This epilogue closes the volume by inviting us to reflect on the afterlives of culturally significant items when they are returned to the original Native communities. Examining Harvard University’s Peabody museum’s return of a totem pole to the Gitxaała Nation in late 2022 followed by a ceremony in the museum a few months later in Spring 2023 Soto Laveaga ponders what it means to close “a circle that should never have been opened” as a member of the Gitxaała Nation described. How will narratives of troubling encounters like this one be narrated in the future when a coda explains that, hopefully, an object has been returned? How will museums curate spaces vacated by objects that were never meant to be exhibited on walls or in cases? Moreover, how will the stories be told when ancestrally powerful objects imbued with living spirits return home? As we enter a new era of repatriation centered on respect and reciprocity, this epilogue reminds us that when it comes to collecting, the human sciences, and Indigenous people the story remains far from finished.

Chapter 2 highlights the use and effects of Solow’s model as an instrument of measurement. It relates the model to the postwar politics of growth and productivity and a line of inquiry that sought to gauge the national whole in terms of monetary units. Existing measurement practices at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) involved the activities of collecting, compiling, and processing data; its researchers complemented and qualified their numbers with descriptive, verbal accounts about how the data had been made and how different measurement procedures led to different results. Here, the model reordered knowledge and nonknowledge about productivity. While commentators were shocked by its utter constructivism and disregard for the ways data were made, it offered a seemingly clean-cut method of measurement that turned statistical inference into a technical procedure. Whatever the model’s neoclassical reading of numbers did not account for was efficiently stashed away in a residual term labeled “technical change.” While Solow explicitly noted that the rest captured all kinds of (relevant) things, the technique remained and was soon denoted “the Solow residual.”

In 1992, amid intense controversy among both hydraulic engineers and the general public, the proposal for the Three Gorges project was submitted to the National People’s Congress for a vote. Li Peng, the Premier of the PRC, who had received training in hydroelectric engineering in the Soviet Union in the early 1950s, oversaw the submission. Despite the fact that proposals submitted to the Congress typically receive unanimous support, the Three Gorges project proposal was passed with vocal oppositions. Despite this, the launch of the massive project on the Yangtze River was seen as a triumph for individuals like Li Peng who were proponents of a technology-centered approach to development. It was broadly perceived as a statement of the Communist Party’s firm control over the Chinese people as well as the country’s land and waterways. Viewing through the lens of environmental history, water control is a crucial aspect of human societies’ relationships with the natural world. In the context of China’s long history of water management, the Three Gorges project elevated the country’s status as a major player in hydropower. From its inception, though, the project has been plagued with social conflicts and environmental difficulties. The full story of the interplay between this massive dam, the Yangtze River, and the Chinese people is yet to be told.

This chapter probes the relation of both science and Indigeneity to nationalism – and of all of these to gender. Rosemblatt focuses on a controversy that began in 1949–1950, when remains said to have belonged to Cuauhtémoc, the last Mexica emperor, were found buried in Ixcateopan, Guerrero. Two official commissions denied the authenticity of the burial, but local officials, along with the broader public, found the story expedient, and anthropologist Eulalia Guzmán lent support to their view. Intellectuals who grounded Mexican greatness in their own cosmopolitan scientific neutrality faced off against those who stressed the Indigenous roots of Mexican national identity. The episode reveals differing views of what constituted scientific proof and how science and indigeneity were related to nationalism and politics more generally. Because the pro-authenticity group was led by a woman, it provides a window onto the gendering of scientific authority. The village of Ixcateopan, the chapter argues, actively engaged science along with Guzmán and her allies.

Major founded a discipline for arranging collections, "the Taxis of Chambers." Taxis was a military term for the strategic mobile arrangements of troops and supplies. Major understood all forms of order, from nature to society, as a form of taxis. In order to advance knowledge of these other forms of order, collections needed to be remade into dynamic repositories that both supplied materials for investigating taxis and themselves could be rearrangeable as knowledge of other orders shifted. To effect this redesign, Major surveyed practices of collecting around the world in a vernacular serial. He built a broad tent for museology while integrating knowledge from a public in ways that often undermined the authority of their views. Curators ought to be experimental philosophers, he maintained. He chided those who did not appreciate order, rather than monetary value, as the most precious part of a collection. He designed shelving, signage, and cataloging to make the museum into a tool of knowledge change. Through experimentation in the collection and discussions in the conference hall, he sought to transform the collection from a site that stupefied to one that awakened awareness.

This chapter shows how human sciences researchers in Puerto Rico faced pressure to abandon earlier traditions and embrace the methods and biomedical enterprise of the United States empire’s scientific modernity. Drawing on the history of mental testing and inmate assessment as well as designs for a new penitentiary, the chapter contends that while mid twentieth-century US-American social science engaged in intense processes of othering that aligned with imperial expansion, Puerto Rican social scientists combined US-American psychometrics with older Spanish ethnographic traditions that powerfully resurfaced in the 1940s. These diagnostic and descriptive tools revealed that incarcerated people required discipline, tutelage, and treatment, but that they also had redemptive potential regardless of social difference. Social scientists put mental test results into dialogue with ethnographic narratives of convicts to forge what to them were forward-looking treatment programs, illustrating how racialized racelessness and intersubjective exchanges transformed Puerto Rican corrections for a time. The result was a blended, “creole” nationalist science with decolonial aspirations, although one that was colonial-populist in practice.

In the sixteenth-century Lutheran university, anthropological studies related the human as a microcosm analogically to the world as a macrocosm. The great chain of being dictated hierarchies corresponding to parts of the human body, forms of knowledge, and cosmic structure. Major claimed to found a new anthropology that spurned analogy and related the human to nature through experiment. He set experimental anthropology as the basis for the entire encyclopedia of arts and sciences because human cognitive processes shaped all knowledge. Major first exhibited his anthropology in a public human dissection in 1666. He deployed it against both academic and Rosicrucian views of the microcosm such as those maintained by his nemesis Johann Ludwig Hannemann. He also countered profit-driven arguments about humans. Having already argued in 1665 that the anatomist could correct Biblical interpreters’ views of black skin, he orchestrated in 1675 a public human anatomy of a Black woman, which was the first anatomical study of skin pigmentation. His colleague, Johann Nicolaus Pechlin, performed the dissection, arguing against Hannemann that skin color offered no justification for the slave trade.