The human in multiple, hybrid topologies

Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a modern Danish museum of natural history, and inspired by the philosophical work of Michel Serres and STS scholars Bruno Latour, John Law, Annemarie Mol and Mike Michael, this paper explores the shifting and morphing of museum visitors as they engage in multiple hybrid associations with a museum exhibition, fellow visitors and portable, mediating technologies such as exercise pamphlets, mobile phone cameras and animal costumes. Museum visitors couple up with various entities and participate in multiple enactments; they associate and dissociate, and thus constitute shifting fluid and flickering human hybrid topologies.

The ethnography of hybrid, morphing museum visitors is related to literature on the relations between people and places. Multiplicity-oriented and heterogeneous ways of conceptualizing the human subject are considered for their implications for research; how to explore and represent the relations between people and places.