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| Mat
weaving on the island of Manono, Western Samoa; © British Museum |
Today on the blog we have more information about the interesting and important Endangered
Material Knowledge Programme. Thanks to Nik Petek-Sargeant for writing it for us.
In 2018 the British Museum launched a major grant programme
that supports ethnographic research into knowledge associated with objects and
the built environment. Named the
Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP), it is the first
programme of its kind. EMKP is focused on providing grants for projects to
record, using video, audio, 3D and other media, the material knowledge,
practices and crafts that are in danger of disappearing. Traditional material
practices and skills are disappearing due to mass produced goods and whole
industries overwhelming local economies and practices. Access to raw materials
and different landscapes and the disappearance of habitats and species are also
hurdles to the transfer of knowledge and tradition to the next generation. To
help preserve the knowledge, EMKP provides monetary support to projects and
their documentation will be made accessible through an open-access digital
repository. With a focus anchored in the ‘made world’ and the intent of
recording ‘knowledge’, EMKP strives to go beyond documenting how an object is
produced and mended, but endeavours to capture the social context around
objects and how/when they are used, as well as how objects embody knowledge,
social relations and are part of the landscape as well as how knowledge about
the objects is transmitted.
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Kuikuro man checking a fish trap, Brazil; © Carlos Fausto
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EMKP’s broad aims also raise questions that need to be
addressed in order to further ethnographic documentation methods. Some of these
include:
· -
How do we best capture knowledge using digital
recording methods?
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How do we preserve culturally-specific
knowledge?
· - How do we approach different knowledge systems
and modes of understanding?
· - What type of metadata and repository structure
is most suitable for such a diversity of data?
An excellent example of a knowledge system under threat and
highlighting the importance of EMKP is the
somshell money project based in Vanuatu. It records a practice that was thought to have died out. In
the Banks Islands in northern Vanuatu in Melanesia, people have developed an
extremely complex value and exchange system around shell money, which was
traded for yams, pigs and other valuables. While
som continues to be used as part of ceremonies, it was thought that
shell money stopped being produced some decades ago. However, a few
practitioners remain but it remains unclear if they have passed on their
knowledge. Thomas Dick and colleagues at Further Arts, Vanuatu, will with the
support of EMKP, be able to carry out detailed t research into
som material knowledge and how shell
money enters the complex exchange system from its beginning as a raw resource.
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| Gold
casting using the lost wax technique; © Kodzo Gavua |
Many of the funded projects also draw on museum collections
from around the world. The collections help researchers explore the diversity
of the now endangered objects and practices. Photos of museum objects and from
pictorial collections are also used as points of discussion with communities and
in many cases allow family and oral histories to be connected to global
collections. The documentation work also helps museums to complement and
re-engage with their records and to bring collections to life by showing how
objects are made, used, and form part of the community today.
Together with the
Endangered Languages DocumentationProgramme ,
EMKP will also open a joint call for applications for projects that intend to combine
language and material knowledge documentation. The joint call offers an
exciting opportunity for trans-disciplinary work that integrates the
documentation of endangered material knowledge and its expression in the
endangered language of its speakers.
EMKP is funded by Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet
Rausing and Peter Baldwin and is based at the Department of Africa, Oceania and
the Americas at the British Museum.
