These questions are at the core of “The Recalcitrant Things” (open access).
Drawing on ethnographic work from Amazonia, Southern Chile, and beyond, the authors (from Brazil and Chile) explore how Indigenous “things” (or lives) are inseparable from people, worlds, and relational networks — and how they often resist full museological capture, not symbolically, but as a matter of reality.
Rather than focusing on museum practices alone, we approach this conundrum as a philosophical challenge to human exceptionalism embedded in Western concepts and traditions; those guiding assumptions behind practices, grammars, and theories around museum collections.
Instead of framing these tensions in terms of “belief” or “representation,” we argue that some things actively unsettle classificatory systems and expose the limits of universalist heritage frameworks.
