Annals: Departmental reports and staff listings

British Museum, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas

The British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG
W: http://www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum/departments/africa,_oceania_and_americas.aspx

Africa, Oceania and the Americas: departmental report

The collection of the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas includes around 350,000 objects, representing the cultures of the indigenous peoples of four continents.  The Department provides a unique environment for relating its ongoing scholarly anthropology research – fieldwork, collections or archive based – with public education and teaching through display, lectures, courses and collaborations with a number of partner universities, and particularly the London colleges.

The scope of the collection is contemporary, archaeological and historical, including important early ethnographic collections. It includes most of Africa (outside Ancient Egypt, Sudan and the Mediterranean) the Pacific and Australia as well as the Americas. 

Within the department the Centre for Anthropology houses the Anthropology Library, which is one of the world's major specialist anthropological collections; its holdings were greatly enhanced by the gift of the Royal Anthropological Institute Library in 1976.  The library contains around 130,000 books and pamphlets and 4,000 journal titles (of which about 1,500 are current), in addition to microfiches, microfilms, maps, newsletters, sound recordings and congress reports. There is also an important collection of around 80,000 photographs and other pictorial material.  The journal collection is referenced by the Anthropological Index Online, a free online service supported by the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Current major research projects include:

“Melanesian art: objects, narratives and indigenous owners”, a five year AHRC-funded research project in partnership with Cambridge University, led by Dr Lissant Bolton and employing two post-doctoral researchers in the department.  The Melanesia Project explores the relationships between a wide range of indigenous art and artefact forms, socially-significant narratives, and the indigenous communities from which historic collections of Melanesian art derive. This project aims to bring new perspectives to both the study of indigenous art, and the understanding of ownership, heritage, and relations between museums and communities.

“Women’s Culture Project”: Dr Bolton has also worked in Vanuatu annually since 1989, collaborating with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre (VKS) in the development of programmes to document and revive women’s knowledge and practice, including annual training workshops for ni-Vanuatu women extension workers. This research relates in part to the analysis of transition and creation of contemporary indigenous knowledge.

“Landscape, Site and Symbol in the Andes: Inca ushnus” is a two-year AHRC-funded project led in the British Museum by Dr Colin McEwan, and in collaboration with Royal Holloway University of London and the National University of San Cristóbal of Huamanga. Dr McEwan’s other research projects include “Decoding Nasca Iconography” and “Archaeology and Community, Agua Blanca, Ecuador”.

The Getty Foundation awarded the department a two-year grant employing three researchers to catalogue, research and make publicly available the Pictorial Archive.

The British Museum’s Africa Programme was initiated in 2003 with a grant from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The Ford Foundation supports projects in West Africa with a grant of $1million. The Programme aims to develop mutually beneficial long-term relations with museums, heritage institutions and scholarship networks across the continent. The objective is to support, through joint activities, the development and sharing of capacities, skills and resources between British Museum and African partners. The Africa Programme currently has established relationships in Mozambique, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana and Nigeria and is working to extend these partnerships with activities in Sierra Leone and Mali.

Kirsten Halliday has joined the department as a PhD student with an AHRC collaborative award held jointly with the UCL Institute of Archaeology studying the collections of Chimu material from the North Coast of Peru.

Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas: Staff

Dr Julie Adams, Postdoctoral Fellow, Melanesia Project; New Caledonia, West Papua, New Zealand textiles.

Dr Claude Ardouin, Curator, west Africa collections: trade; textiles; metalwork.

Dr Hassan Arero, Curator, eastern African collections: nomadic and pastoralist cultures of eastern Africa; African and Caribbean Diaspora communities and identities in the UK.

Dr Lissant Bolton, Head of Oceania Section, Oceanic (Pacific and Australian) collections. Melanesia; gender and kastom in Vanuatu; the indigenous use of collections and cultural knowledge; textiles; radio.

Dr Liz Bonshek, Postdoctoral Fellow, Melanesia Project. Research on the Melanesia Collections, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, leadership, land and material culture.

Dr Ben Burt, Curator, Solomon Islands, indigenous histories, Christianity and missions, material culture – adornment.

Dr Max Carrocci, Centre for Anthropology Fellow: Native American ethnography; gender and sexuality; material culture; urban communities; identity; art and anthropology.

Julie Hudson, Africa Programme Coordinator, Curator of Northern African Collections: urban and rural textiles; pottery

Jonathan C H King, Keeper of the Department, works with the art and material culture of Native North America

Dr Colin McEwan, Head of Americas Section, Curator of Latin American Collections: inter-disciplinary approaches to pre-Columbian archaeology, art and architecture.

Dr Jenny Newell, Curator Polynesian collections: art; history, anthropology and ethnohistory of Polynesia; Tahiti; European colonialism in the Pacific.

Natasha Smith, Curator Oceania, Polynesia, Marquesas, material culture and contemporary art.

Christopher Spring, Curator Northeast, East and South African collections: contemporary African artists.

Dr Robert Storrie, Curator in the Americas Section: North American collections; lowland South America; hunting cosmologies; visual anthropology; classification; ethno-ecology