Spectral Archives and the Ghosts of 1918: Insights from the Field Museum’s Pandemic Collection

At the chaotic outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, amid uprisings for racial justice in our home and partner communities, Field Museum anthropologists sought the guidance of precedent in the museum’s archives of the 1918 influenza epidemic. Those archives, however, were nearly silent on the social upheaval and illness struggles of that moment. Animated by the spectral archives of 1918—the missing traces of an earlier disaster—and haunted by the imperial origins of the disasters that COVID-19 has precipitated and amplified, Field Museum researchers initiated the Pandemic Collection: a project to document the intersection of COVID-19 and movements for racial justice, with community partners from Chicago, the Philippines, Native North America, and the Northwest Amazon. This work makes clear that we are all living in the continuing disaster of empire and that there is no solution that does not learn from, and speak to, our ghosts, our ancestors, and our inheritors.