Collecting, Ordering, Governing

"Collecting, Ordering, Governing is a book that demands, instantiates, and rewards a sustained rethinking of the history of anthropology, collecting, museums, and liberal governance. Not only is its multiple authorship an innovation, but the book and its combinations push the reader to think in new, sometimes uncomfortable ways. Once-familiar stories and histories—reconsidered, recombined, and reconceptualized in the light of more recent ideas of liberal governmentality—show the contradictions and loose ends in anthropology’s efforts to provide knowledge that might improve, emancipate, or protect those it studies." — Fred R. Myers, author of Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art

"Tacking between colonial peripheries and imperial centers, across oceans and continents, Collecting, Ordering, Governing delivers what its title promises and much more. A magisterial work of breathtaking theoretical richness, this book advances our understanding of the relationship of disciplinary subjects to the disciplining of subjects—and their efforts of self-determination—through material practices of collection, ordering, and display." — Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Chief Curator, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews