Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings
British Museum - Asia
The British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG
W: http://www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum/departments/asia.aspx
Asia Department BM: departmental report
The Department of Asia holds a wonderful collection of antiquities and ethnographic material from across Asia. Much of the ethnographic material was collected by anthropologists. We have for example the collections of Man (Nicobar) as well as those of Nick Tapp (Hmong), Thomas Gibson (Buid) and Monica Janowski (Kelabit) among many others.
The Department plays a key role in exploring Asian cultures for London, UK and the international visiting public through exhibitions, events, lectures, workshops, and more widely via an active loans programme and publishing, including on the web. The museum promotes understanding by tracing connections and making links between past and present, and cross-culturally. Thus, for example, the Japanese Mitsubishi Corporation Gallery display (refurbished in 2006) includes Ainu material from Hokkaido, as well as illustrating sometimes contentious themes in 20th century Japanese history and demonstrating that the country was less 'closed' than semi-porous under the Shogunate. Furthermore an ongoing research project, funded by the ESRC (2002-07), focuses on changes in tribal cultures in the NE Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, in collaboration with SOAS and Arunachal University. In October 2008 the department will mount an exhibition reporting on this project illustrating not only changes in material culture over the last sixty years among the Apatani and the Monpa, but also indicating the ways in which research is carried out in the field. Two volumes published by Brill and prepared by project members Stuart Blackburn and Michael Tarr will be launched at that time. There is also a very active China and Korean programme of events and exhibitions.
Asia Staff
Anouska Komlosy (BA, PhD). Carried out fieldwork with Tai speaking peoples in Yunnan Province China.
Areas of interest: politics of representation/aesthetics, tattoo, gender and Southeast Asian cosmology.
Brain Durrans (BSc, PhD). Though now retired is still very involved with the Museum and its collections and has a number of research projects ongoing, including one with ASEMUS. Areas of interest: Asian anthropology, Borneo, India; art, religion, epistemology, museology.