The Evolution of the Ethnographic Object Catalog of the Canadian Museum of History, Part 2: Systematizing, Communicating, and Reconciling Anthropological Knowledge in the Museum, ca. 1960–2018

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This article reports on the second part of a two-part study tracing the evolution of the Canadian Museum of History’s catalog of its ethnological collections from 1879 to the present day. Drawing on the insights of rhetorical genre studies, we examine how the catalog has been implicated in the formation and shaping of anthropological knowledge in the museum over the course of its history. In this second part, we trace the catalog’s evolution from internal management tool to public access tool between 1960 and 2018 and examine how it participated in the actions of systematizing, communicating, and reconciling knowledge within the museum during that time period.