Trace Ethnography, Affect, and Institutional Ecologies in the Distributed Records of a Plaster Model

This article investigates the classification and record‐keeping history of a medicine man model in the Wellcome Library archives and the Science Museum archives in London, and the multifarious ways that information is constructed or lost in the history of a museum collection. First, attending to the affective turn in information scholarship, I argue that people's relationships and idiosyncratic preoccupations are formative in the histories of records and yet obscured in them. Second, I argue that broader “epistemic cultures” and “ecologies of standards”—belief systems, histories of disciplinary thought, and institutional histories—are formative in the legacy of information systems. A “trace ethnographic” approach to the history of one ethnographic piece illuminated the formation of authoritative knowledge as it played out in the acquisition and classification of the object and its institutionalized records.