects in Early Modern Sweden and Beyond: From the Kunstkammer to the Current Museum Crisis (Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700) - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

1. The book brings art history expertise and perspectives to a field dominated by anthropologists, museologists, and archaeologists. By extension, the book problematises the established distinctions between various academic disciplines and object categories. 2. The book combines a close study of the material and visual qualities of individual objects with an exploration of the entangled histories of colonialism and the museum, and thus interweaves the micro and macro perspectives. 3. The book takes the longue durée view, moving from explorations of colonialism and collecting in early modernity to consideration of the present state of museums and their future prospects. An elaborately crafted and decorated tomahawk from somewhere along the North American east coast: how did it end up in the royal collections in Stockholm in the late seventeenth century? What does it say about the Swedish kingdom’s colonial ambitions and desires? What questions does it raise from its present place in a display cabinet in the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm?
Colonial Objects in Early Modern Sweden and Beyond is about the tomahawk and other objects like it, acquired in colonial contact zones and displayed by Swedish elites in the seventeenth century. Its first part situates the objects in two distinct but related spaces: the expanding space of the colonial world, and the exclusive space of the Kunstkammer. The second part traces the objects’ physical and epistemological transfer from the Kunstkammer to the modern museum system. In the final part, colonial objects are considered at the centre of a heated debate over the present state of museums, and their possible futures.

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