Job: Programme Manager: African Histories and Heritage Collaborative Programmes, British Museum

Programme Manager: African Histories and Heritage Collaborative Programmes 

Fixed-Term (5 years)
£49,962 per annum
Application Deadline: 12pm on 27 April 2021

The British Museum is seeking an experienced Programme Manager to plan and deliver an exciting and complex externally-funded research and public engagement programme in collaboration with curatorial and research staff. The African Histories and Heritage Collaborative Programmes will involve working with partners nationally and internationally in the development and delivery of innovative, collaborative projects with a focus on diverse African histories and heritage, including pre-colonial African histories and global connections, and shared African-British history and heritage.

In this role you will lead on strategic budget and resource planning, and the reporting and management of the programme and its projects. This will involve the development and delivery of operational, financial, contractual and governance frameworks to ensure successful collaboration and the timely delivery of the programme. You will be responsible for coordination of the programme and activities with partners, managing dependencies and the different priorities of collaborative partners.

Full details on the British Museum website 

Job: Vacancy for Lead Curator: Reimagining the British Museum

 Lead Curator: Reimagining the British Museum Project

Collection Projects and Resources
Full-Time
Fixed-Term (24 Months, end date 21 June 2023)
£48,169 per annum
Application Deadline: 12pm on 19 March 2021

The British Museum is seeking an innovative and critical thinker to lead curatorial and research teams in the delivery of an exciting and complex new project to place global collaboration at the heart of the Museum’s new masterplan. The Reimagining the British Museum project will develop new curatorial approaches to interpreting the collection and developing the narratives that will underpin a comprehensive redisplay of the galleries.

In this role you will manage a dedicated curatorial team who will work with curators and other specialists across the organisation as well as individuals and groups around the world to develop curatorial briefs for new suites of permanent galleries. You will deliver pilot projects such as displays, and digital or other public programmes to test and evaluate different collaborative methods and narrative approaches, producing a clear plan and framework for how the Museum will collaborate globally in the development and delivery of its masterplan. Working beyond your own area of expertise or scholarly discipline, you will provide the right environment to stimulate new thinking and debate while balancing the need to meet challenging deadlines.

The start date for the project and this post is planned for late June 2021.

Further details on the British Museum website. 

Review of Tantra: enlightenment to revolution British Museum (24 Sept 2020 - 24 Jan 2021) By Kajal Meghani

 Tantra: enlightenment to revolution at the British Museum seeks to demystify Tantric philosophy. Curated by Dr Imma Ramos, the exhibition challenges the visitor to rethink any preconceived notions they have of Tantra, which is often misunderstood as a hedonistic sexual practice. Rather, as the exhibition explains, Tantra is a collection of instructional sacred texts that are written as a dialogue between gods and goddesses. The texts encourage devotees to transcend desire, aversion and fear by actively engaging with the erotic and macabre to view the material world as being animated by the power of divine feminine energy known as shakti.

The exhibition is arranged chronologically and explores the history of Tantra as waves of influence. Starting with its beginnings in sixth-century India, the exhibition’s examination of Tantra continues with its influence on India’s fight for independence from British colonial rule and ends with the impact of Tantric philosophy on 1960s counterculture and contemporary artists across the world. The exhibition features objects from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Tibet, Japan, the UK and the USA, demonstrating materially the far-reaching impact of Tantra.

The first sections of the exhibition opens with the earliest surviving Tantric manuscripts (now in the collection of Cambridge University Library) and temple sculptures representing the goddess or yogini from the museum’s collection. 

Fig 1: Sandstone sculpture of the goddess Chamunda. Photograph: Trustees of the British Museum.

The exhibition shows how Tantra’s profound influence on Hindu and Buddhist thought in medieval India inspired the rise of goddess worship in parts of South Asia. Goddesses associated with Tantra, such as Chamunda, a formidable form of Parvati, the Hindu goddess of fertility and love, were incorporated into the Hindu and Buddhist pantheons. In Buddhism, Tantric thought led to the rise of Vajrayana Buddhism, or the path of the thunderbolt, which spread across parts of Asia and gained a particular stronghold in Tibet.

This part of the exhibition explains the foundations of Tantric philosophy to the visitor and includes an evocative recreation of a 10th-century temple dedicated to yogini worship in Odisha (eastern India). Temples devoted to yogini were circular in design with an open roof to invite yoginis from the sky to enter the sacred space. The immersive recreation enables the visitor to understand how the sculptures on display would have been positioned in relation to one another and to experience the interplay of the building and the sky during worship. 

Fig 2: Recreation of a 10th-century temple dedicated to the worship of yoginis. Photograph: Trustees of the British Museum.

 

Stereotypical ideas of Tantra associated with yoga and sex are unpicked by the exhibition to show how these practices enabled a devotee to achieve enlightenment. Sculptures and paintings from India, Tibet and Nepal illustrate how practitioners could use their body and senses to awaken their own or their partner’s shakti. This section shows that Tantra not only influenced Buddhist and Hindu thought but also interested Islamic rulers, such as those of the Mughal empire based in northern India and independent Islamic sultanates largely based in Southern India. One of the most fascinating paintings in this section commissioned by a Mughal ruler, possibly Shah Jahan (1592 - 1666), is the depiction of the goddess Bhairavi painted in the 1630s by Mughal court artist Payag (active 1591 - 1658), which is from the Metropolitan Museum. Bhairavi, depicted with red skin, fangs and adorned with a garland and skirt made of human skulls, sits on a decapitated body in a cremation ground with a man, possibly the Hindu god Shiva or a yogi imitating him. The painting was commissioned as a gift by the Mughal ruler to the Hindu ruler of Mewar, Jagat Singh (1607 - 1652), who was a devotee to the goddess Bhairavi.

Fig 3: The Goddess Bhairavi Devi with Shiva. Photograph: The Metropolitan Museum

A section of the exhibition focusing on the use of human remains in Tantric Buddhist practice as a reminder of the impermanence of the body, was developed in consultation and collaboration with members of the Tibetan community in London and scholars of Tibetan Buddhism. Listening to their personal experiences and perspectives on the use of human remains in Tibetan Buddhist practice whilst looking at the display of objects made of human bones provides a unique insight into the display that a museum label may be unable to do. 

Fig 4: Display exploring the influence of Tantra on Tibetan Buddhism. Photograph: DHA Designs

 

This and the following section of the exhibition, which focus on the role of Tantra during British colonial rule, challenges the language and misconceptions that stemmed from colonial scholarship. During the colonial period, many British officials and missionaries misunderstood Tantra as black magic due to the use of human remains and the depictions of fierce goddesses such as Kali, a Tantric goddess particularly venerated in Bengal that inspired revolutionaries challenging British rule in India.

The final section of the exhibition examines the influence of Tantra on artists based in Asia, the UK and the USA and continues to influence practitioners today. Following the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, South Asian artists inspired by Tantric philosophy came to be known as the Neo-Tantra movement and the final section of the exhibition displays paintings by Biren De (1926 - 2011), Ghulam Rasool Santosh (1929 - 2007) and Prafulla Mohanti (b. 1936). Tantra’s influence on the UK and USA, is contextualized by the politics and counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, and also touches on the first exhibition of art inspired by Tantra, which took place in 1971 at the Hayward Gallery.

Fig 5: The final section of the exhibition displaying the influence of Tantra on the Neo-Tantra movement. Photography: DHA Designs.

Tantra: enlightenment to revolution is an important exhibition with rich content and interpretation that allows the visitor to develop a nuanced understanding of Tantric philosophy and to see how it influenced religious and cultural beliefs across the world. The exhibition dispels misunderstandings of Tantra being related exclusively to sex and so-called black magic, and contextualizes these ideas within the wider framework of Tantric philosophy whilst also tracing the origins of these misconceptions. This is further explored through a selection of collecting histories of some of the objects in the exhibition found on the museum’s website. The interpretation in the exhibition is clear and the sections that highlight and incorporate community and practitioner voices enable the visitor to gain a multifaceted understanding of Tantra.

Given the current COVID-related restrictions, the exhibition and the British Museum is closed until further notice. Until the exhibition can be visited in person, the Museum’s website features a guided tour of Tantra: enlightenment to revolution, given by its curator, Dr Imma Ramos and features additional content on the Museum’s blog.

Kajal Meghani is a collaborative doctoral award student with the University of Brighton and the British Museum, funded by AHRC

PhD opportunity: Women collectors of South Asia: gender, material culture, and empire

The University of Lincoln and the British Museum are pleased to announce the availability of a fully-funded Collaborative doctoral studentship from October 2020 under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Scheme. We encourage applications from suitable candidates with relevant experience, as well as coming from an academic background. This studentship can be studied full or part-time.

This project explores the critical role that women played in collecting objects from South Asia during the colonial and post-colonial eras, highlighting the agency of women of all backgrounds in the formation of museum collections and knowledge production.

This project will be jointly supervised by Dr Sarah Longair and Dr Sushma Jansari and the student will be expected to spend time at both the University of Lincoln and the British Museum, as well as becoming part of the wider cohort of CDP funded students across the UK.

Project Overview

This project will investigate the lives, collections, activities, writings, and networks of women collectors and donors of material culture from South Asia to the British Museum and other collections in the UK. It will explore how and why women collected objects and what motivated them, how they acquired knowledge about their collections and the dynamics of their donation of objects to museums.

With a focus on objects from South Asia, this project will be set in a colonial and/or post-colonial context, during which South Asian, British, and later British South Asian women negotiated the challenges of living under the British Empire and its aftermath. It will make an important and original contribution to our understanding of the British Museum as well as other institutions, demonstrating how gender, race, and empire influenced the forging of collections. It will examine how far collecting and engagement with material culture was a means for women to establish their own network, and how these factors aligned with or challenged racial and social divides in imperial and post-imperial settings.

Using the British Museum as a starting point, it will trace the lives of selected women and their collections and donations to the British Museum and other UK museums. Objects themselves will be studied as well as associated archival material. Personal papers and publications will shed further light on the way in which women collected and donated, the networks within which they acted, intermediaries who assisted them, and how this knowledge was disseminated. The research will require the student to spend time researching at the British Museum, along with other museums and archives.

 Further details and information about how to apply can be found on the University of Lincoln website.  

Deadline: 9 June

Interviews are likely to take place on Friday 26 June at the British Museum if permitted by then, otherwise online.

British Museum Vacancy for Project Curator: West Africa Bronze Casting Traditions Project

Role Summary

Project Curator: West African Bronze Casting Traditions Project
Africa, Oceania and the Americas
Full time
Fixed term (23 months in duration)
£29,607 per annum
Application deadline: 12 Noon on Wednesday 3 July 2019

The British Museum is seeking to appoint a Project Curator to work on the West African Bronze Casting Traditions project. This Project Curator role will undertake essential collection documentation and research on the Museum’s collection of West African bronzes.  This project and the position will involve wider research of the breadth of West African bronze casting traditions and laying the foundations for a major new research project.

Key areas of responsibility:

• To upgrade the documentation of the Museum’s holdings of West African bronzes, with a focus on Nigeria
• To research the broader context of the collection, including collection histories, related objects in the collection, and the histories of bronze casting traditions in West Africa as revealed by the collection
• To make the collection, and knowledge about it, publicly accessible via publication, digital media, exhibition display, and broadcast media
• To liaise with project partners in West Africa and in the UK, along with other international partners
• To co-ordinate scientific research on the collections, including liaising with colleagues within the Museum.

Full details and how to apply on the British Museum Website.

PhD Opportunity: Reframing Oceania: towards new narratives of the colonial Pacific in the British Museum

A Collaborative Doctoral Partnership studentship between the British Museum and UCL, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Start date: 1st October 2019


Application Deadline: 12 April
Interviews will take place on 24 April

Supervisors
Dr Gaye Sculthorpe (British Museum)

Prof. Margot Finn (UCL)

Project Overview

This PhD project will interrogate archives, objects and images in the British Museum pertaining to Oceania to identify what new stories emerge and consider how these histories of the colonial Pacific could be constructed and publicly presented. Attentive to individual histories and Indigenous agency, the project will promote new perspectives on the distinctive histories of Pacific Islanders and their relationship with other parts of the world, particularly Britain. The emphasis will be on the period c.1820-1920.

This project aims to go beyond research focused only on specific places, object types, or specific collectors to consider how the ensemble of resources about these collections can be interrogated to generate new narratives. It will address inter-relationships and broad themes relevant across the Pacific, and can draw on examples from any place, group of people, or object. There will be room for the student to shape the research within this broad context.

As well as opportunities for working with the collections in London, there will be networking opportunities to work with colleagues and communities in Oceania as well as at the British Museum.

Full details and information about how to appy can be found on the UCL website.

PhD opportunity: Leather trousers and Leopard skin waistcoats: Missing objects and endangered material knowledge in the Kalahari

A Collaborative Doctoral Partnership studentship between the British Museum and the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Start date: 1st October 2019

Stoffel Speelman by William Burchell

Application Deadline: Friday 3rd May 2019 at 23h59min
Interviews will take place on Monday 20th May 2019 at UEA in Norwich

Supervisors
Dr Chris Wingfield (Sainsbury Research Unit)

Prof. Ceri Ashley (British Museum)

Project Overview 
In a letter to his brother dated 12 April 1823, the early missionary to South Africa, Robert Moffat (1951, 72), wrote:

As to clothing, I shall first mention what can be procured here. I often wear a Bichuana cap made of fox [jackal] skins. Trousers of a prepared antelope skin… Last winter I had a waistcoat and jacket made of tiger [leopard] skin for the cold weather.

The British Museum holds a number of artefacts sent to London by Moffat, acquired from the London Missionary Society museum (Wingfield 2018), but, sadly, no leather trousers or leopard skin waistcoats. In attempting to tell alternative stories that challenge museum visitors’ perceptions about the past, it can become necessary to consider objects that did not find their way into museum collections, and to explore ways in which they may nevertheless be implicated in these collections.

The primary focus of this project are the relevant historic collections at the British Museum: a number of more traditional leather items, as well as needles and needle cases (some made from leather), and knives (some with sheaths made from leather). Worn suspended from the neck by leather straps, these speak to the significance of leather processing in the daily lives of many nineteenth century Kalahari residents.

This PhD will involve working with relevant collections alongside historic accounts to develop a detailed understanding of nineteenth century leather and skin processing in the Kalahari. It is anticipated that it will also involve a period of fieldwork, working with partners in Botswana, to document contemporary methods used by craftspeople in the region today.

Fulll details of the project and information about how to apply are available on the UEA website.

British Museum: Exploring narratives and community engagement in African museums.

Last Saturday the British Museum hosted an afternoon of events relating to the development of African museums. Sam Nixon, head of the Africa section, explained the events were part of a wider series of closed workshops and discussions that had been happening at the BM over the previous two days. He placed the events in the context of … The events included Hartwig Fischer in conversation with David Adjaye and a panel discussion on  Exploring narratives and community engagement in African museums.   

The Panel discussion was particularly interesting with three excellent speakers all addressing the theme in their own way.  Professor Kodzo Gavua (Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, University of Ghana) described how he felt that Ghanaian museums had become dysfunctional.  He argued that this was because a western concept of museums had been imposed, one that reflected the interests and aims of the political elite.  As a result of this they had failed to effectively connect the past to the present and many people did not feel that the museums were relevant to their lives.  He called for a new paradigm that counteracts the persistent ‘dark continent’ stereotypes and goes beyond the national and ethnic narratives that museums currently represent to connect the past to the present more meaningfully.

Seun Oduwole (Principal Architect: SISA, Lagos) spoke about the development of the JK Randle Centre forYoruba Culture and History, Nigeria which is due to open later this year.  He explained the history of the site and the role of Dr J.K. Randle (1855-1928) in building a swimming pool for the people of Lagos Island which later fell into disrepair.  The new project involves creating some shared green space, renovating the pool and visiting the cultural centre.  It is due to open later this year. The cultural centre will include four sections – Creation, Custom and Practice, Modern Yoruba and Future Yoruba.  A series of presentations across Lagos haves seen a very positive response to the project.  Seun Oduwole was at pains to emphasise the project was for the local community in Lagos but the glossy promotional video emphasised the centre’s role in attracting tourists.  It will be interesting to see how competing demands are balanced, a problem that I’m sure will be familiar to many working in museums in the UK.

Professor Paul Basu (SOAS) talked about how new museum projects in West Africa were providing an opportunity to rethink answers to the question ‘what is a museum?.’  He argued that museums should be thought of as collections of relationships between people that are mediated through objects and stories.  This focus on relationships is at the heart of his current research project ‘[Re]-entanglements  Re-engaging with ColonialArchives in Postcolonial Times’.  He spoke about the potential that digitising objects and archives had to ‘liberate’ collections and reconnect them to places and people they had come from. He spoke movingly about being able to take photographs and sound recordings back to the places they had been collected and share them with the descendants of those recorded. 

It was an interesting and enjoyable session with much food for thought.  However, it was a shame that there was no opportunity for questions from, or discussion with, the audience.  Questions of repatriation, sohotly debated at the moment, were notable by their absence although apparently were being raised behind closed doors. 

British Museum Special Events focusing on African Museums.

The Africa section of the British Museum AOA department has organised two events for the afternoon of Saturday the 2nd of February that will be unmissable to anyone interested in the contemporary museum-scape in Africa.  Both events are free but booking is essential

First up at 13.30 in the Sackler Rooms is ‘Exploring narratives and community engagement in African museums’.

At this discussion, speakers from Ghana, Nigeria and the UK will present their experiences of developing museum, research and heritage projects in West Africa, including the challenges and opportunities presented by such projects. In particular, the event will explore how local narratives and community engagement can help to inform interpretations and introduce new perspectives.

To book please visit the BritishMuseum website.

Following on at 15.00 in the Stevenson Lecture Theatre is ‘The future of museum architecture in Africa: Sir David Adjaye & Hartwig Fischer in conversation’ 

 

At this special event, British Museum Director Hartwig Fischer joins Sir David Adjaye to discuss the future of museum construction in Africa, as well as the Museum’s own engagements with a series of ambitious new West African museum projects.

Again, this event is free but you need to book through the museum website.

Endangered Material Knowledge Programme.

The British Museum Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas recently launched a new grant programme to fund documentation of critically endangered material knowledge systems across the globe, with a focus on non-western contexts. The Endangered Material Knowledge Programme (EMKP) is a major programme to help preserve the knowledge of endangered material practices for future generations. Societies around the globe are changing at an unprecedented rate, and specialist, locally-informed knowledge is in danger of being lost - knowledge that has helped communities thrive in unique environmental, social and cultural contexts. The programme will document what we might term the ‘made world’ and how people use, build, make and repair the natural resources around them to create their distinctive societies, homes and spaces. The scope of this work will be potentially huge – material practices can range from special events, to the production and use of everyday household items like cooking implements, agricultural tools or clothes, as well the houses and buildings that people occupy.

 Funded by Arcadia – a charitable trust of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, grants will be available for digital recording of material practices, which will then be made publically available through an open access repository hosted by the Museum.

Small grants (c£15,000) and large grants (c £70,000) are available, and details of the programme and links to the application forms can be found on the British Museum website.

Trading Images: Photography in the Niger Delta

Today we have another guestblog, this time Helen Anderson, Project Curator at the British Museum discusses what the museums photography collection reveals and also what it conceals.  If you wish to have a project, collection or object you are working on profiled on the MEG blog then please email web@museumethnographersgroup.org.uk  

Helen writes:

As a project curator in the Africa department at the British Museum, I have the pleasure of working on varied and interesting assignments. Over the past six months or so my focus has been identifying and cataloguing photographs attributed to the Nigerian photographer Jonathan Adagogo Green, dating to the late 19^th/early 20^th century of the Niger Delta.  Green ran his own studio in Bonny in the Niger Delta in 1891 until his early death in 1905 at 32 years old, and whose photographs became highly collectible by Europeans and Nigerians alike.

 

Jonathan Adagogo Green - At the Akquete (Akwete) Market  buying palm oil in calabashes.  (Af,A46.65 British Museum)

This photograph (one of Green’s) shows a European trader purchasing palm oil in a market in the Niger Delta, taken during the last decade of the 19^th century and part of an album owned by a British palm oil trader.  The major production of palm oil lay in the interior of the Niger Delta, and oil was traded along the rivers to the ports on the coast where traders were based. The relationship between European traders in the ports and the Urhobo (or Sobo) peoples of the hinterland who produced the palm oil was mediated by local middlemen of the Delta region, the Itsekiri, some of whom became very wealthy. 

It is not always easy to understand the relationships between traders and local peoples in the Delta from the albums alone, but in the course of my research it has been possible to discover the identities and background of the owners of these albums, with surprising results. Palm oil traders could often live and work in the Niger Delta for many years, and their ongoing relationships with the Itsekiri went well beyond the economic. The stories uncovered so far show that some traders formed intimate relationships with local Itsekiri women, having children with them and, in some cases, engaging in complex sets of social and cultural relationships with local chiefs, even marrying their daughters.

Photographs can reveal a huge amount of information concerning the types of images people were collecting, the names of commercial photographers and how the same images can recur in different albums over periods of time. They demonstrate details of life for local peoples, European traders and colonial administrators. What they conceal are the specificities, the minutiae of how a palm oil trader from Liverpool marries an Itsekiri princess; what did it mean to be a child of mixed race parents in early 20^th century Nigeria; to what extent did photograph albums act as a proxy for diaries, many traders never wrote down their experiences.  Our photographic collections are a valuable resource to think about the multifaceted histories and narratives at play in the Niger Delta during this complex period in history, using the camera lens as a prism through which to view these dynamic relationships.