Sensing Culture at the Pitt Rivers Museum, October 2017

In October Jamie Cameron (Research Assistant, Oxford Internet Institute) came to the Pitt Rivers Museum to 3D scan an object in the museum’s collection; a model of a totem pole (also known as a crest pole) made by the Northwest Coast Haida (1891.49.13 .1 - .2). The scan will be 3D printed and used for Sensing Culture, a Heritage Lottery funded project, led by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB). One of the aims at the project is to develop and produce ways in which the visitor experience for blind and partially sighted people can be improved. Other museums within the University of Oxford GLAM (Gardens, Libraries, Archives and Museums) are also involved.

 Jamie Cameron '3D scanning' the model Crest Pole © Pitt Rivers Museum

Our colleague Laura Peers (Curator of the Americans and Professor of Museum Anthropology) recommended the wooden model of a Haida totem pole for 3D printing. The pole was made in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Canada, most likely by artist Charles Edenshaw. Our documentation tells us that the model pole was collected by resident missionary Charles Harrison (who published accounts of the Haida) at the end of the 19th Century. The pole itself is carved with ‘crest figures’ that relate to lineages, aspects of status and property rights. To the Haida of the Northwest Coast, the act of looking up at these representations shown on the sides of giant crest poles would have triggered a visual reminder of the stories of how ancestral beings bestowed certain rights on a family. The figures on this particular model pole include an eagle, bears and their cubs in human or ancestral form, frogs and humans.

Unfortunately we don’t yet have insight into why this particular model totem pole was made. Could it have been a prototype for a much larger pole that was never carved? Was it a commercial product for Europeans, or could it have been made to order by European collectors to illustrate the types of narratives on totems that the Haida produced?

 © Pitt Rivers Museum (1891.49.13 .1 - .2) 

In 2009 the museum received a Haida delegation as part of the project “Haida Material Culture in British Museums: Generating New Forms of Knowledge”. The delegates, when looking at the model crest pole, observed that some of the original museum labelling is incorrect, and that the bear at the bottom of the pole was holding in its mouth a prawn or shrimp, and not a crayfish as had been labelled. They also added that this pole might be depicting the bear mother story, a popular Haida narrative. These observations were added to our online database, a living document which reflects the multi-vocality and dynamism of the museum’s collection. Visits like these highlight the importance of retaining relationships between museums and the living communities from which material culture was taken from, often under very difficult and problematic circumstances. The Pitt Rivers Museum always aims to be at the forefront in repairing relationships damaged in the past by European colonial collecting practices. We continue to generate positive outputs such as material repatriation, loans to source communities, access for originating communities to engage with and reconnect with the collection both physically and digitally, and collaborative work, such as the Great Box Project in 2014

Jamie used 3D imaging technologies, including photogrammetry, to create a ‘scan’ of the totem pole. This will be 3D printed, and such prints will allow visitors who are blind or partially sighted to ‘read’ the object through touch. Haida art uses a structured formline design, where different coloured paints highlight certain features, and on carvings such as the model pole, formline appears in incisions in shallow and deep relief. Visitors will be able to feel the incised lines on the 3D print to help understand the layout and proportions of the totem pole. Many museums are using 3D printing to engage their visitors, and it is just one of the ways that the Pitt Rivers Museum works to enable access to its collections.

Nicholas Crowe 

Assistant Curator

Museum Ethnographers Group 2015 Conference Review

MEG Conference – Powell-Cotton Museum, Kent, 20/21 April Nature and Culture in Museums

Every year the Museum Ethnographers Group holds a two-day conference to explore an important theme within the discipline of museum ethnography. As web officer for the Museum Ethnographers group I was lucky enough to attend the 2015 conference. This year’s conference theme was aptly chosen to suit the unique setting of the conference host, the Powell-Cotton Museum.

The Powell-Cotton Museum has long embraced in its displays the duality of nature and culture, natural and man-made, animals and objects. This was emphasised during conference organiser and Head of Collections at the Powell-Cotton Museum Inbal Livne’s welcoming speech. The first day of the conference was held in Gallery 1, an inspiring gallery, finished in 1939 with wall-to-wall dioramas displaying the animals of north and west African and India, speakers had a hard job competing with the visual stimulus of the gallery but often what was being spoken was directly being reinforced by the displays. This was particularly useful for Jude Philips (Macleay Museum, Sydney University Museums) talk on the Macleay Museum’s recent exhibition ‘Stuffed, stitched and studied’. When Jude’s power point presentation struggled to get working Jude was able to use the displays as her visual prompts to illustrate her talk. After a stirling effort of Powell-Cotton Museum staff the power point was up and running and Jude was able to share images of the exhibition with the group including quirky artist photographic portraits of taxidermed specimens emphasising taxidermy as a human endeavour and the anthropomorphical attributes we assign to them.

Our first speaker, Paolo Viscardi (Horniman Museum) was the first of other speakers to talk of the role of collaboration between anthropologists and natural historians, referencing the early cabinets of curiosities or ‘wunderkammer’, encyclopaedic collections where categorical distinctions and boundaries between disciplines; art, geology, archaeology, ethnology and natural history were yet to be made. This was also alluded to by Alison Clark (Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) in her presentation ‘All the World for Sale: Nature and Culture at Gerrard and Sons’, taxidermist and art dealer whose sales room often included zoology specimens alongside ethnographic collections. Alison also reminded us that ethnographic collections are made up from composite objects, made up from animal parts as well as other organic materials. Collecting practices during the 19^th century reflected in publications such as ‘hints to travellers’ encouraged this multidisciplinary approach and resulted in collections including a diverse range of objects exploring the natural and man made world, nature and culture. Jenny Walklate was the third speaker to reference ‘wunderkammer’ in her presentation ‘Swifts in the Tower of the House of God: The Reciprocal Framing of Nature and Culture in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History’ and the complex relationship the building reflects between science and faith. Jenny finished her presentation with an insightful auto-ethnography of her personal reflections on how the Victorian aesthetic of the museum impacts upon contemporary personal interpretations of the natural world.

A long and very tasty lunch gave delegates the first opportunity to look around the Museum galleries and gardens including the much anticipated newly opened Gallery 6. The subject of an ACE funded project ‘Securing the Future of Our Past’ the gallery has been re-designed to encourage every visitor to be a researcher, introducing Percy Powell-Cotton's expeditions on which he amassed his collections. The gallery also puts the Museum’s handling collection at its centre, a combination of natural history and ethnographic objects for visitors to experience first hand. The modern design of Gallery 6 contrasted with the more traditional displays in the rest of the Museum but highlighted the Museum’s potential.

The end of day one saw interesting presentations from Caroline Cornish (Royal Holloway) and Mark Nesbitt (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) on ‘Seeds of Industry and Empire: Revitalising Economic Botany Collections’. I was not overly familiar with the concept of ‘economic botany’ defined by Caroline and Mark simply as ‘plants transformed into items of use to human beings’ These collections were established and displayed in colonised countries, modelled on the oldest such collection, the Kew Museum of Economic Botany. The end of empire marked the end of these collections and many were dispersed and put into storage. Caroline and Mark, through the course of their project on the subject have been re-discovering these collections and exploring their relevance today.

Lastly, the day was finished on an entertaining note with a look at the role of animals and Museum displays and marketing campaigns in Antonia Lovelace’s presentation ‘Comparing the meerkat and falling for ‘Digital’ monkey – How trending animal totems playfully impact on our relationship with real animals and Museum displays’ Antonia has had to present a case for acquiring some of these popular characters into the collections at Leeds City Museum, a collection that already includes toys. Her paper asked ‘is there a place for these objects in contemporary collecting?

The day’s sessions finished at 5.00pm allowing more time for exploration of the galleries, a drinks reception and a short talk from Chris Spring of the British Museum on the temporary touring exhibition ‘Social Fabric: African Textiles Today’. Delegates enjoyed top-notch catering of a delicious three-course meal provided by the Powell-Cotton’s in house caterers.

Day two of the conference was opened by Anita Herle (Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology), Tony Eccles (Royal AlbertMemorial Museum Exeter) and Alison Brown (University of Aberdeen) and their paper ‘Storied Landscapes: Enlivening Blackfoot Collections in UK Museums’ and the work all three are doing through their respective institutions extending networks between Blackfoot people and UK collections and how for Blackfoot people landscape and sites of encounter contribute to a fuller understanding of Blackfoot historic collections.

The interdisciplinary aspect of the conference theme ‘Nature and Culture’ was metamorphasied by interventionist artist Alana Jelinek by cleverly using the science of ecology as a metaphor for the art world. Alana reinstated and emphasised the reoccurring themes of the conference; that the dichotomy between nature and culture may not exist, there is no clear divide between what is human and what is not human. Alana proposed using the science of ecology to understand the complex interactions between the range of cultural practices at play in the art world.

As well as the more thematic papers on ‘Nature and Culture’, the conference as usual offered a plethora of interesting ‘work in progress’ papers for colleagues to share and up-date members on current projects in the sector often reflecting current trends and practice in ethnography more generally. Included in this was an update from Len Pole on the ‘Uniques’project: getting to know more about ethnographic collections in Kent and Sussex’, Alison Petch on progress being made on researching Spencer and Gillen collections outside of Australia, Heather Donoghue on cataloguing the Cooke Daniels collections at the British Museum before she embarks on fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Clare Wintle’s potential project exploring ethnographic museums at the end of empire, 1945-1980, a period often thought of as the ‘dark ages of museum ethnography’, but how far is this theory true, in what ways were museums in the UK contributing to wider political, economic and social change during the middle years of the twentieth century? Catherine Harvey spoke about a recent significant acquisition for Hasting’s Museum of North American material from Colin Taylor and the challenges faced by small local museums during difficult economic times in advocating world culture collections. Alison Brown concluded the work on progress papers having just returned from Russia having, through an AHRC funded project facilitated the loan of a mammoth ivory model of ysyakh from the British Museum to the National Museum of the Arts, Yakutiia.

A selection of papers from the conference will be available in the next issue of the Journal of Museum Ethnography (JME) (available from April 2016).

Faye Belsey 

Assistant Curator

The Huipil of San Antonio Aguas Calientes

Anyone traveling today through the Mayan villages and towns of highland Guatemala and observing the riot of colour expressed in the clothing that women create and wear would find it difficult to believe it was not always so.

A prime example of the profound change that has, in fact, taken place is the huipil worn by women in San Antonio Aguas Calientes. Today the women of San Antonio are noted throughout Guatemala for both their weaving skill, their design sense and their use of colour. However a traveler in 1900 would have noted that their huipil was an exceedingly dull affair. The ground fabric was a natural pale brown handspun and hand woven cotton with narrow warp stripes. Onto this simple background were brocaded a few doubled-faced supplementary weft motifs.

Woman with jug, San Antonio Aguas Calientes. CIRMA, Yas Collection, late 19th Century.

How did this rapid and radical change occur? Margot Blum Schevill believes that one impetus was the fact the San Antonio women increasingly came into contact with women from other villages where the design of the huipil was more complex and colourful. Other researchers point to the influence of needlepoint pattern books to which weavers began to have access. With these graphic aids the weaver could begin to reimagine the design the huipil.

Another important factor must have been increasing availability to commercial threads and to synthetic dyes. Women would travel to the nearby town of Antigua with the vegetables or textiles they had to sell and use part of their profits to buy threads and dyes from local merchants or from traders who came from Guatemala City on market days.

It is also important to note that fashion is not static even in a culture as economically impoverished as the Maya. Especially over the last 50 years the aesthetic expressed in all aspects of the woman’s traje (outfit), including the huipil, has continued to change in almost every village. As in San Antonio these changes extend even to the colour of the ground fabric. In the remote village of Chajul, for example, it had long been white. Today it is often red or blue.

Hupil from San Antonio with velvet trim notably missing, Sam Noble Museum, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK

There is a hint as to the role of fashion in a fine example of a huipil from San Antonio in the collection of The Sam Noble Museum at the University of Oklahoma at Norman. If you compare it with a close comparable in the Pitt Rivers’ collection (2012.104.37) you’ll note that the velvet trim that was once applied to the neck and arm openings has been removed. Only a shadow remains. One wonders why the owner decided to remove the trim before disposing of the huipil?

Hupil from San Antonio in the Pitt Rivers Museum (2012.104.37) with velvet trim around neck © Pitt Rivers Museum. 

The answer may have been related to fashion. As far as the owner (or her daughter or granddaughter) was concerned the huipil was no longer in fashion. Thus the trim was removed to be recycled in a new huipil that expressed the weaver’s newly acquired taste and aspirations.

Dai Williams

Independent researcher.

In 2012 Dai Williams generously donated a portion of his collection of Guatemalan textiles to the Pitt Rivers Museum. To look more closely at this specific collection please search for it on the Museum’s online catalogue via the Pitt Rivers Museum website.