The semsemeya is an instrument that looks slightly like a cross between a harp and a guitar to the unfamiliar eye. The instrument originally comes from Upper Egypt, where it used to be much larger. In fact, the semsemeya ‘evolved’ from the tambura, which shares […]
All posts filed under: Africa
Money with soul: The kissi penny
If I say ’money’, I’ll wager that there is a pretty good chance that you’ll conjure up an image of coins and bank notes. But what exactly is money? What it basically boils down to, is some sort of artefact that we have all agreed […]
Anything can be made with imagination and enough raffia
All right, can we talk about how awesome this home-made laptop is?! Made from the raffia, and collected in Gabon in 1998, it is wonderfully wacky with all its knobs, buttons, and dials, and shows such a tremendous amount of imagination. We do not know […]
The adventures of Jørgen Bitsch – and a spiky ‘teat halter’
What is this? Some strange torture device? A really edgy necklace? Sometimes objects do not tell their story outright (at least not to those, who do not already have specialised knowledge). When I was combing through our database, looking for an interesting subject for today’s […]
Cheeky monkey: Coconut figure from Namibia
The curious little coconut monkey figure is a part of collection that Mogens Stryhn just handed over to Moesgaard Museum a few weeks ago. As such, it has entered the museum database as EA 909-127. The entire collection consists of 269 artefacts that Stryhn has […]
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 […]
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 […]
A Brass Box, or How I Lost Faith in Humanity
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 […]
Magic and Medicine: On the benefits of fungi, blood, and iron paste
Did you know that the famous 5.300-year-old ‘iceman’ Ötzi found in the Italian Alps in the 1990s carried around a fungus that worked as an antibiotic? And that it would have helped him alleviate the symptoms of the parasites scientists have found in his colon? […]
Capturing the Moment: The journey to the end of the world…
A very blue sky. Children having fun in sand dunes. Target practicing. Passing time. The photo was taken by a Danish explorer in the Kalahari Desert in the southern parts of Africa in 1947. Even now, the Kalahari Desert is in many ways on the […]
The importance of representation: Ghanaian doll
When I was a girl, I wasn’t much into dolls. I was the kind of kid who fell asleep with my box of books next to me in my bed (along with about a 75 stuffed animals). When I, at the age of two, had […]
Rock churches and colourful angels: Ethiopian icon
Did you know that Christianity flourished in Ethiopia many hundreds of years before it reached Scandinavia? Christianity became the state religion in Ethiopia in 330 AD, five hundred years before the first missionaries reached Denmark in the Viking Age. We, here in Northern Europe, pride […]
