Modernists & Mentors: Indigenous colonial artistic exchanges study day

MEG event review: Researching donors of museum ethnography

Friday 27 September, Thinktank, Birmingham

Representatives from Birmingham Museums Trust, Reading Museum, the Museum of English Rural Life (Reading) and Brighton Museum & Art Gallery came together for a training event organised by the Museum Ethnographers Group (MEG). The event reflected MEG’s new emphasis on events which offer continual professional development opportunities to those working with ethnographic museum collections.

Our trainer was Dr Katherine Prior, a historian and historical consultant with particular expertise in using imperial archives. The emphasis of the day was on gaining skills and knowledge to support the research of donor histories and object biographies. Katherine started with a case study of a small group of Brighton Museum artefacts which, through web-based research, she was able to link to a critical moment in the establishment of an Anglican mission in Abeokuta, Nigeria, as well as – in the process - unsettling the established historical narrative of how a key Brighton Museum object was acquired.

Participants were introduced to a wide range of commonly available web resources as well as to simple techniques of improving Google search results. In the afternoon session we were able to put these to the test through researching donor names from our own institutions. All were impressed by the results and inspired to test out our new skills and knowledge back at our institutions:

‘My job will involve a lot of researching object biographies … it would have taken me a long time to find these techniques out by myself’

‘I’m better equipped [to undertake research] than I was this morning’

‘I work in a museum, and a library at the weekends, and a lot of the tricks we were shown today I had no idea about’

‘I’ve come away with lots of ideas for doing things back at work’

The case study presented at the event, as well as a list of useful web-based resources, will be made available through the MEG website. MEG is grateful to Thinktank and Birmingham Museums Trust for hosting the event.

Help identifying unknown language

Here at the National Maritime Museum we've received an enquiry about a dugout canoe, which has letters carved in to the sides. I'm not a language specialist and I can't identify what language this might be. My colleague Simon Stephens who specializes in ship design thinks that this is probably a South Asian canoe.

Can anyone help identify the language? Any insights gratefully received!

Heloise Finch-Boyer

Melanesia: Art and Encounter Book Launch

An invitation to

Melanesia: Art and encounter: Introducing a new book from the British Museum

Professor Marliyn Strathern will chair a panel of scholars (including Nicholas Thomas, Tony Crook, Paul Basu and Jago Cooper), followed by a reception with the editors.

6.00pm, Friday 11^th October, in the Stevenson Lecture Theatre of the British Museum.

The book will be on sale at 15% discount.

No booking required, but an advance note of attendance would be appreciated. Please email Polly Bence

Melanesia: Art and encounter is the combination of a five-year research project into the Melanesian collections of the British Museum.

Edited by Lissant Bolton, Nicholas Thomas, Elizabeth Bonshek, Julie Adams and Ben Burt, this significant publication draws upon the experience of cultural experts and artists from Melanesia and around the world.

A total of 57 chapters and 300 colour photos cover Papua New Guinea (north and south), West Papua, Solomon Island, Vanuatu and New Caledonia.

British Museum Press

ISBN 978 0 7141 2596 1

£75 hardback

orders: sales@britishmuseum.co.uk

Exhibition: James and Emma Hadfield, legacy of a Loyalty Islands mission, 1878-1920. Le Musée de Nouvelle Caledonie, 4 September 2013 – 4 February 2014.

This week the exhibition James et Emma Hadfield, héritage d'une mission, îles Loyauté, 1878-1920 opens in the Musée de Nouvelle Caledonie (MNC). A landmark exhibition it displays for the first time in their country of origin a proportion of the collections made by James and Emma Hadfield, British missionaries resident in the Loyalty Islands. The idea for an exhibition began with the generous donation of over one hundred artefacts to the MNC from the present descendants of the Hadfields. In 2008 the family brought together all objects remaining in private family hands and returned them to Noumea, the capital of New Caledonia and the site of the museum. Since their arrival and in anticipation of the exhibition the museum has worked in partnership with the Loyalty Islands regional council and invited weavers, elders and cultural workers from the Loyalty Islands to view, learn from and supplement the information recorded by the Hadfields at the time of the collection.

It was Emma Hadfield who became the driving force and main collector of artefacts during their residency in the region, recording local names and stories about the culture they encountered which were eventually brought together in her book Among the Natives of the Loyalty Group (1920). Her collecting was anthropological in style and scope, she entered into correspondence with the British Museum and collected at their specific request. The collection now residing in the Museum of New Caledonia was once on loan and exhibited by the National Museums of Scotland (NMS), in Edinburgh one of two collections of 105 object and 94 objects each lent to the museum in 1910. Although both collections were put on display the smaller was quickly purchased by NMS and the other remained on loan until the 1960s when it was returned to the family. The exhibition opened in Noumea on 4 September and brings together artefacts from the permanent collections of all three institutions for the first time.

The exhibition comprises four areas, the first introduces the Hadfields, their lives on the islands during the forty years that they spent there. The largest area displays the collections from the Loyalty Islands covering themes of Chiefs, their status and power; domestic life; social life, dance and music; and warfare. Highlight objects include jade necklaces meciwe; elegant baskets and mats; and a fine club decorated with flying fox fur and cowrie shell. Within this section is an audio area where visitors get a sense of the Hadfields’ lives and the stories that Emma collected whilst in the region. Visitors can listen in French, English, drehu and iaai the languages of the islands of Lifou and Ouvea where the Hadfields were resident.  The final area consists of large visuals showing Loyalty Island life today and the Hadfields legacy, topics covered range from leisure activities such as the women’s cricket leagues, the introduction of mission dresses which are worn in villages today; education and school life; and examines the life of ministers and their wives in the communities today.

A catalogue will be forthcoming to accompany the exhibition. This catalogue will also provide an overview of the many other institutions that house Hadfield material, including the Pitt Rivers Museum and Australian Museum in Sydney. Also opening next month in Paris at the Musée Quai Branly is the exhibition Kanak, L’Art est une parole featuring Kanak (New Caledonian) artefacts from across Europe and including over 60 items from the Musée de Nouvelle Caledonie. This exhibition curated by Emmanuel Kasarhérou former Director of the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in Noumea and Roger Boulay renowned expert in Kanak material culture is the culmination of three years intensive study documenting the 133 collections of Kanak material to be found in France and promises to be a comprehensive and informative exhibition.

by Chantal Knowles

Fragmentary Ancestors: Figurines from Koma Land, Ghana

Koma figurine. Image by Alan Seabright

Fragmentary Ancestors: Figurines from Koma Land, Ghana

Manchester Museum

Fri 25 Oct 2013 - Mon 5 May 2014

Free entry

This exhibition is the first ever officially approved showing of clay figurines made by a previously little understood people in Koma Land in Ghana in West Africa. The figurines, often fragmentary and depicting stylised humans, two-headed creatures, birds, and animals, are thought to perhaps represent ancestors. It is possible that some of the figurines had liquid offerings poured into channels that have been discovered in them, and that some might have been linked with healing and medicine. They were discovered during archaeological fieldwork directed by Dr Benjamin Kankpeyeng (University of Ghana) and involving colleagues such as Prof. Timothy Insoll (University of Manchester) working with the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board. The Koma figurines have been dated to between approximately 500 and 1300 AD.