Horniman Museum Research Articles

Silent Heritage: Investigating Ruxton's Nigeria Collection at the Horniman Museum and Gardens

Abstract Museums which display all of their colonial collections are rare, and those which offer clear information on collection provenances and colonial histories in displays are rarer still. Absence and silence surrounding the colonial past in Europe's museums places them at odds with international pressure to account for the custodianship of colonial-era collections. This is examined here through investigating the silent heritage of the Ruxton Nigeria Collection, held at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London. Ruxton collected as a military official during Britain's conquest of Nigeria. His collection is typical of assemblages throughout European ethnographic museums, dominated by “everyday” material heritage, not the “treasures” of elites which monopolise restitution discourse. How can provenance research be conducted upon quieter collections dating from the colonial era with little accompanying documentation? What are the potential impacts of such research upon restitution debates? From the available evidence around the Ruxton collection, it is clear that silences are more fundamental than just a matter of archival gaps, and if silences remain even after provenance research (which many museums are unable to conduct on all of their collections), then we need to question not only why and how collections are displayed, but how museums justify having them at all.

“Horniman Museum and Library Publications” series: zoology and anthropology (1904–1977)

Horniman Museum and Gardens, London published a group of visitor guides and handbooks from 1904 to 1977 under the series title “Horniman Museum and Library Publications” to accompany the permanent galleries. This paper presents a bibliography for the series, which covered subjects in zoology and anthropology. The series included 16 publications. Many had multiple editions. Authors were not always identified explicitly, and attribution was assigned to the institution. This paper identifies authors and other notable contributors for each volume. The Horniman stopped assigning new publications to the series at the end of the 1930s; however, new guides and handbooks continued to be published in similar fashion. Some of those later publications asserted continuity, claiming to be new editions. Others did not. Both continuities and breaks reveal aspects of work within the museum environment as well as trends in British museum engagement with its audiences. For instance, simplification is a profound trend over successive editions.

Handing back the Benin Bronzes

Starting with the Horniman Museum's announcement, this guest editorial analyses recent pledges by several institutions in the UK and elsewhere to return Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. Which institutions have pledged to return, and what are the issues involved? Why has the British Museum not followed suit? How prepared is Nigeria to receive these items?

BLIND SPOTS IN MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY: Ancient Egypt in the Ethnographic Museum

abstract In the past few decades, the literature in museum anthropology has advocated efforts to be more transparent about its colonial origins, address the historical injustices of imperial collecting, and rethink display narratives in collaboration with source communities. In this paper, however, we question the extent to which the epistemic and political predicaments underlying ethnographic representations are being fundamentally and systematically confronted. As we highlight with the example of ancient Egyptian material, it is apparent that significant parts of museum holdings remain freighted by unquestioned colonial and Eurocentric discourses. We employ a case study of the Egyptian material redisplayed in the “World Cultures” gallery of the Horniman Museum, London, to demonstrate how the ethnographic museum continues to unwittingly produce “silences” around collections. To redress the lacunae we provide examples of the way in which this body of material could be more meaningfully integrated within museological discourses that have informed the rethinking of other aspects of world culture.

The Present as Past: Science Fiction and the Museum

This article explores the role that science fiction (sf) texts might play in the museum, offering a perspective on acts of collection, curation, exhibition, and museum architecture, to ask what the museums of science fiction futures can offer those of us concerned with the role and responsibility of the museum in the present. It draws together methods, content and reflections from a workshop held at the Horniman Museum with art and curation students from University of the Arts London in 2019, which explored the spaces and imaginaries of the museum. Over the course of this workshop, participants were asked to restage the museums described in three science fiction novels: H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), and Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women (1979). By bringing the spaces of science fiction into the museum, these interventions reframed the terms of our engagement with museum objects and provided a site for broader reflection on the nature of museum design and practice. This process of imaginative construction is extended into this paper, which crosses the fields of architectural design and theory, science fiction and utopian studies, and museum studies. It draws directly upon the interventions generated in the workshop, including photographs and descriptions which reflect on the critical potential present in multiple forms of knowing and the radical possibility inherent in collective acts of remaking. These fragments are used to direct research into museum practices, to situate these actions within wider theoretical contexts, and to explore the science-fictional as a mode of thinking and making as well as a source text.

Ethnographic Objects on The Cold War Front: The Tangled History of a London Museum Collection

AbstractThis article addresses the historical context of a museum collection of Romanian artifacts in light of British–Romanian diplomacy. The museum's holdings are unpacked through a study of the events that led to their acquisition in the 1950s. It is argued that the ethnographic investigation of the historical and political landscape in which the collection emerged reveals the importance of the collection’s performance on the Cold War cultural stage, where acts of exhibiting museum artifacts across the Iron Curtain served to create certain representations of the modern state. Particular attention is paid to the often‐overlooked European folk art collections residing in European ethnographic museums. The history of the Romanian collection held by the Horniman Museum of London (UK) demonstrates that an anthropological critique of these holdings can help explore the complex histories and the political relations that underpinned the movement and display of folk artifacts across the Iron Curtain. [Cold War, museum ethnography, state, Romania, Britain]

On the ‘Horniman walrus’

This article considers the connections between a walrus displayed in the Horniman Museum in south-east London and international environmental law. Drawing on my experience of reproducing this walrus in clay, it uses the walrus as a microcosm of international environmental law’s engagement with nature in the context of cultural and philosophical trends involving the artefactualisation, socialisation and humanisation of nature.

To Weave Or Not To Weave: Vernacular Textiles and Historical Change in Romania

This article discusses the historical and social change associated with textiles in a rural setting in central Romania. Using ethnographic fieldwork with the Horniman Museum's folk textile collection, it considers the transformation of traditional weaving in the source community. It highlights that the local perceptions of traditional fabrics are embedded in the narratives of practice and personhood. Weavers’ stories provide insights into the craftswomen's adjustment to major historical transformations and ideas of modernity and femininity. This perspective sheds light on local values beyond fixed folk styles and traditional designs.

Early early music

The Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, London, holds one of the largest musical instrument collections in the UK, encompassing several thousand instruments. It hosts the Dolmetsch collection and several other historical instrument collections, and was recently further enriched by the permanent loan of keyboard and string instruments from the Victoria and Albert Museum. In recent years, and particularly since the appointment of Mimi Waitzman to the position of deputy-keeper of musical instruments, the Museum has been establishing its position as a centre for diverse activities in early music research, display and performance. Its idyllic surroundings and the proximity of the instruments provided the ideal environment for a three-day conference on 12–14 March 2014 about the early roots of the historically informed performance movement, appropriately entitled Roots of Revival. Pre-conference activities included a tour of the Horniman’s Study Collection Centre in Greenwich, a tour of the Music Gallery in the Museum’s main site, and a book launch event (Networks of music and culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, edited by David Smith and Rachelle Taylor), which, in turn, included a concert of keyboard music played by Peter Dirksen, Hank Knox, David Smith and Rachelle Taylor.

“Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids: A Journey through the English Ritual Year”

This review article critiques the Horniman Museum's temporary exhibition, "Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids: A Journey through the English Ritual Year" (22 October 2011 to 09 September 2012), which contained fifty photographs by Sara Hannant documenting English folk festivals in the early twenty-first century. In particular this review focuses on the portrayal of contemporary Paganism within the exhibit.

Changes in microbial diversity associated with two coral species recovering from a stressed state in a public aquarium system

Coral diseases are a major factor in the decline of coral reefs worldwide, and a large proportion of studies focusing on disease causation use aquaria to control variables that affect disease occurrence and development. Public aquaria can therefore provide an invaluable resource to study the factors contributing to health and disease. In November 2010 the corals within the main display tank at the Horniman Museum and Gardens, London, UK, underwent a severe stress event due to reduced water quality, which resulted in death of a large number of coral colonies. Three separate colonies of two species of reef coral, Seritopora hystrix and Montipora capricornis showing signs of stress and acute tissue loss were removed from the display tank and placed in a research tank with improved water quality. Both coral species showed a significant difference in 16S rRNA gene bacterial diversity be-tween healthy and stressed states (S. hystrix; ANOSIM, R=0.44, p=0.02 and M. capricornis; ANOSIM, R=0.33, p=0.01), and between the stressed state and the recovering corals. After four months the bacterial communities had returned to a similar state to that seen in healthy corals of the same species. The bacterial communities associated with the two coral species were distinct, despite them being reared under identical environmental conditions. Despite the environmental perturbation being identical different visual signs were seen in each species and distinctly different bacterial communities associated with the stressed state occurred within them. Recovery of the visually healthy state was associated with a return of the bacterial community, within two months, to the pre-disturbance state. These observations suggest that coral-associated microbial communities are remarkably resilient and return to a very similar stable state following disturbance.

Museums, Colonialism, and Identity: A History of Naga Collections in Britain. AndyWest. london: horniman museum and gardens, 2011. 209 pp.

Museums, Colonialism, and Identity: A History of Naga Collections in Britain. AndyWest. london: <scp>horniman museum and gardens</scp>, 2011. 209 <scp>pp</scp>.

런던 호니만 박물관 소장 한복 유물에 관한 연구

This paper investigates the formative features and the historical meaning of the Korean dress collection held in the Horniman Museum in London. The Museum holds eighteen items of Korean dresses donated by Mrs. C. de J. Luxmore in 1948 and by Mrs. Bowra in 1953. Male dresses consist of white silk outer robe (durumagi), a pale violet silk waistcoat (jokki), a jade green silk jacket (jeogori), pale yellow silk trousers (baji), a pair of ankle bands (daenim), a cotton waistband (dae), a silk purse (jumeoni), a rattan under-vest (deungbaeja), a pair of rattan wristlets (deungtosi), a top hat (gat) and a skullcap (tanggeon). Female dresses comprise a jade green silk jacket (jeogori), an ivory silk skirt (chima), a light blue silk petticoat (sokchima), two kinds of white cotton trousers (sokbaji and soksokgot), a pair of silk wristlets (tosi) and a pair of padded socks (beoseon). A Korean dress collection of the Horniman Museum shows a set of ordinary dress items worn by a married couple in the 1930s and the 1940s. Of these items, a silk petticoat (sokchima) and a rattan under-vest (deungbaeja) can be highly evaluated as object resources in the history of Korean dress. The petticoat is a rare and valuable example that represents an early type of modern petticoat that has replaced a traditional petticoat (dansokgot). The rattan under-vest has square neckline and two tiny sleeves similar to a Western cap sleeve. This kind of under-vest is a transitional form shown between under-vest similar to the Korean waistcoat (baeja) and one similar to the Western waistcoat (jokki).

Re-Introducing Visitors: Thoughts and Discussion on John Falk’s Notion of Visitors’ Identity-Related Visit Motivations

Until today museums have tried to identify and segment their audiences based on their demographics. After years of conducting research in the US, John Falk in 2009 introduced a descriptive and predictive framework for identifying visitors on the basis of their motivations, as related to identity. This article summarises Falk’s innovative framework as described in his book <em>Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience</em> (2009), in addition to his presentation at the Visitor Studies Conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum in January 2010. In addition the article draws on the author’s related research case studies from the Courtauld Gallery, the Horniman Museum and the Wellcome Collection in the UK.

Religious displays: an observational study with a focus on the horniman museum

ABSTRACTReligious displays can help foster cross-cultural understanding. However, the extent to which they can achieve this aim is wholly dependent on the museum's displays, community involvement, background fieldwork research, and the educational and public programming provided around the exhibition, among other factors. Well-crafted displays can encourage greater understanding of a community's religious practices, customs, and cultural differences. If crafted badly, however, such displays can have either no effect or, indeed, the reverse, and actually aid in cementing prejudices. The extent to which either of these extremes applies depends on the factors listed above. This article is an observational study of how best to display objects of religious significance in the museum context, based on a detailed analysis of the key factors which contribute to a successful display. It concentrates on the Horniman Museum in south London, critically analyzing its three permanent exhibition galleries: the African Worlds Gallery, the Centenary Gallery, and the Music Gallery. In so doing, it also makes reference to other relevant religious displays. More fundamentally, this study sets out to explore the different forms of displaying religious objects within museums and consider which of these are the most successful in helping visitors understand the significance of those objects, as well as the people and communities from which they originate.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES AND SCHOLARLY NETWORKS

Items in the anthropology collections of the Horniman Museum in London that originate from those parts of the world which today make up the modern state of Malaysia number approximately 1,200, a relatively small collection built up over a period of about 150 years. In many ways the changing nature of museum collections of ethnographic artefacts reflects the history of the anthropological museum in Britain as well as the changing relationships between Britain and the parts of the world where items have been collected. This article examines the Museum's Malaysian material, whether donated, purchased or collected in the field by curators and considers both how it fitted in with the changing concepts informing museum practice and what it tells us about the views it expresses of ‘other’ cultures in general, and the Malay world in particular. 1In this article I deal with material originating from those territories that make up present-day Malaysia, which I refer to as the Museum's Malaysian collections henceforth. Drawing on the Museum's correspondence files, registers and handbooks, as well as the collections themselves, the article seeks to explore how ideas about the Malay world were formed and expressed in the way material was interpreted and displayed. The picture revealed, especially in the early period, is one of a network of British people, chiefly academics, with a shared view of what kinds of material culture from the Malay world should be collected and how that material should be interpreted. Underlying this, however, are suggestions of an increasingly wide range of relationships between people of the Malay world and Britons abroad, embodied in the material which found its way for whatever reason into the cases or storage shelves at the Museum.

FT‐Raman spectroscopy of pigments on a Hindu statue,Kali Walking on Siva

AbstractFT‐Raman spectroscopic analysis of eight pigmented specimens from an important Hindu statue group,Kali Walking on Siva, acquired in 1895 but of indeterminate age and now in the Horniman Museum, London, has revealed some interesting and unusual combinations of coloured pigments including cinnabar, minium,lapis lazuliand red ochre. Several specimens showed evidence of organic additives, which have been attributed to shellac resins commonly believed to have been used on this type of statuary. The Raman spectroscopic results confirm that the predominant black pigment on theKalifigure is lamp black or soot, in contrast to the SEM‐EDX data that suggests the origin of this pigment as from bone black or ivory black from the presence of phosphorus. An eclectic range of white pigments have been identified in this group including lead white, barytes, calcite and anhydrite; rutile and anatase found on one specimen on thejackalin this group have been ascribed to recent unrecorded restoration. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Amazon to Caribbean: Early peoples of the rainforest, Horniman Museum, to 31 October 2006, admission free

Anthropology TodayVolume 21, Issue 6 p. 22-22 Amazon to Caribbean: Early peoples of the rainforest, Horniman Museum, to 31 October 2006, admission free Anouska Komlosy, London a.komlosy@britishlibrary.netSearch for more papers by this author Anouska Komlosy, London a.komlosy@britishlibrary.netSearch for more papers by this author First published: 29 November 2005 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8322.2005.00401.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume21, Issue6December 2005Pages 22-22 RelatedInformation

The Renaissance of Museums in Britain

In this paper – given as a lecture at Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the summer of 2003 – I survey the remarkable renaissance of museums – national and regional, public and private – in Britain in recent years, largely made possible with the financial support of the Heritage Lottery Fund. I look in detail at four non-national museum projects of particular interest: the Horniman Museum in South London, a remarkable and idiosyncratic collection of anthropological, natural history and musical material which has recently been re-housed and redisplayed; secondly, the nearby Dulwich Picture Gallery, famous for its 17th- and 18th-century Old Master paintings, a masterpiece of 19th-century architecture by Sir John Soane, which has been restored, and modern museum services provided. The third is the New Art Gallery, Walsall, where the Garman Ryan collection of early 20th-century painting and sculpture form the centrepiece of a new building with fine galleries and the forum is the Manchester Art Gallery, where the former City Art Gallery and the Athenaeum have been combined in a single building in which to display the city's rich art collections. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, of which I am Director, is the most important museum of art and archaeology in England outside London and the greatest University Museum in the world. Its astonishingly rich collections are introduced and the transformational plan for the museum is described. In July 2005 the Heritage Lottery Fund announced a grant of £15 million and the renovation of the Museum is now underway.

Socio-cultural history of Palembang Songket1

1I would like to express my deep gratitude to Professor V.T. King, University of Hull, and Dr Fiona Kerlogue, Horniman Museum, who offered many suggestions for this paper.