Reassembling the social life of a Medicine Man: Reassessing otherness, agency and authorship in the Wellcome archives
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it