Human Objects, Object Rights: from Elgin’s Marbles to Bullock’s Laplanders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay probes the question of rights along the porous boundary between persons and things. Its broader framework is the rapid expansion of museums – and museum collections – in the Romantic period, but it examines in particular two episodes that in different ways mingle and merge bodies and objects. The first is the still-controversial acquisition of marbles from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin, and their subsequent sale to the British Museum. The complex debates surrounding this transaction are ethical, political, and aesthetic in nature, but what is of interest here is the emphasis, on the part of contemporary commentators, on the uncanny life-likeness of the fragments. The second part of the essay considers this problem from another angle by examining William Bullock’s temporary exhibition, at his London Museum in 1822, of a family of Laplanders, their reindeer and sleds, and examples of their cultural and domestic artifacts. Body-object, object-body: this inversion, so resonant now in a critical climate engaged by thing theory and object oriented ontologies, takes on additional force in the emergent cultural economy of the Romantic museum, where the right to (and of) the object, and the place of the body, are provocatively on display.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".