October 16, 2018
Excerpt from The Fate of Anatomical Collections, Chapter 7 Adieu Albinus : How the Preparations in the Nineteenth-Century Leiden Anatomical Collections Lost their Past by Hieke Huistra
“And, building on the body of work on the agency of objects, I want to argue that a third party is involved in the process: the preparations themselves. Without their specific material properties, the reinterpretations could never have been carried out, as I will demonstrate. Together, then, curators, audiences and preparations determined the fate of the Leiden anatomical collections in the nineteenth century.
Footnote: On the agency of objects, or material agency, see Bruno Latour, ‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’, in Shaping Technology/Building Society, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 225–58; Andrew Pickering, e Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. My interpretation of material agency resembles that of Pickering: the agency of objects is emergent in time and shaped in reaction to the intentions of the human actors involved.”
Source: The Fate of Anatomical Collections Rina Knoeff, Robert Zwijnenberg. Ashgate Publishing Company (2015)
ID: on-the-agency-of-anatomical-preparations
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