To the extent that the Indonesian island of Sumba is famous, it is for its horses. A quick google search will return dreamy images of the setting sun illuminating riders on the pristine beach, or the elegant sandalwood ponies, originally bred here on Sumba and […]
People on Sumba depend on the goodwill of the ancestors and in the Zaizo ritual, the requests of the living flow through the music and ultimately reach the ancestor spirits. As I wrote in the last post about gongs, Zaizo rituals related to the ancestors […]
The first, middle and last rule of thumb in ethnographic fieldwork is that you gotta spend time with your informants to get to know them. Sounds easy enough. Do a bit of “deep hanging out”, participate in stuff and go write about it. Well, in […]
In September, anthropologist Victor Krusell went to Sumba Island, Indonesia, to collect objects for our Ethnographic Collections at Moesgaard Museum. In the video below, you can follow his and the objects’ journey – and in the bottom, we have showcased two central objects, that now […]
Here at The Ethnographic Collections, we have the most wonderful collection of shoes. They were collected by Søren Ludvig Tuxen, zoologist, and a bit of a shoe fetishist. Since the beginning of this blog, we have featured a wide selection of his shoes, from the […]
The shadows on the wall are dancing in the dim light coming from several candles. Despite the questionable rigidness, it moves effortlessly across the stage. For a moment its facial expression seems to change, and the shadow seems alive. Though the audience knows that the […]
ethnographica 