Collecting ambiguity: Objects and the afterlives of empire on the island of Ireland

This paper considers material culture as a prism through which to understand lived experiences of colonialism and empire in Northern Ireland and suggests that examining connections to meaningful objects both inside and outside museums provides a powerful tool for considering how empire has been understood and made personal. We consider privately held possessions, symbols in the landscape and the public materiality of empire as represented in museum collections, bringing together public history and anthropology to argue that the afterlives of colonialism in Northern Ireland reveal not only the place of empire in shaping the island of Ireland’s divisions but also unexpected shared experiences and narratives. Three theoretical perspectives can assist in creating new museological engagements with contested histories: object biography, autoethnography and what we call ‘non-public’ history.