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 […]
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 […]
ethnographica 