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Collecting the Puerto Rican Colony: Spanish‐American War Material Encounters between Officer‐Wives and Puerto Ricans
Author(s) -
Guzmán Amanda J.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
museum anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.197
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1548-1379
pISSN - 0892-8339
DOI - 10.1111/muan.12170
Subject(s) - puerto rican , context (archaeology) , colonialism , history , ethnology , spanish civil war , officer , wife , nationalism , gender studies , diaspora , anthropology , sociology , archaeology , political science , law , politics
Within a current moment characterized by widespread diaspora and debate about national identities, the American commonwealth of Puerto Rico stands at an economically perilous, politically liminal classificatory intersection as both American and a “cultural other.” This article presents an on‐the‐ground, collection‐oriented intervention for documenting and interpreting the origins of the island's complex colonial relationship with the United States. Tacking between objects, texts, and photographs, the historical context of the Spanish‐American War is explored through the case study of the Puerto Rican Ethnological Collection at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History ( NMNH ). The NMNH 's assemblage reveals previously unrecognized intercultural exchanges between officer‐wife collectors (collectors who were the wives of military officers stationed in Puerto Rico) and local makers. The perspectives of these two differentially disenfranchised, yet agential, groups, which formed part of the ideological formation of Puerto Rico within a nationalist museum imaginary, simultaneously reconstruct and complicate Puerto Rican narratives. [Puerto Rico, Caribbean, Spanish‐American War, women collectors, miniatures]