Pitt Rivers Museum Research Articles

Beyond access: (re)designing archival guides for changing landscapes

In 2013, the authors of this article and their colleague Gavan McCarthy published Stories in Stone: an annotated history and guide to the collections of Ernest Westlake (1855–1922). The guide provided contextual information and digital access to the entire paper archives relating to the three large stone collections formed by Westlake during his lifetime: French and English geological specimens housed in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History from 1924, and a collection of Tasmanian Aboriginal stone tools stored in the Pitt Rivers Museum since 1923. The Tasmanian collections, formed by Westlake from 1908 to 1910, are highly significant to the Palawa (or Pakana or Tasmanian Aboriginal) community because they include objects made by ancestors, and words spoken by ancestors to Westlake and recorded in his field notebooks. Stories in Stone was created to improve access to Westlake’s Tasmanian collections for the Palawa community with whom author Rebe Taylor had worked closely since 1999. Nonetheless, the structural and technical design of Stories in Stone was not Palawa-led. It was driven by Australian and international archiving standards; by stipulations set out by the collecting institutions; and by the stories of collecting and subsequent scholarship on the collections. In 2023, Stories in Stone is offline, and the authors are planning a relaunch. This time they aim to reach beyond their original aim of providing archival access to the Palawa community, and work with Palawa community to co-design how that access is delivered. This consultative work will be done at the University of Tasmania, where Palawa advisors and other Indigenous scholars have been integral to developing international Indigenous data sovereignty principals. This article precedes those formal discussions and thus offers a timely reflection on the original aims and design of Stories in Stone as well as an extensive analysis of broader changes in the management and dissemination of First Nations collections and culture. Such changes include: international human rights frameworks; movements supporting data and archival sovereignty; co-designed archival technologies; and increased focus on archives as process not merely product. These developments will lay the foundations for the next version of Stories in Stone, which aims to go beyond access, scholarship, and standards by helping to facilitate First Nations’ aspirations for dignity, sovereignty, and self-determination.

Archive or exhibition?: A comparative case study of the real and virtual Pitt Rivers Museum

Museums are exhibitionary complexes which communicate using aggregated space, objects, and people. For the visitors of museums, two distinctive modes of experience – “archive” and “exhibition” experiences – stand out and are in conversation with one another. One might expect these experiences to have contradictory aims, or be mutually exclusive, but the distinction between the two has not always been clear or rigid. The distinction can be observed in details of museum practices, which cater to public expectations for change in museum spaces and public history. This paper will take the Pitt Rivers Museum as a subject and will embed a 3D virtual thematic exhibition – Rites of Passage – to illustrate the relation between the two experiences. Within the virtual exhibition a study of bodily movement is depicted for the comparison between the two experiences, which might further help us grasp the substance of replying to future generation of museums.

His Dark Materials Among the Displays, the Pitt Rivers Museum, December 12, 2022 to December 31, 2023

<i>His Dark Materials Among the Displays</i>, the Pitt Rivers Museum, December 12, 2022 to December 31, 2023

Indigenous Voices and the Archive

Between 1914 and 1919, the British administrator and anthropologist John Henry Hutton (1885-1968) made fourteen cylinder recordings documenting the songs of Naga communities in the Naga Hills District, today part of the state of Nagaland in India. Little is known about the recording circumstances, as the documentation is limited to brief recording notes he sent with the cylinders to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which holds the collection. Hutton’s publications, on the other hand, include transcriptions and translations of some of the recorded songs, but the poor sound quality makes it difficult to assign these to the published songs with certainty. This paper summarises the outcomes of a research project funded by the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives between January and March 2022, which aimed to reconnect Naga communities with Hutton’s recordings to elucidate the content and performance context of the recordings, and to provide digital copies of the collection with enhanced documentation to the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (Gurgaon) and the Highland Institute (Kohima). Fieldwork participants appreciated the opportunity to hear Hutton’s recordings, which they considered important historical documentation of Naga traditional music. Yet, most listeners struggled to identify the recorded songs, although a few were able to name and even perform some of them. The project concluded with an exhibition at the Highland Institute that featured Hutton’s recordings and more recent examples of Naga traditional music. Overall, few listeners were aware of the existence of Hutton’s recordings when we conducted our fieldwork in February 2022, although the recordings have been available online on the website of the Pitt Rivers Museum since 2013. Thus, I argue that initiatives of making historical sound recordings accessible online need to be supported by actions on the ground in countries of origin, to facilitate community engagement with audio collections uploaded to the web.

Muuseumikogude potentsiaali kaardistamine päritolu-uuringute kaudu

This article focuses on the possibilities created through provenance research in the museum. Setting out current interest in provenance research against the backdrop of antiracist and decolonial movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, the article focuses specifically on the history of research in ethnographic museums shaped by legislative acts such as NAGPRA in the USA, critical thinking about representational practices in anthropology, and collaborative work with originating communities. Using the Siberian collection acquired by Maria Czaplicka in 1914 and held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford as a case study, I argue that broad-ranging and open-ended provenance research akin to anthropological fieldwork allows to uncover different narratives pertaining to museum objects. It enables to understand why and how the objects were brought to the museum, the kinds of epistemic realities they have helped to build but also to attend to different cultural meanings and realities embedded in these objects. A close historical study of the Czaplicka collection has added to our understanding of the nature of ethnographic research in the early 20th century, brought to attention immoral acquisition of grave goods and human remains during the Siberian expedition but also highlighted close relations between ethnographers and their Indigenous hosts. Contemporary fieldwork in Siberia and creative engagement with the collection have further broadened the understanding of the origin of these objects in relation to Evenki worldview and lived experience. Through such nuanced research, a “thick description” emerges that enables a museum interpretation that can speak to the emergence of drifts and fault lines in the society, bring different worldviews into one space, and within that space address topics of global concern.

History maker: Discovering James Arthur Harley

This extract from a recently published book tells the story of James Arthur Harley (1843‐1943), the first black student to achieve the first Diploma in Anthropology in 1909 at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

Front and back cover caption, volume 39 issue 3

Front and back cover caption, volume 39 issue 3ROBOTIC BUDDHIST FUNERAL PRIESTSHumanoid robot ‘Pepper’, produced by SoftBank Robotics, debuts to great fanfare in 2017 in its new role as a Buddhist priest and funeral attendant at ENDEX, the Japanese funeral and cemetery industry convention. Alongside AR grave design programs, eco‐urns and ash jewellery, Pepper is one of many striking, experimental products and services aimed at reinvigorating and reinventing Japan's ‘ending industry’.In a country with a rapidly aging population, Japan is facing a crisis in how to handle death. Traditional Buddhist funeral rites are becoming increasingly expensive and difficult to find, and many families are looking for new ways to say goodbye to their loved ones.One possible solution is the use of robotic Buddhist priests. These robots are programmed to chant sutras, lead prayers and perform other traditional funeral rituals. They are also much cheaper than human priests, making them an attractive option for families on a budget.The use of robotic priests is still in its early stages, but it has the potential to revolutionize the way death is handled in Japan. By providing a more affordable and accessible option for funeral services, robots could help to ensure that everyone has a dignified send‐off, regardless of their financial situation.These interventions respond to the weakening of traditional Buddhist death rites and the socio‐religious structures that once supported them.THE FIRST BLACK STUDENT IN ANTHROPOLOGYJames Arthur Harley (1873‐1943), a talented polymath with a degree from Harvard University, arrived in Edwardian England in 1907 and enrolled in the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford to pursue a Diploma in Anthropology. Unfortunately, the curriculum at the time perpetuated racist ideologies that portrayed and thought of black people as intellectually inferior, exotic, sub‐species, sub‐human – savage. However, Harley's presence at Britain's world‐renowned university, a bastion of white elite privilege, prestige and class, was not unique.Thirty‐four years earlier in 1873, Christian Frederick Cole (1853‐1885) from Sierra Leone became the university's first black scholar when he matriculated at University College, aged 21, to read for an honours degree in Classical Moderations, going on to achieve the august status of Britain's first black barrister.Harley, an Antiguan scholar, completed the course and became the first black man to earn the diploma. In so doing, he, like many black scholars at the University of Oxford, from Alain LeRoy Locke (1885‐1954), the first black Rhodes scholar, later known as the father of the Harlem Renaissance, to Kofoworola Moore (1913‐2002), the first black woman to receive a degree in 1932, all obliterated the preconceived racist‐held ideologies with their achievements and later contributions.Anthropology continuously evolves and adapts to the changes humans experience in this world. Through the presence of Harley and his fellow pioneers in these institutions, we see how they gradually evolve and reframe how black students are viewed. These early students were change agents and perhaps instigators of decolonized curricula and forged a path for other black students to follow.

Maria Czaplicka: Gender, Shamanism, Race [Maria Czaplicka: Płeć, szamanizm, rasa; Biografia antropologiczna

Maria Czaplicka: Gender, Shamanism, Race [Maria Czaplicka: Płeć, szamanizm, rasa; Biografia antropologiczna

Special Section

Anthropology, Art, and Ethnographic Collections: A Conversation with Howard MorphyJason M. Gibson (JG): In your book Museums, Infinity and the Culture of Protocols: Ethnographic Collections and Source Communities (Morphy 2020), you begin with an anecdote of visiting the Pitt Rivers Museum as a young child. Did museums play a part in sparking an interest in humanity, and its diversity, or were you fascinated by the Other?Book Review: Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value, Howard Morphy and Robyn McKenzie, eds. (London: Routledge, 2022)What does value mean within and beyond museum contexts? What are the processes through which value is manifested? How might a deeper understanding of these processes contribute to the practice of museum anthropology? These questions are explored in Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value, which looks at collaborative work in museums using ethnographic collections as a focus. Most of the chapters involve collections from Australia and the Pacific—reflecting the origins of many of them in two conferences associated with the project “The Relational Museum and Its Objects,” funded by the Australian Research Council and the Australian National University and led by Howard Morphy. Bringing together early career researchers, as well as museum-based scholars who have many years of thinking through and learning with community-based research partners, makes evident how the processual shifts in museum anthropology toward a more collaboratively grounded practice have become normalized, but crucially also highlights the value of “slow museology,” as the editors note in their introduction (3), acknowledging Raymond Silverman’s (2015) term. While the editors caution that the core values of ethnographic collections and museums are not universal, the inclusion of chapters from beyond the Australia/Pacific region highlights that the foundational underpinning values and aspirations for cross-cultural work—“the desire for understanding” and “the desire to be understood” (22) are shaping much of the innovative museum-based work currently being carried out worldwide. Examples include Gwyneira Isaac’s chapter on 3D technologies of reproduction and their value for Tlingit of Alaska, and Henrietta Lidchi and Nicole Hartwell’s examination of how materiality and memory intersect in collections associated with nineteenth-century British military campaigns.

Three Skulls from Sabah in the Pitt Rivers Museum

Three Skulls from Sabah in the Pitt Rivers Museum

In the mud: Lesbian trauma and the reparative quilt in the Pitt Rivers Museum

This practice-based paper reflects on my quilt commissioned for the Beyond the Binary project at the Pitt Rivers Museum. The quilt pieces together fragments from the Pitt Rivers collection and the personal archive of Fisch, aka King Frankie Sinatra, Drag King and Rebel Dyke. Through an autoethnographic narrative, threaded through with queer and feminist psychoanalytic theories, this paper reflects on the reparative qualities of the quilt, and its potentiality as a site for affective resonances and transformative possibilities in the aftermath of historical lesbian trauma.

International Magic?

This paper explores international aspects of Finnish folk magic. Folk magic objects in two Finnish museum collections (the National Museum of Finland and Museum Centre Vapriikki) are compared to analogous objects in the Nordiska museet in Sweden and the Pitt Rivers Museum in the UK to reveal the collections’ resemblances and differences. The material in question dates to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many similar objects occur in these collections. Explanations for this are sought in historical networks between peoples. Yet a closer inspection also reveals variation in practices and beliefs. This reveals the dynamic nature of folk magic traditions, although collection and curation policies also play a role. Moreover, the complex connections between religion, medicine, and magic are uncovered.

Decolonising the Curatorial Process

Orson Nava’s Decolonising the Curatorial Process is a forty-minute documentary which invites us to a participate in a special, temporal and intellectual journey, engaging with dialogical practice and reflection on what decolonising art institutions and spaces entails. From the Museum of London Docklands in London, to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and Cape Peninsula University, the film becomes a meeting point for researchers and practitioners committed to radically transforming museums and higher education institutions, as well as the collaboration between these to. Beyond this insightful call to dismantle long-established Eurocentric curatorial practice, Nava’s film and research statement evidence the dialogical and inter-disciplinary methodologies that participate in what is still an ongoing struggle. Such a process is enhanced by the integration of voices of two peer reviewers, who celebrate the visibility to the decolonial thinking process led by researchers of African heritage.

Frances LarsonUndreamed Shores: The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology

BOOKS IN REVIEW Frances Larson Undreamed Shores:The Hidden Heroines of British Anthropology London. Granta. 2020. 352 pages. FRANCES LARSON IS AN anthropologist at the University of Durham and the author of three books on anthropologists, collectors of artifacts, and beheadings. Undreamed Shores is her latest addition to this list. It traces the lives of Britain’s first female anthropologists—a group of five women, all educated at Oxford in the early twentieth century. However diverse their backgrounds, all were confronted with the severe limitations to which English society subjugated their gender. While their brothers, male friends, and colleagues were privately educated and able to pursue university degrees and research positions, “most women were educated [to] become good wives and mothers.” We not only learn of the lives of these extraordinary women, the cultures they studied, and the times they lived in, but we also see the field of anthropology establish and define itself, as Larson’s heroines struggle to survive in a world both hostile to their gender and their field. To Larson, the slowly growing emancipation of women in England in the early twentieth century did not merely coincide with the birth of modern anthropology but was a necessary contribution to it. A woman’s perspective is an essential part to the study of any society and particularly valuable in the study of subjects such as the societal role of women, family structures, childbirth, and sexuality. In the context of field research specifically, female researchers may be perceived as a lesser threat than their male counterparts and may thus be more tolerated by certain subject groups. And finally, Larson’s anthropologists were less likely than some of their male colleagues to put tales of their own bravery before the content of their work. Their books were “modest and attentive . True to their data and its limitations . . . their work was respected without being celebrated.” Katherine Routledge, born 1866, sailed to Easter Island to study its Polynesian culture and past. Winifred Blackman, born 1872, lived with agricultural peasants of Upper Egypt for nineteen seasons. Barbara Freire-Marreco, born 1879, lived and worked in the pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona. Maria Czaplicka, born 1884, was a Polish citizen and traveled northern Siberia throughout the winter. Lastly, Beatrice Blackwood, born 1889, traveled to New Guinea twice and, for decades, held a leading role with the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, contributing more than two thousand objects herself. Braving all odds, these women made their way to Oxford at a time when there were only three university posts in anthroAugust 21 and September 19, 1939, in the Politeama Theater in his newfound hometown , coinciding with the outbreak of the war. Despite the imminent demise of world peace, Heinz is enveloped by a fatal infatuation with tomboy Sonja Graf, real-life German American chess master and dominatrix . Unlike the chess players who traveled to Buenos Aires, Heinz is not part of the “intellectual fraternity” that comes with being a master or connoisseur (or, more precisely victim) of the game; his preferred cerebral enigma is the enchanting woman who antagonizes him so profusely, refusing outright his attempts at courtship. Ultimately, Heinz gives up on the idea of love and takes on a new, more arduous task. In his long-winded soliloquies scattered throughout otherwise mundane diary entries, Heinz argues that the political boundaries between nations are “unnatural ,” similar to the checkered squares on the chessboard that were introduced to the blank expanse of the board in the tenth century. Heinz eventually transitions from a reserved pacifist into a full-blown anarchist. Determined to prevent the Germans from corrupting the most classical of ancient pastimes, Heinz, with the help of the Palestinian , French, and Polish teams, attempts to thwart the only remaining conquerable enterprise for the Germans: the world of chess. Ariel Magnus uses the sixty-four-square board as a canvas for the German domination of the “checkerboard of Europe”; the international chess competition that the Germans so effortlessly conquer symbolizes their eventual belligerent conquest of Europe. Chess with my Grandfather is laden with what seem to be long-winded bouts of inspiration that can be likened to a diver’s parlous journey into...

The ethnographic archive and the poetics of history: Revisiting Godfrey Lienhardt’s archive

ABSTRACT This article develops an approach for working with vernacular texts in ethnographic archives. It examines Dinka song texts collected in (South) Sudan by the anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt (between 1947 and 1951), now archived at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Songs were central to developing Lienhardt’s ethnographic analysis; they are also an exciting and unique record of popular and artistic expression at the time of his research. The songs he transcribed offer perspectives on life under colonial rule that are often occluded in the documentary and ethnographic record (including Lienhardt’s own writing). In this article, I examine a selection of songs, showing that to be understood today they must be seen as both a product of Lienhardt’s data collecting practices and works of art in their own right. It is possible to usefully recontextualize these songs by triangulating between Lienhardt’s published work, his unpublished field notes and other academic studies in South Sudanese history and anthropology. Importantly, these songs must be treated as verbal arts – and read with an appreciation of their aesthetic and stylistic qualities. Their meaning and significance is not always straightforward, in fact they are often deliberately opaque. Any interpretation must embrace these ‘difficult’ aspects.

Man, Woman, Child

Abstract This paper is concerned with the ethical aspects of museum metadata. These are not always immediately evident when working with the metadata related to museum objects, although, I will argue, they are embedded in the object, accumulated at each phase of its journey into the institution; and continue to accumulate while it is part of a collection. This takes place against a backdrop of new development and possibilities afforded by digital technologies for building connections between and across heritage collections online, which can result in these complicated metadata potentially entering the data ecosystem. This eventuality, I will argue, has ethical and technical implications which need to be considered and understood through the theoretical lenses of critical data studies, museum informatics and the growing calls from museum scholars and others to decolonisation of museum collections. Using a small collection of drawings from the Pitt Rivers Museum of Anthropology and World Archaeology at the University of Oxford, I will demonstrate how difficult museum metadata can be buried deep in museum documentation, and how this data, once brought to the surface by digitisation, can expose the trauma of a collection’s origins. I will go on to ask whether the current models used to share heritage data online are appropriate mechanisms for materials with such sensitive histories, and ask how best to handle them in the increasingly digital future.

Lady scientist, technological treasures and the making of a discipline

Abstract The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is known for its abundant ethnographic and archaeological collections and typological displays. Conceived as an educational museum serving the purposes of evolutionist anthropology and its comparative practice, the collections grew considerably in size and geographical scope during Henry Balfour’s curatorship (1893–1939). The museum’s Siberian collection is almost entirely made up of objects from a single expedition to the Yenisei valley in 1914–15, led by a recent graduate from the University of Oxford Diploma in Anthropology, Maria Antonina Czaplicka (1884–1921). This article follows the journey of the making of this collection, starting from the context of the newly established diploma, and moving through international networks of museum professionals, into the Illimpei tundra, and back to what is now its institutional home in Oxford. Examining the practices of an early professionally trained anthropologist, the article offers novel insights into the complex entanglement of museum collecting and early twentieth-century anthropological teaching and research.

West African Voice-Disguisers and Audible Ghosts: A Case for Expanding the Fluency of Global Design History

With reference to a Boki voice-disguiser, created by an unknown designer in south-eastern Nigeria circa 1925 and now on display in the Pitt Rivers Museum, this article uses the concepts of sound and magic to reveal the limitations of current approaches to global design history. The noise-producing aspect of the instrument is related to profound metaphysical manifestations that challenge the global design historian to think beyond the industrial and technical foundations of design as defined in “the West”. Alongside core literature around global design history, this essay engages with a diverse spectrum of methodologically focused scholarship, including anthropology and neuroscience, in an attempt to understand the case study as a design object and a generator of auditory environment and ritual.

‘African Curiosities’ from the voyage of HMS Avon, 1845–1846: historiographical notes on a forgotten collection

Abstract Thanks to the detailed nature of the sketches accompanying an article published in the Illustrated London News in 1846, it has proved possible recently to trace the history of some objects in the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum to the voyage of HMS Avon (Commander Henry Mangles Denham) to the coast of West Africa in 1845–6. Drawing on archival materials that survive at the Pitt Rivers Museum, the British Museum, the National Archives, and the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, historiographical notes are provided on the nature and content of the collection, along with an account of its post-voyage history, including its recent ‘rediscovery’.

“Breaking juju,” breaking trade: Museums and the culture of iconoclasm in southern Nigeria

“Breaking juju,” breaking trade: Museums and the culture of iconoclasm in southern Nigeria