Circulation in four walnuts from the Sarah Pike Conger collection

Abstract

Four walnuts are quietly evocative among hyper-elite objects of women's life in the Late Qing Dynasty at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. This article explores the multiple worlds these objects unfold as we intentionally break from the catalog's preoccupation with “original use”. Using concepts of mobility and materiality, I investigate artificially obscured relationships contained by these four walnuts. This circulatory rumination examines the American collector Sarah Pike Conger and elite collecting culture entrenched by the Late Qing Dynasty (1875–1912); the intertwined cultivation of health, wealth, and prestige through gifting; and the connections between pleasures of the past to modern phenomenon like the walnut speculation in China ca. 2008–2013. Through this rumination, I challenge the divisions constructed by assumptions of the museum and what is traditional.

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