Abstract/Summary

Captain Robert Falcon Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton, among others, led multiple expeditions during the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, which lasted from the late-19th to the mid-20th century. Today, the material culture of their expeditions shapes the legacies of Heroic Age explorers in museum collections across Britain and Ireland. The Polar Museum in Cambridge and Discovery Point in Dundee are both heritage institutions with Heroic Age collections relating to Scott and Shackleton’s expeditions. While these collections are generally considered to be fairly inert – unless they are put on public display – and to relate to only a select group of white European explorers, this thesis considers the ongoing production of their status within the museums, and the diverse network of actors with which they are entangled. Through ethnographic data acquired during fieldwork with the museum teams and visitors at the Polar Museum and Discovery Point, as well as visitor observations and archival research, I argue that museum objects are undergoing continuous production within their networks. This thesis makes three key arguments: (1) that museum objects are subject to three modes of fragility – physical, contextual and conceptual, and that these must be stabilised to ensure their ‘object’ status; (2) that certain museum objects may be seen as more significant than others as a result of their inalienable connection to the body of particular historic figures; and (3) that reconstituting the network of actors within which objects are entangled enables researchers to analytically ‘pause’ an object’s connection to an inalienable individual and uncover other actors who have shaped the object’s trajectory. This thesis argues that ‘object’ status is not a fixed state, but requires a broad network of actors to produce and sustain it over time.