This paper examines the challenges of developing decolonial practice in history of science collections through an India–UK collaboration centred on surveying instruments and standards. Taking land surveying as a central case, I ask what it means to turn land into a number, and how scientific instruments functioned as material mechanisms of governance rather than neutral tools of measurement. Focusing on instruments such as waywisers and chains, I trace how surveying depended on localised practices of making, calibration, and repair, drawing attention to the often-erased labour of Indian makers, technicians, and repairers whose expertise enabled imperial measurement regimes to function.
The paper argues that, unlike ethnographic collections, scientific-instrument collections are governed by specific infrastructures of authority such as expertise, universality, conservation norms, and standards that make it structurally difficult to recognise affected publics as communities with standing. While these collections are increasingly willing to acknowledge colonial contexts, they often lack mechanisms for redistributing interpretive authority beyond curatorial and technical expertise.
Methodologically, the paper combines object-based analysis with decolonial literature and archival research to infer conditions of possibility for lived experiences that surveying instruments helped produce but rarely recorded. I reflect on the possibilities and limits of such mixed methods, including the risks of speculative anthropology when working with fragmentary archives. Rather than offering a model of decolonisation borrowed from ethnographic museums, the paper proposes an alternative approach grounded in materiality, repair, and localisation, asking how scientific collections might reckon with colonial power without relying on simplified notions of what it means to be a ‘source community’, or on models of authority that assume such communities are readily identifiable.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Hilary Term 2026
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre (entry via Robinson Close).
Convened by Chihab El-Khachab and Paola Esposito.
