The Inertia of Collections

Changes against the Grain in the Rosenlew Museum of Pori, Finland

in Museum Worlds
Author:
Francisco Martínez University of Leicester fm211@leicester.ac.uk

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DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3167/armw.2019.070103
Keywords:
collections; industrial legacies; knowledge production; material culture; museum anthropology; obduracy; Rosenlew Museum
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Abstract

The first aim of this article is to study the persistence of the collection's positive presentation of Rosenlew's industrial heritage, and the second is to anthropologically reconsider what kind of knowledge is generated therein through the preservation and display of factory-made artifacts, which give a sense of concreteness and gravitas to the industrial past. By studying the permanent exhibition and the collections of the Rosenlew Museum and by organizing a workshop with schoolchildren, I reveal the presence of various inertia effects. Long-term corporate values continue to influence the development of the museum's permanent collection not only through the arrangement of industrial artifacts into a collection but also—at a heuristic level—through epistemological frames and the indexing power of the museum assemblage.

Contributor Notes

FRANCISCO MARTíNEZ is a Lecturer in the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. He has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki and Aalto University. Currently, Francisco is co-editor of the new Berghahn Books series Politics of Repair, and a member of the editorial board of the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures. Francisco is the author of Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia (UCL Press, 2018), which was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He has edited several books, including Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough: Ethnographic Responses (Berghahn Books, 2019), and he has also curated different exhibitions, including Objects of Attention (Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design, 2019). Email: fm211@leicester.ac.uk

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Museum Worlds

Advances in Research

Cover Museum Worlds
Article Category:
Research Article
Page Count:
22
Keywords:
collections; industrial legacies; knowledge production; material culture; museum anthropology; obduracy; Rosenlew Museum
Print Publication Date:
01 Jul 2019
Online Publication Date:
01 Jul 2019
Copyright:
© Berghahn Books 2019

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