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Uncertain objects and ethnographic possibilities: thinking through the Smithsonian-Universal African Expedition

ABSTRACT The early twentieth century saw the proliferation of museum-sponsored expeditions seeking to collect footage, artifacts, and specimens to expand museum collections. These expeditions were faced with obstacles that rendered the process of collecting at the least constrained, and often haphazard, with ramifications for the African material culture accessioned from collecting expeditions, and held by research museums today. This paper considers what such objects can still tell us, despite the uncertainties they concretize. I situate my discussions in relation to the travels of the Smithsonian-Universal African Expedition that commenced a year-long journey of scholarship, filming and collection, from Cape Town to Cairo, in 1919. Attending to such objects might allow us to understand the breadth of motivations, desires, and constraints that animated the past better, and to establish new terms through which to understand the postcolonial present.