Miruna Achim
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Miruna Achim is a professor in the Humanities Department at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa, in Mexico City. Her research has focused on museography and the history of collection making, with a particular interest in the construction of Mesoamerican vestiges into objects of art, science, politics, extraction, heritage, and restitution demands. She has held fellowships from the Beinecke Library (Yale University) and Smithsonian Institution. She is currently a member of the Horizon 2020 MSCA RISE project SciCoMove: Scientific Collections on the Move.
In September 2023, she joins the Paris IAS as part of the French Institutes for advanced Study fellowship program - FIAS - co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 945408. Her fellowship also benefits from the support of the RFIEA+ LABEX, with a national funding (Grant ANR-11-LABX-0027-01).
Research Interests
Collections and museums history; History of archaeology and antiquarianism; Heritage and restitution; Object biographies and material cultures studies
Jade ecologies, global historiographies: looking for, translating and appropriating (Meso)american resources
Drawing on various methodological and disciplinary approaches (object biographies, art history, global history, science and technology studies, ethnography and oral history) and on a wide array of sources (archival and published material as well as specific objects in different collections), this project studies the trajectories of Mesoamerican jades since the sixteenth century and the ways in which understandings of matter have affected and continue to affect the region whence it is extracted. It reconstructs how the values of and knowledge about jades have been produced, translated and distributed between linguistic and geographic borders, and scaled and negotiated between local contexts of use and global networks of exchange. And it inquires into the conceptual and political arrangements that have sustained the differential production of knowledge and ignorance about jades, making it possible for certain narratives of the stones’ use and value to become prominent, while the social and environmental violence pending on their extraction today has been silenced and opaqued. Jade functions thus as a site for probing into the ways in which ancient America has been imagined, constructed, collected, and displayed, in juxtaposition with objects from other cultural areas; into the place of pre-conquest cultures in universal and global histories of mankind; and into the relations of contemporary Amerindian communities with other transregional economic and political actors.
Key Publications
Miruna Achim, From Idols to Antiquity: Forging the National Museum of Mexico, 1825-1867, Nebraska University Press, 2017.
Miruna Achim, Museum Matters: Making and Unmaking Mexico’s National Collections, co-edited with Susan Deans-Smith and Sandra Rozental, University of Arizona Press, 2021.
Miruna Achim, ed. Margaret Díaz-Andreu, “Mexican Antiquities on the Move: the Making of an Archaeological Category,” in Handbook of the History of Archaeology, Oxford University Press, 2023.
 Intervention de Miruna Achim, chercheuse résidente à l'IEA de Paris (2023/2024), dans le cadre du colloque L’objet précieux : un fait social total ? organisé par l'EHESS avec le soutien de Cartier.  Discussion avec Miruna Achim, chercheuse résidente à l'IEA de Paris (2023/2024), dans le cadre d'une rencontre-débat autour de l’exposition « Mexica : Des dons et des dieux au Templo Mayor » organisée par le musée du Quai Branly  Intervention de Miruna Achim, chercheuse résidente à l'IEA de Paris (2023/2024), dans le cadre du séminaire Cultures lithiques : systèmes d’échanges, de savoirs et de croyances organisé par l'EHESS et le CNRS |
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