By Emilia Mac Donagh, UNLP
From the 4 to the 8 of July, the postgraduate course “HISTORIA NATURAL, COLECCIONES, ARCHIVOS Y MUSEOS. SIGLOS XIX Y XX” took place in the Museum of La Plata. As a PhD fellow at the Faculty of Natural Sciences, I enrolled. But honestly in the beginning I was only moved by how catchy I found the name and it´s affinity to my thesis topic. At that moment I wasn’t aware of the fact that the academic proposal had its origin in a SciCoMove workshop/training session. But the surprise could not have been more gratifying. The fusion of both opened the gates of the SciCoMove Project and allowed people with different backgrounds and from different points of Argentina to take a look at the work that’s currently being done within this project.
It was an intense week of hard work and exchanges. The course offered expositions and testimonies by professionals from different places like Switzerland, France, and Argentina. But, moreover, it was marked by the constant promotion of dialogue and exchange among everyone who was involved. And that included those of us who were taking it as a postgraduate course, the teachers, and the PhD student members of the SciCoMove Project. Being able to debate, share ideas, and co-create with people from different places and academic backgrounds, and who participate in projects like SciCoMove, represents a great opportunity of academic and professional growth.
Throughout the week, Irina, Susana and Natalie invited us to review the history of all museums as institutions, focusing in the particular case of the La Plata Museum, where we actually were. Being inside the museum was not a minor detail when breaking down it’s emergence story, and understanding that it is not as lineal and fluid as it is usually portrayed.
We wandered around the museum, and visited the exhibitions, the deposits, and the archive. For some this implied their first time in the museum and its guts. And for others like me, this meant a known place unveiling new connotations and possibilities. The study and analysis of collections, archives and objects that are or have been a part of the museums allows to revisit and rethink how the boundaries of the scientific field are and have been historically built. From that perspective the course proposed a guide to consider what (and who) are conceived inside those borders as well as how this is constantly being reshaped.
One of the things that blew my mind during the course was the idea of objects in museums and collections as artifacts. This is one of the pillars in which the SciCoMove project strands in order to tell how these objects have been moved around different places. I was familiar with the concept of artifact and its traditional application in archaeology. Artifact, as a concept is traditionally used in opposition of what is pristine and untouched. So, anything that has signs of being exposed to some kind of human work, becomes an artifact. Of course, all tools found in an archaeological context easily fit this classification. Now the interesting part comes when we define what is this “human work”, and how it impacts the objects.
Sometime ago a friend archaeologist had revealed to me that this concept had many more possibilities, as he implied in his work that the soils and strata where the archaeological objects were found could be seen as an artifact too. And I found this somehow related. Just as the soils, the “natural” objects often found in the museums are normally conceived just as a part of nature, portraited in the exhibitions, or safeguarded in the collections. Then, for example, we could think about a piece of dinosaur bone. It probably has been dug out, reconditioned after, placed in a particular place according to one particular bone structure, and displayed in a room charged with conjectures about it. All those procedures involve changes in the objects, even if they are meant for preservation. When thinking about it, to classify, arrange chronologically, restore, build up, and all other actions that take place when working within museums and collections are human work. The same goes to any type of object, no matter how “natural” or “cultural” we might think it is, from the point when an object becomes something collected, categorised, saved, etc. it begins to be conceptualised. And that is the key to start talking about artifacts, because to give meaning is one of the firsts and most basic human works.
From a historical perspective, with case-study examples and in line with the goal of the SciCoMove Project, the course aimed to make evident that when constructing scientific knowledge, no man nor woman of science acts alone. Neither in the past or present.
At the beginning of the week, Irina Podgorny insisted that we let aside the idiomatic barriers and size the situation to meet other people and even make friends. Following her advice, along the week we saw how the theoretical and conceptual talks slipped out of the classes and continued unto the bars. There´s no better empiric proof than that of what role company, assembly, and the collective play for the generation of knowledge.
Thereby, my bond with museums has a long history. Since I started studding anthropology in the Collage of Natural Sciences, which is associated with the Museum of La Plata. And now I am carrying out my PhD studies considering museums as spaces of science communication and heritage safeguard, and on how to problematize that, within the construction of scientific knowledge. With that in mind, participating of the course has been a very valuable and rewarding experience, especially considering the opportunity to get in touch with the SciCoMove Project.










I have a Bachelor´s Degree in Anthropology by the Facultad de Ciencias Naturales, Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), where I now also taught. In 2021 I got a University Diploma in Public Science Communication, by the UNICEN. Currently I am carrying out my PhD, working in the Laboratory of Applied Ethnography Investigations, and with a scholarship from the UNLP, under the tutoring of Gabriela Morgante (LINEA UNLP-CIC) and Mariano Bonomo (Dept. Arqueología, Museo de La Plata). My thesis centers on museums as places for the collective construction of knowledge and the heritage safeguard, and takes place in Molinos (Calchaquí Valleys, Salta)