Description

This is an exhibition of some of the object in the "anthropology teaching collection", a gathering of ethnographic things brought to Edinburgh anthropologists working and studying at the University of Edinburgh from the 1950s to the late 1970s (or possibly 1980s). For a good few years this collection, including objects from West Africa, Papua New Guinea and South India, was in a neglected and abject state. Last year a group of students began work to better understand and care for this collection. Based on this work this exhibition brings some of these object back on public display. In so doing we will be, in part, inviting a conversation about the history of Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. More broadly, however, this exhibition will curate a critical space to reflect on the long history of anthropological collecting and it association with the work of colonialism but also decolonisation. In so doing, we consider how objects may speak not only of the ways and habits of source communities but the legacy of anthropological entanglements with the lives of others.