English playwright Arthur Wing Pinero said that ‘where there’s tea there’s hope’. In many societies, drinking tea is a social event; sometimes even a ritual; something to gather around, something that organises the day, a tradition, a cultural practice. And around the globe, tea is […]
The tradition of hunting for eggs as a celebration of Easter is older than I thought. I had always assumed that hunting for eggs was another Anglo-American scheme to make more money on capitalising on holidays. The tradition goes back to 1700’s Netherlands, where children […]
When my son was 4 years old, he loved to dress in skirts. Reactions from the surroundings varied a lot: from the daycare assistant who laughed and said he was funny, to his great grandfather who exclaimed that skirts were for girls only. Not to […]
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 […]
The World Cup has come to an end – at long last to some and way too quickly for others. It has been a year of surprises – England making it to the semifinals for the first time in 28 years, Lionel Messi missing a […]
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 […]
Imagine playing a tune on this single stringed instrument! The Bedouins of Kuwait, Iraq and Egypt actually manage to compose quite complex musical performances from this simple instrument and its characteristic Middle Eastern sound, even though its tone range is limited to only a […]
ethnographica 