Today is the day! Guests from near and far will, in a few hours, show up at Moesgaard Museum to attend the official opening of the new special exhibition ‘On the steppes of Genghis Khan – Mongolia’s nomads’ – tomorrow it is the turn of […]
Baby nomads: Mongolian child saddle
How do you transport your baby, when you are always on the move, and your mode of transport of a horse or a reindeer? Next week, the new big special exhibition ‘On the steppes of Genghis Khan – Mongolia’s nomads’ opens at Moesgaard Museum. The […]
Free the feet! Swiss wooden sandals
A major Danish newspaper recently released a dress code, warning their employees not to get overly casual in order to survive the unusually warm May, we’ve had. No shorts or tank tops, no dresses above the knee. To us, sun-unaccustomed Danes, who complain when it […]
A suggestion for the sunny days: New Guinean fashion
After the coldest spring in ages, Denmark is now experiencing its warmest May since the Danish Meteorological Institute began recording temperatures back in the 1800s. I do not think I am the only one who is slightly confused. And sweaty… So today, I have dived […]
Pain and expression: Solomon Island tattoo kit
I find tattoos immensely fascinating. From the earliest definitive example of tattoos (Ötzi the 5.000 year old Iceman), to Julius Cesar’s accounts of the painted Gauls, and Ahmad ibn Fadlan’s descriptions of the Scandinavian Rus and their intricately decorated bodies. All right, these last two […]
“What’s you got in there?” An unusual backpack
One might think that it is its look that makes this backpack unusual. And I suppose it is true; the shredded, almost hair-like fibres decorating the backpack makes it look like less of a container for your things, and more like the back of some […]
Artefact lottery: Pointy hat from Kazakhstan
So, today I figured, to Hell with long-winded and well thought through blog posts! Instead, I decided to do a little ‘artefact lottery’: I would close my eyes, scroll through our database, click on something random, and that was to be the subject of my […]
Elections and independence: Greenlandic figurine
Last week, there was an election in Greenland. Though Greenland is an autonomous constituent country within Denmark, there was much talk up to the election about the stirring movement for Greenlandic independence, and about whether the political parties Nunatta Qitornai and Partii Naleraq, agitating for […]
Prairie Indian moccasins: A shoe mystery…?
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 […]
Woven fabric: Does this REALLY qualify as an ethnographic artefact?
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 […]
Whose heritage? Nepalese torana
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 […]
Faith on the roads: Religious stickers from Gabon
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 […]
