Do you know that strange realisation you have, when you see old pictures of your grandparents, or even great grandparents? And you realise that they too were young once; that they had this whole life that you know very little about? And that their world […]
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? […]
Secrets of a metal heart
Someone, living in Kabul in the 1940s owned this little heart shaped box. I wonder what they kept in it. What secrets did the little metal heart keep safe? Maybe it belonged to a young woman, who kept her earrings and trinkets safe beneath its […]
A little extra luck for 2018—we need it!
I think most of us will agree that 2017 has been a bit of a crazy year. It has been the year of Trump and his Twitter wars on everything from North Korea to Meryl Streep to his own White House staff. There has been […]
A moment of tranquillity: Danish ice skates
Do you know how it seems that winters were always colder ‘back in the days’? How in the childhoods of parents and grandparents, winters seemed to be magical times, covered in show. Times, when you could walk on the frozen ocean near the coastline, where […]
Strange decorations
What is this human need to decorate? Why can we not settle for the plain and practical? As soon as the early humans stuck their fingers in ash or ochre for the first time, and found out that it could be used to draw squiggly […]
There’s no such thing as bad weather: Evenki boots
This week, the first snow of the season graced our fair city. Hundreds of Aarhusian citizens were standing by the harbour on Saturday night, celebrating the end of Aarhus as the European Capital of Culture 2017. As the music boomed out over the crowds and […]
Arctic Monsters: A visit from a Greenlandic tupilaq
When I was a child, I was absolutely fascinated by tupilaqs. These grotesque Greenlandic figurines with gaping mouths and twisted limbs seemed alive to me, and stirred my imagination to conjure up images of strange spirits tormenting the arctic landscape and its inhabitants. These figurines […]
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 […]
Capturing the moment: Into the unknown
This is one of my absolute favorites in the ethnographic photographic collections at Moesgaard Museum! Two men wandering in mountains. The scene has epic qualities. The two characters, the mountains half covered in mist. And the dog. Where did the dog come from? The two […]
Capturing the moment: An intimate scene in an al-Na’im Bedouin camp
Although ethnographic artefacts form the backbone of ethnographic collections, there is much more material qualifying as ‘ethnographic material’. Ethnographic photos are often used in exhibitions as a sort of supplement to what is considered the really significant material: the artefacts. In this and the following […]
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 […]
