Reassembling the social life of a Medicine Man: Reassessing otherness, agency and authorship in the Wellcome archives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article traces the social life of a Medicine Man in a life-size diorama at the London Science Museum. While the author shows that the representations the model has perpetuated throughout its social life, largely due to its particular material and social contexts, were often laden with misperception and exoticization, she also argues that the model came to be on contemporary view through an unusual set of actions, spaces, and happenings which, first, question the notion of curatorial authorship, and second, expand the growing body of work that considers the wide-ranging kinds of networks and agencies that shape the life histories of things. She begins by describing the context for the model, including its relationship to colonial histories of display and more recent work on agency and technologies of representation. Next, she describes the model’s early life in the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum and its relationship to early ethnography in Ibibioland and London. Then, she describes its shifts in representation amidst changes to the network of associated objects, spaces, events and persons that made up its representational framework over a 30-year period, before recounting its most recent move to the Science Museum in the late 1970s. Thus detailing this model’s social life, the article illustrates the ways in which authorship, colonial relationships, and representation emerge as complex and distributed amidst networks of material and social contexts. The author therefore argues for a particularist (rather than broad discursive) approach to tracing the associations and networks by which displays come to exist in museum spaces and become embedded with complex histories of colonial involvement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.102 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.022 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".