Whenever I feel uninspired and unsure as to what to write about, I always turn to collection EA600. This collection is solely (pun intended) made up of shoes. Shoes from Morocco, India, Iceland, Japan, Canada, Kenya, Denmark, Greenland – you name it! In a previous […]
A woven fabric. It could be purchased in IKEA for pocket change. But it was not. It is an ethnographic artefact collected in Egypt in 2002, more specifically in Luxor in Upper Egypt. The question is; does it qualify as a museum artefact? Often, ethnographic […]
Last week two artefacts were returned to Nepal from a museum in the US. The two pieces, which are carved in stone, date back to the 12th century. They were donated to a museum in New York in 2015, and it was recently brought to […]
Driving on a motorbike in an African city is scary. During my own fieldwork in Uganda, I never felt threatened by people, rarely by animals (there was that one rat that bit my toe through a mosquito net), but almost always by the traffic. In […]
What did your kids do for the Easter Holiday? Hunt for Easter eggs in the garden? Watch TV and play with Legos? Stay up later than usual and spend the mornings bumming around in their pyjamas? I can promise you that the children of the […]
After last week’s somewhat depressing post, I promised to find a more cheerful subject for this week. I have mined my memories for the most pure moments of happiness that I can recall, and one of them prompted me to select these swimming goggles for […]
Let’s play a guessing game. What purpose do you think this artefact has? Is it an antique business card holder for the stylish gentleman (or -woman) of business? Is it a snuff container that fits perfectly into a jacket pocket? Has is, perhaps, contained bobby […]
When my co-corker called me this morning to tell me that she was in a bus sliding backwards down a hill due to heavy snow and a very icy road, I felt compelled to continue the Siberian theme of last week’s blog post. As I […]
After a rather mild and wet winter, Denmark is gearing up for a couple of cold weeks. In the weather forecasts we have heard about a ‘Siberian wind’ coming from the East, bringing with it snow and freezing cold temperatures. To prepare ourselves, we have […]
Would you expect to see a car from the 1970s in a contemporary ethnographic exhibition? No? That, however, was what the museum guests could see in the newly re-opened Moesgaard Museum in 2014. A tiny blue Fiat Maluch displayed on a thick red carpet. What […]
Here at The Ethnographic Collections, we have the most wonderful collection of shoes. They were collected by Søren Ludvig Tuxen, zoologist, and a bit of a shoe fetishist. Since the beginning of this blog, we have featured a wide selection of his shoes, from the […]
Last Friday, after some lovely speeches and a glass of bubbles, we were finally allowed to enter the new exhibition ‘Dialogues’ At Moesgaard Museum. In the darkened room, we were transported to dusty Central Australia, to icy Eastern Siberia, and to the lush rainforests of […]
