The permanent preservation of objects in global custodianship is a captivating ideal that informs countless museums’ corporate identities and governs collection guidelines as well as politics. Recent research has challenged the alleged perpetuity of collections and collected items, revealing their coherence as fragile and dependent on historically, politically and culturally specific conditions. Duplicates offer an instructive point of entry to explore the idea of collection permanence, museum politics, and the mobility of museum objects. The history of duplicates, moreover, comprises a constellation of practises, concepts and debates that can be found in various forms throughout the intertwined histories of natural-scientific, ethnographic and artistic collections. This history, however, has rarely been questioned or explored. By introducing the issue of duplicates, this paper opens up a discussion that not only connects different forms of collections, but also situates the history of collecting institutions across the disciplinary spectrum within broader political, economic and epistemic frameworks.

在全球托管中永久保存物品是一个迷人的理想，它为无数博物馆的企业身份提供信息，并管理着收藏指南和政治。最近的研究对所谓的收藏品和收藏品的永久性提出了挑战，揭示了它们的连贯性是脆弱的，并且依赖于历史、政治和文化的特定条件。复制品为探索收藏的永久性、博物馆政治和博物馆物品的流动性提供了一个指导性的切入点。此外，复制的历史包括一系列实践、概念和辩论，这些实践、概念和辩论可以在自然科学、民族志和艺术收藏的交织历史中以各种形式出现。然而，这段历史很少受到质疑或探索。