Colourised versions of Northcote Thomas’s original monochrome photographs. Left: Nwamboyi (Nwamgboye) (NWT 2972); Right: Eze Nri Obalike (NWT 2227). Both photographed in Agukwu Nri in 1911. Coloured by Chiadikōbi Nwaubani, 2018.
Although there were many early experiments with colour photography from the 1850s, it was not until the mid-1930s, with the introduction of Kodachrome film, that it became widely used. All of Northcote Thomas’s photographs made during his anthropological surveys of Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915 were monochrome. Since the beginning of photography, however, various techniques have been used to hand-colour monochrome prints. Hand-colouring photographic prints using a fine brush with different kinds of dyes, watercolours and oils was a highly-skilled task. Demand for hand-coloured photographs reached its peak in the early twentieth century.
To date, we have come across only one historical example of a photograph taken by Thomas that has been hand-coloured. This was published in the serialised pictorial encyclopaedia, Peoples of All Nations, around 1920. In the section entitled ‘British Empire in Africa’ Thomas contributed around 23 photographs, many of which have been touched-up for publication, among these is the colour plate disparagingly entitled ‘Gewgaws of Primitive Society’. The photograph shows two young girls, which Thomas elsewhere describes as ‘onye ebuci’, adorned with bracelets of hippo ivory, anklets and garters of cowries, and necklaces and headdresses of long red beads. In addition to colouring the photograph, a vaguely ‘tropical’ background has been painted in place of Thomas’s calico photographic backdrop.
Comparison of Northcote Thomas’s original photograph of ‘onye ebuci’ girls (NWT 4135), photographed in Onicha Olona in 1912 and the hand-coloured version published in c.1920 in the popular encyclopaedia, Peoples of All Nations.
Today, with digital tools such as Adobe Photoshop, new possibilities for colourising historical monochrome photographs present themselves, though the process is no less skilled. Artist and Ukpuru blogger, Chiadikōbi Nwaubani has long been interested in historical visual representations of Nigeria and has been digitally colourising some of the Northcote Thomas photographic archive.
Colourised versions of Northcote Thomas’s original monochrome photographs. Left: ‘Nwaeyeye girl’ (NWT 1853); Right: Nwaifu (NWT 1846a). Both photographed in Awka in 1910. Coloured by Chiadikōbi Nwaubani, 2018.
Chiadikōbi explains:
I’ve started colouring some of the photographs from the Northcote collection and I’m focusing mainly on the photos of his tours of the Igbo area. Since the colouring is partly based on guess work, some knowledge about the culture helps in deciding what is coloured what, such as the indigo cloth in the picture of the Eze Nri. Resist-dyed indigo cloth like that is still popularly used and I could notice the depth of the grey and the patterns and guess that it was one of the indigo cloths.
I started colouring some of these pictures a few years ago from digital scans of the printed Anthropological Report volumes. I was looking at other areas of the past, and at the time I used the Northcote Thomas images to practice colouring photos. I think the impact of the original black and white photos was less than these coloured versions because of the quality, but there was another sense of familiarity that was added to the pictures after they were coloured, partly because the age and the surroundings had already made the images quite distant.
One of the reactions to Northcote’s pictures I’ve heard is that ‘they don’t look like Igbo people’ (by some Igbo people referring to the pictures he took of Igbo people), and I think this was partly because of the lack of reference for anything in the pictures that they can relate to today, which may also be related to the ambiguity that black and white gives some objects, in this case cultural ones. The colourisation adds another sense of life to the photos, which also includes the colouring of material culture.
Colourised version of Northcote Thomas’s original monochrome photograph. Mooku(?) (NWT 3649a), photographed in Mgbakwu in 1911. Coloured by Chiadikōbi Nwaubani, 2018.
Animated image showing stages in colourising Northcote Thomas’s photograph of ‘Nwaeyeye girl’ (NWT 1853) using Photoshop. Note the multiple layers needed to build up the skin tones. Chiadikōbi Nwaubani, 2018.
Flutes collected by Northcote Thomas during his anthropological surveys of Edo- and Igbo-speaking communities, Southern Nigeria, 1909-1913. (University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology).
During his anthropological surveys of Edo- and Igbo-speaking communities in Southern Nigeria between 1909 and 1913, N. W. Thomas collected and recorded a number of examples of local flutes. Thomas gives the Edo name for these as alele, elele or ulele (depending on dialect); he records the Igbo name as ọja. In the first volume of his Anthropological Report on the Ibo-speaking Peoples of Nigeria, Thomas notes that, next to the drum, the flute was probably the commonest musical instrument in the region; he also observes that there are ‘two or three kinds made of wood’, and another kind ‘made of calabash covered with the skin of a cow’ (1913: 136). Thomas distinguishes different styles of flute music, played in different contexts, for example during wrestling matches, during wall-making and while drinking palm wine (ibid.).
Left: ‘Man with flute’, Ijebba [Uzebba], June 1909 (NWT 640; RAI 400.15778); Right: man with three flutes strung around his neck, Agolo [Agulu], 1911 (NWT 2171; RAI 400.16124).In her article ‘Classification of Igbo Musical Instruments’ (1987), the ethnomusicologist, Joy Nwosu Lo-Bamijoko, provides the following account of the ọja:
Ọja is the most common of the wind instruments. It is made of wood, usually a light soft wood, and of bamboo. The wooden ọja is notched and end blown, while the bamboo ọja, also notched, is side blown. Of the two types of ọja only the wooden one has survived the changing times. The explanation of this survival can once again be found in its deep functionality in Igbo cultural and social life. The characteristic of ọja is the high-pitched sound which the different types produce. This is because this family of instruments is small in size. The biggest ọja discovered by this author is about 26cm long, and the smallest about 14cm long. The size of an ọja determines its pitch and the quality of sound determines the instrument’s function. The highest-pitched flutes, which are also the shortest, are known either as ọja-mmonwu (flutes used for masquerade music) or ọja-okolobia (flutes used for ceremonies of men who have attained manhood). The sound of both flutes is bright and they are used more for chanting than for singing. The difference between the two styles is that chanting is an extended form of speaking, while singing is purely musical.
The lowest-pitched flutes are known as ọja-igede. Igede is a drum music used for burial ceremonies, and ọja-igede is used in pairs with the male ọja calling and the female ọja responding.
The next ọja, whose sound is half way between the highest-pitched and the lowest-pitched ones, is known as ọja-ukwe (the singing flute). This is used for women’s dances of all types.
Flutes collected by Northcote Thomas in Nigeria. Left: ‘Flute of camwood, Bini’, collected 1909-10 (NWT 55; MAA Z 12063); Right: ‘Flute (oja), Obu [Awgbu]’, collected 1911 (NWT 192; MAA Z 14046).Christian Uzoma Onyeji, Professor of Music at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, further elaborates on the significance of the ọja in Igbo culture (Onyeji 2006: 198):
As an instrument, it is fundamentally employed for performance-composition of melodies, as well as simulation of texts in music and dance performance situations. It provides lyrical melodies that contribute immensely to the overall timbre and aesthetics of Igbo music. In some musical performances oja effectively employed for non-verbal communication with ensemble members as well as the audience. This could be in the form of cues, musical signals or mere encouragement of dancers and players to a more creative performance. … In some instances, oja is employed as a master instrument that conducts and marshals or determines a musical event or performance form. This is found in some masquerade performances such as Ojionu. But, oja performs both musical and non-musical roles in Igbo land. Its use extends beyond the musical. It is employed in non-musical events and contexts as a talking instrument. As such it encodes significant messages within non-musical contexts. In such instances it conveys relevant messages to cognitive members or initiates in a a ceremony. It is, particularly, used for salutations and praise on these occasions.
Northcote Thomas made several recordings of flute playing using his wax cylinder phonograph, which illustrate a number of different styles. Beyond stating where and when they were recorded, Thomas unfortunately provided little further information about the different styles. Here are three examples:
‘Uzebba flute, June 10th, 1909’ (NWT 137; BL C51/2424) – this is likely to be a recording of the flute player in the photograph on the left above (NWT 640):
‘Flute record, taken at Awka, December 13th, 1910’ (NWT 409; BL C51/2636):
‘Record 441, taken at Awgulu, February 8th, 1911’ (NWT 441; BL C51/2683):
A number of videos of contemporary ọja players can be found online.
References
Lo-Bamijoko, J. N. (1987) ‘Classification of Igbo Musical Instruments’, African Music 6(4): 19-41.
Onyeji, C. U. (2006) ‘Oja (Igbo wooden flute): An Introduction to the Playing Technique and Performance’, in M. Mans (ed.) Centering on African Practice in Musical Arts Education (pp.195-208), Cape Town: African Minds.
Thomas, N. W. (1913) Anthropological Report on the Ibo-speaking Peoples of Nigeria, Part 1: Law and Custom of the Ibo of the Awka Neighbourhood, London: Harrison & Sons.
As part of the Museum Affordances / [Re:]Entanglements project we shall be creating an exhibition. Initially, this will be installed, from October to December 2020, at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS University of London, close to the British Museum. It will then transfer to the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 2021. We hope to bring together some of Northcote Thomas’s original collections, photographs and sound recordings alongside artworks and research material that we have assembled throughout the project. The exhibition is not, however, intended to be merely a display of ‘research findings’ – it is intended to be a continuation of the research itself. This builds on some of our own and others’ work on the exhibition as a kind of ‘laboratory’ or experimental space. We hope the exhibition will provide an inspiring and provocative forum in which visitors with different perspectives can come together to discuss and debate some of the issues that the project seeks to address.
Left: Exhibition Experiments book edited by Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu; Right: The Light Surgeons’ video installation at The Body Adorned exhibition, The Horniman Museum, 2012.
As part of the [Re:]Entanglements exhibition, we are collaborating with the multimedia creative studio The Light Surgeons to make a video installation we are conceptualizing under the title ‘Faces/Voices’. We recently filmed some initial interviews to begin the process of developing this installation. During the four anthropological surveys N. W. Thomas undertook in West Africa between 1909 and 1915, he made thousands of photographs. About half of these were so-called ‘physical type’ portraits – typically taking a full-face and profile portrait photograph of each of his sitters. Such photographs have been much discussed and heavily criticized in academic and postcolonial literature. We are interested, however, in how different people ‘read’ these photographs in different ways. Do they epitomize the ‘anthropological gaze’, turning people into objects to be collected, collated and compared? Can we somehow discern in people’s expressions their inner experience of colonialism? Or do they reveal an intimacy between the anthropologist and the communities that he was working with that points beyond the colonial critique?
In the Faces/Voices installation we experiment with how faces ‘captured’ in Northcote Thomas’s historical photographs enable contemporary participants to voice their thoughts, opinions and responses to the colonial/anthropological archive.By juxtaposing Thomas’s historical photographic portraits with the faces and voices of project participants and members of the public, we hope to explore the diversity of responses to these images, allowing the different perspectives to co-exist alongside each other.
Interviewing a project participant for the Faces/Voices video installation. In the finished work we will juxtapose the faces and voices of our participants with the faces of N. W. Thomas’s research participants from over 100 years ago. (Photograph by George Agbo.)Thomas’s photographic portraits are mute. The people he photographed lack ‘voice’ (although we are also experimenting with reuniting Thomas’s historical photographs with his sound recordings – perhaps giving back voice to these images). In the pilot video shoot, we began experimenting with how the photographs enable people today who have often very different connections with the areas in which Thomas worked to voice their own positions and responses to the anthropological archive.
We’ll be doing more filming in due course. Let us know if you would like to participate!
On 19-20 September 2018, the first of three workshops that we are organizing as part of the Museum Affordances project took place at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. The workshops seek to bridge the worlds of museum and archives scholarship and practice, and critically explore the concept of ‘affordance’ in relation to different spheres of museum and archive work. The first workshop focused on collections; subsequent workshops – to be held in Berlin and Leiden respectively – will focus on museum interventions and museum exhibitions. One of the objectives of the workshop series is to contextualize our work with the N. W. Thomas collections and archives in relation to other innovative museum and archive projects currently taking place.
One of the participants, Cécile Bründlmayer of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, kindly agreed to write a guest blog summarizing some of the presentations and discussions that took place.
I was recently fortunate to attend a two-day workshop with the title ‘Museum Affordances’ at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge. The venue served as an excellent background to kick off a series of three workshops over the span of three years which are loosely based around three broad dimensions of museum work, starting with the topic of collections and then continuing with the topics of interventions and exhibitions. The workshops are part of a research project funded by the UK’s Art and Humanities Research Council which is engaging with a multifaceted ethnographic archive assembled by the colonial anthropologist, Northcote W. Thomas, in Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915.
Within that context, the first workshop on collections served as a means to ask how the concept of affordances might help in order to address current questions concerning ethnographic museum practice. Applying the concept to specific case examples served as an interesting tool for experimental brainstorming which raised a lot of thought provoking questions.
Introduction: The affordance concept and its application to ethnographic museum practice
The workshop started with an introduction to the Museum Affordances project by Paul Basu (SOAS University of London, UK). He started by positioning the project within a broader context of questioning the continued relevance of ethnographic museums and their collections today, particularly confronting the colonial entanglements of these institutions and what these entanglements mean in a postcolonial or decolonizing world.
He presented the concept of ‘affordances‘ which was developed in the 1970s by the American psychologist James Gibson who described the term in the following way: ‘The affordance of anything is a specific combination of (its) properties in light of what it offers, provides, or furnishes for the animal that perceives it’ (Gibson 1977). So while properties are objective phenomena with an existence independent of values and meanings, they serve as affordances only in particular combinations and relative to particular actors. Based on this concept, the following questions where discussed throughout the workshop: What do museums afford? What do they make possible?
Panel 1: Changing contexts, changing perceptions
Chaired by Nicholas Thomas, Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Cambridge (UK)
Presentations from Chris Wingfield and Michae Aird in the ‘Changing contexts’ panel.
The first panel dealt with examples of how the changing of time and context affects the perception of particular affordances. Dan Gilfoyle from The National Archives (UK) opened the panel with a talk about the archive of the Colonial Office which was responsible for the overall administration of the British Empire. The Colonial Office gathered an enormous amount of documentation about the Empires’ administration, from correspondence letters to maps and photographs. From the 1870s on the Colonial Office appointed scientific specialists to work in and for the colonies: one of them was the anthropologist, N. W. Thomas. Despite some small achievements in language teaching for colonial officers, his work wasn’t considered a success during his time and the results of his project have remained hidden in the archives for over 100 years. The affordances that Thomas’ collections might offer are therefore latent and unused. While Thomas’ work didn’t afford much in the eyes of his past employers, what might it afford today?
Chris Wingfield, senior lecturer at the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania & the Americas (UK), then shifted the focus to the London Missionary Society, its history and questions of affordance and affordability. Based on the collecting history of the London Missionary Society, he reflected on the tension between affordances and affordability. If affordances are unlimited, he asked, how is it possible that only some of them are activated and others are not? How are the affordances of collections affected by institutional considerations, including judgments of value and cost? How do people negotiate affordability? As he showed with the example of the London Missionary Society, the perception of affordability of collecting or of an existing collection changes throughout time. The same collection can be considered useless in one context and useful in another.
Michael Aird from the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Queensland (Australia) then continued to reflect upon his exhibition ‘Transforming Tindale’, which was shown at the state library of Queensland in 2010. In that exhibition, he displayed a collection of photographs taken in 1938 by the prominent scientist Norman Tindale, an Australian anthropologist who documented about 5,000 Aboriginal people for the government. As part of the exhibition, Michael Aird reunited the photographs with their depicted subjects or their descendants. As most of the people that have been photographed by Tindale were on governmental reserves and had no chance to refuse to be photographed, Aird’s presentation prompted a long debate about the ethics of exhibiting photographs that where taken under forced conditions.
Panel 2: Engaging with collections, perceiving affordances
Chaired by Haidy Geismar, Department of Anthropology, University College London (UK)
Presentations from George Agbo, Philipp Schorch and Dean Sully in the ‘Engaging with collections’ panel.
George Agbo, a postdoctoral researcher on the Museum Affordances project based Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Cambridge (UK) opened the second panel by asking what digital photography affords when working with collections, taking his own work with the N. W. Thomas collection as an example. He pointed towards the ability of digital photography to get closer to the objects and to be able to reunite objects that were originally collected together but which have become separated in the museum stores. He also stressed the affordance of digital photography to put the collection online and circulate it. What happens when you do that? He provided examples of discussions from the project’s own Facebook Group, which has a growing number of Nigerian and Sierra Leonean members. Finally, he discussed different methods of photographing the objects and the specific qualities of a photographed object. How to capture the integrity of an object? What happens when you manipulate the background of the object? Is the environment not part of the object? And what are the things that photography cannot afford, such as the smell, sound or touch of an object?
Philipp Schorch from the Staatliche Ethnographische Sammlungen Sachsen (Germany) then continued with a presentation about an experiment he undertook together with his students and the German art historian/philosopher Bruno Haas. Based on the example of a Tatanua mask from Papua New Guinea, he started with the following questions: What can a mask tell us? How can we see the mask for what it is and not for what it supposes to represent through a typical anthropological or art historical lens? By referring to Bruno Haas’ recent work, ‘Die ikonischen Situationen’, he tried to come closer to the structures that show themselves in the singular piece, starting with the specific formal qualities of the object, and ignoring preconceived notions such as ritual or ethnic group, in order to approach the mask in all its individuality.
Finally, Dean Sully, from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London (UK) took us through the everyday life of a conservator and revealed the tools, techniques and thought processes that come together in contemporary museum conservation practice. He presented heritage conservation as a broader analysis of the past which affords an understanding of the world from the traces left behind by people. The analytical process of conservation reveals how museum objects may have been used in the past, how they transmitted agency to the present and how they impact the lives of people now and in the future. Through the enduring presence of heritage places and objects cultural practices can be rethought, reimagined and revitalised continuously.
Panel 3: Whose affordances? Connections and communities
Chaired by Enotie Ogbebor, Nosona Studios, Benin City (Nigeria)
Presentations from Rita Ouedraogo, Maria-Katharina Lang and Chris Morton in the ‘Whose affordances’ panel.
The second day of the workshop started with a panel focusing on questions of affordances related to collaborative work. Rita Ouedraogo from the Research Centre for Material Culture at the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (The Netherlands) started by presenting a project she conducted within the context of the 60-year celebration of Ghana’s independence. For the project she invited people who feel a connection to Ghana to look at the Ghanaian objects in the collections of the Tropenmuseum and choose objects that related to them. After several months of talks, meetings and depot visits, one person became intrigued by a Fanti canoe, which became the centre of a series of discussions. What does the canoe represent or make possible for the differently-positioned participants of the project? What does the object afford to whom? Do all such affordances co-exist harmoniously?
Maria-Katharina Lang from the Institut für Sozialanthropologie, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Austria) then continued to present her work with a collection from Mongolia, which was gathered by the Austrian natural scientist Hans Leder during the second half of the 19th century. Shortly after the objects arrived in Europe, Buddhism was forcefully eliminated in Mongolia, monasteries were closed or even destroyed. With her project, which was called called ‘Nomadic Artefacts‘, Maria-Katharina Lang tried to reassemble the dispersed collection, which got distributed among different museums. She then linked the objects with specific regions and people and conducted interviews with monks, herders and museum workers in Mongolia about the collection and its meanings. The results of the project were presented in an innovative exhibition and website.
Chris Morton from the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (UK), then continued with a presentation about a collection of physical anthropology photographs from Botswana, discussing its original context and his recent work with the community. The collection comprises photographs of the San people in Botswana taken by the anthropologist Joseph Weiner in the 1950s. Weiner was part of an expedition into the central Kalahari, where he led one of the physical anthropology sub-sections. The latter focused his work on taking blood and hair samples, measuring skin color, genitalia, muscle strength, weight measure and photographs, based on a systematized method to document physique. Despite the huge effort, the work was not successful and the methods fell into disrepute – an example of ‘false affordances’, in which the project failed to deliver what it promised. Chris Morton asked what the photographs might afford the communities in which they were taken today and presented some preliminary findings in which the photographs were perceived very differently. While the photographs represent an anthropological ‘dead end’, how might they be useful for the future? Who decides what the future of such a collection is?
Chaired by Wayne Modest, Research Centre for Material Culture at the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (The Netherlands)
Presentations from Michael Barrett, Annette Schmidt and Tal Adler in the ‘Difficult histories’ panel.
Michael Barrett, curator at the Varldkultur Museerna, Stockholm (Sweden) opened the panel with a presentation of a project he started in 2017, a long term public engagement in collaboration with people of African descent in Sweden whose purpose is to adopt new perspectives in order to make the museum more relevant for a broader and more engaged audience. In the course of a workshop series called ‘Encountering the collection’ he tried to ease out previously unacknowledged affordances of the collections together with the participants. His case study showed that ethnographic collections may afford some aspects of a utopian ‘Afropean’ museum, which includes highlighting and questioning cultural and social identities. The project also afforded uncovering entangled histories between Sweden and Ethiopia which allowed a reflection on the historical development of African identities in Europe/Sweden.
Annette Schmidt from the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen (The Netherlands) then shed light on the hidden affordances of so-called ‘tourist art’ from the Museum’s Lower Congo collection in order to unpack the local perspective on life in the region during the period 1850 to 1908, covering a time frame in which power relations between the local rulers and the European traders changed dramatically. Annette Schmidt emphasized the potential of tourist art as representatives of the local Congolese view of Europeans. Can it provide a new perspective on the history that for so long has been told from the perspective of the colonisers?
Sharon Macdonald and Tal Adler from the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (Germany) concluded the panel with a talk about the project ‘TRACES’ (Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts, From Intervention to Co-Production) which allowed artists, researchers and museum staff to engage on a long term basis with ethically problematic collections. Tal Adler presented his work on a collection of human skulls and photographs from the Natural History Museum in Vienna and showed clips of a film that resulted from his work.
Panel 5: Focus on sound
Chaired by Ikenna Onwuegbuna, Department of Music, University of Nigeria, Nsukka (Nigeria)
Ikenna Onwuegbuna chairing the ‘Focus on sound’ session, ,with Yvonne Mbanefo and Janet Topp Fargion.
Finally, the last panel focused on sound archives. Janet Topp Fargion from the British Library (UK) presented her work at the British Library Sound Archive and the challenges of making its large collection available (online and offline) to all kinds of communities. She emphasized the importance of recirculating the collections in order to keep languages and cultural traditions alive. She provided examples of the connections with communities being made through the sound elicitation work being done as part of the Museum Affordances project.
Yvonne Mbanefo from the Igbo Studies Initiative (UK), then gave a talk about the possibilities of historical sound recordings and what can be done with it. Alarmed by the language and culture decline in Nigeria, she started to record oral histories in her native language Igbo which triggered strong interest in many different groups. With the example of two audio files from the N. W. Thomas collection, she demonstrated the creative possibilities inherent in these recordings. She demonstrated how one of Thomas’s recordings of a traditional folktale could be transcribed, translated and re-recorded, forming the basis for a Igbo language training resource for children. From linguistic information to the creation of text-based T-Shirts in the Igbo language or inspiration for rap-songs and new choreographies, Yvonne Mbanefo argued that the possibilities to create something new out of old sound recordings are endless. The more museums involve the community the more ideas can be found.
Wayne Modest leading the discussion after the ‘Difficult histories’ panel, with Sharon Macdonald, Michael Barrett, Annette Schmidt and Tal Adler.
Discussions
Throughout the workshop, questions and discussions opened up a variety of different topics concerning the usability of the concept of affordances for museum practice. All presentations made clear that affordances change over time and that while the possibilities they enable are seemingly endless, they are still limited by certain restraints which are connected to certain institutional, academic or historical contexts as well as to ethical or political views. It became clear that museum affordances are made up of latent relations between things, people and intentions, which are interdependent, changeable and in constant mutual exchange and can be (re)activated within different contexts.
Haidy Geismar stressed the tension between the ecological definition of affordance by James Gibson which is about understanding the entangled nature of things and their environment and the idea of a pure and unmediated engagement with an object. How can we stick with the ecological complexity? And what does engaging with the object really mean?
An important topic circulated around questions of how to find ways to apply the concept of affordances within museum practices and what ethical and political questions emerge while doing that. When opening up a collection and making all affordances accessible, isn’t there also a danger of losing control over misuse and misapplication? How to deal with this tension of wanting to make the collection and its affordances accessible while having to consider ethical and political issues at the same time?
With reference to Michael Aird’s ‘Transforming Tindale’ exhibition, Sharon Macdonald asked about the limits of aesthetization, which prompted a long discussion about the aesthetization of potentially discriminating photographs. How far does one affordance play off against others? How do you decide if a photograph can be shown or not? Does the strength of the people looking into the camera transcend their status as victims, as Michael Aird suggested? Nicholas Thomas argued that it is not constructive to stick to a rigid methodology in order to judge if some photographs are appropriate and others are not. Deciding whether or not photographs are potentially hurtful is a social process and always depends on the specific objects or photographs and what people are doing with them or how they respond to them. The discussion then turned towards the question of the responsibility of the curator concerning the openness of contentious collections. Who should be allowed to use them and for what? And what role does the institutional context play? What is the difference in storing or exhibiting problematic collections in ethnographic museums, art galleries or natural history museums?
The presentations of collaborative projects then prompted discussion on how these projects serve to rethink the ethnographic archive and push beyond their original intentions. Can the ethnographic museum be reframed not as a problematic site, but as a more hopeful place for discussing identity in a novel way?
Finally, with regard to the last two presentations, Wayne Modest asked about the affordance of sound in relation to the visual. Does it afford something different? By pointing to the large amount of research that has been done on the nature of sound, Janet Topp Fargion stressed the immersive quality of sound which has the ability to trigger strong emotional reactions. When seeking to reveal the hidden affordances of museum collections, audio recordings have as much potential for collaborative projects as material objects or photographs do.
Cécile Bründlmayer studied Social and Cultural Anthropology and Fine Arts in Vienna and currently works as research associate and curator at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Prior to this she worked at the Weltmuseum Wien (former Museum of Ethnology, Vienna) during the process of re-establishing and reconceptualising the entire new permanent exhibition.
A video introducing some of the work we have been pursuing in the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology stores by George Emeka Agbo, the project’s postdoctoral research fellow.
Excerpt from N. W. Thomas’s typed-up notes describing Otuo’s ‘Ukpesoda’ wrestling festival, 12-13 July 1909.
The first phase of the [Re:]Entanglements project has been focusing on researching the archives and collections assembled during Northcote Thomas’s anthropological surveys in Southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone. After the surveys, the collections were dispersed and they are now scattered across many institutions, including the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Royal Anthropological Institute, the British Library Sound Archive, the UK National Archives, and National Museum, Lagos. One of the exciting aspects of this research is to reassemble the disassembled documents, photographs, sound recordings and artefacts relating to a particular event that N. W. Thomas documented.
Here, for example, we bring together photographs, sound recordings and an object that can be associated with an account of a wrestling festival that Thomas attended on 12-13 July 1909 in the North Edo town of Otuo (spelled Otua by Thomas). This written account was found in a bundle of typed up notes from his first tour, perhaps fragments of an early draft of his Anthropological Report on the Edo-speaking Peoples of Nigeria.
At Otua I witnessed a wrestling festival called Ukpesoda, said to have been ordered by Osa.
At 8.30 in the morning the road to the market but not the market itself was swept by boys who had not yet joined otu [an age-set]; then they plucked leaves from any tree on the road & headed by two boys carrying brooms marched through the town & back to the square.
Uninitiated children sweeping the road to the market before the start of the festival, Otuo. NWT 817b, RAI 400.17082.
In the afternoon a sacrifice was offered to the ground, euelekpa, by four of the king’s company, while the other chiefs looked on. The main share in the ceremony was borne by Eidevri (A) & Omorigie (B). A said: I salute the whole town; now is the time for our feast; B replied: the whole town thanks you.
A said: The king gets more fufu than others. The king replied: I thank you for seeing that it is all right. The fufu was provided by the king & three chiefs.
Distributing sacrificed fufu and meat to the king and chiefs on the first day of the festival, Otuo. NWT 816f, RAI 400.17075.
A & B then washed their hands & stood on either side of the stone of sacrifice. B brought water & put the dish on the ground; A washed his hands over the stone; B brought fufu & handed it to A & then put soup & four pieces of meat in the fufu dish. A put it on the ground close to the stone & they repeated this operation four times, once for each set of fufu. Then A & B stood aside, saying: We have finished, come & eat.
Then small boys lined up some ten yards away, rushed in, seized the fufu & took it away from the square to eat.
On their return A & B began to divide the fufu for the different companies. A cut the fufu horizontally, leaving some in the bottom of the calabash for the chief who provided it & putting the other slices on leaves on the ground. Then he took a knife & cut the fufu on the leaf & B gave to each company. The head took it & summoned the others. The people who are not yet in a company also get a portion, which is handed to the firstcomer after the order is given.
The meat was then cut up; the four chiefs got a piece each & A took the remainder home; it was divided on the following day.
The sacrifice over, the women began to dance & sing for joy; two performed to the song of the others; then all raised their hands & shouted.
Women singing on the first day of the festival, Otuo. NWT 816l, RAI 400.17080.
‘Otua women’s song, July 13th 1909’. NWT 169, BL C51/2449.
On the following morning three drummers appeared on the square at 7.30 AM with three kinds of drums called alukpe, ozi & adoka.
Drummers playing on the second day of the festival, Otuo. NWT 817a, RAI 400.17081.
Drumming recorded by N. W. Thomas in Otuo, July 1909. NWT 156, BL C51/2268.
As soon as the people collected the wrestling began. Men hopped round the circle as a challenge & the victor hopped around afterwards.
Wrestling scenes during the second day of the festival, Otuo. NWT 818c2, RAI 400.17084; NWT 818c3, RAI 400.17085; NWT 818c4, RAI 400.17086.
Anyone familiar with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart will recall the significance of wrestling in southern Nigerian society. We might imagine the scene in Otuo as being not unlike that evoked by Achebe:
The drummers took up their sticks again and the air shivered and grew tense like a tightened bow … The wrestlers were now almost still in each other’s grip. The muscles on their arms and their thighs and on their backs stood out and twitched. It looked like an equal match. The two judges were already moving forward to separate them when Ikezue, now desperate, went down quickly on one knee in an attempt to fling his man backwards over his head. It was a sad miscalculation. Quick as the lightning of Amadiora, Okafo raised his right leg and swung it over his rival’s head. The crowd burst into a thunderous roar. Okafo was swept off his feet by his supporters and carried home shoulder-high. They sang his praise and the young women clapped their hands.
Since the N. W. Thomas collections are in different physical locations, it is only through digital technology that we can bring them together in one space, reuniting sound, image and object. Bringing together these materials seems simple enough, but actually involves painstaking archival and collections-based research. Each institution has accessioned these materials using its own numbering system, and it has been necessary to reunite them using Thomas’s own original numbering systems, relying on the scratched numbers on the edges of photographic negatives, Thomas’s spoken ident at the beginning of sound tracks, and associating Thomas’s collection numbers with his object catalogues. This is further complicated by the fact that there is no straight-forward documentation of Thomas’s itineraries, recording what he did where, and what he collected, photographed and recorded.
‘Alukpe’ drum collected by N. W. Thomas in Otuo in 1909. If this is not the actual drum in the photographs of the wrestling festival, it is very similar. NWT 2048, MAA Z 13384.
Figure 1: Mask collected by Northcote Thomas in Ibillo, Nigeria, in 1910. University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, Z 26531.
Northcote Whitridge Thomas collected this helmet mask from Ibillo in 1910, towards the end of his first tour in Edo-speaking areas of Nigeria (Figure 1). Ibillo, one of the Okpameri groups in what is now Akoko-Edo Local Government Area of Edo State (then part of what was called Kukuruku), continues to use this type of mask in its age-grade festival called Ikpishionua, held approximately every 7 years. At the Ikpishionua festival the mask appears under the name of Ugolo, while during smaller annual festivals it appears as Uvbono.
Figure 2: The mask as photographed by Jean Borgatti in 1969.
I photographed this mask at University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 1969 (Figure 2) as part of a feasibility study for field research among the peoples of Edo North that I began in 1971 – though Ibillo did not figure in that early field research. When I returned to Nigeria in 2015, over forty years later, I did begin to do additional research in Akoko-Edo, and visited Ibillo at that time. When I showed my photograph to an elder and group of age-grade members, they cautioned me not to show it to women since it was in the ‘production’ stage: that is, without costume and without the line of feathers inserted into the sagittal crest, as can be seen in a video made by Emmanuel Concept Video Productions of the Ikpishionua festival in 2015 (Figure 3). I was able to obtain screenshots of various masquerades from this video and Professor P. D. Ogunnubi of Odo Quarter and age group representatives identified these for me, giving a brief explanation for each one. Subsequently, an art history student from the Department of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Benin and an Ibillo indigene, Wendy Emmanuel Adejumo, wrote his honors thesis on the masquerades (Adejumo 2017). This blog entry draws on our shared findings.
Figure 3: Ugolo masquerade at the Ikpishionua festival, Ibillo, in 2015. (Left: Ibillo People Facebook page; Left: Emmanuel Concept Video Productions)
The term ‘Okpameri’ dates from the mid-19th century and was the result of a number of neighboring villages solidifying their coalition against Nupe slave-raiding (Orifah n.d.). Okpameri has also come to mean ‘We are one’, though it was not a term used much before the middle of the 20th century. Okpameri includes 23 towns and villages: Aiyegunle (Osi), Anyaoza, Bekuma, Dangbala, Ekor, Ekpe, Ekpesa, Ibillo, Ikiran-Ile, Ikiran-Oke, Imoga, Makeke, Lampese, Ogugu, Ogbe, Ojah (Ozah), Ojirami-Afekunu, Ojirami-Dam, Ojirami-Kpetesshi, Somorika, Ugboshi-Afe, Ugboshi-Ele and Unumu (Orifa n.d.). Ibillo’s population as recorded in the 2006 census was 24,303 (Ojeifo & Esaigbe 2012). It consists of four kinship-based quarters. Listed in order of seniority, these are: Eku/Odo, Uwhosi/Illese, Ekuya and Ekuma/Uzeh. Ibillo’s headship rotates among these quarters. All celebrate an age grade festival approximately every 7 years, and in the past they all celebrated on the same date. In recent times, however, the quarters have staggered their celebrations to maximize local attendance. There is some controversy over this since some believe Ibillo could make ‘tourist capital’ from the festival if they celebrated together.
Though held annually to purify the community and foster community identity, the festival is celebrated in its most elaborate form approximately every 7 years when a new male ‘age group’ is formed. In this way, it resembles the situation described in a previous blog on Otuo, a community on the border of Akoko-Edo and Owan Local Government Areas, which Northcote Thomas also visited and where he photographed masquerades associated with an age-group festival called ‘Eliminia’.
Although Professor Ogunnubi identified the mask collected by Thomas as ‘Ugolo’, Northcote Thomas recorded its name as ‘Ofuno’. This appears to be a misspelling. The proper spelling should be ‘Ubvono’ or ‘Uvono’. Ubvono is only celebrated in the interval between Ikpishionua festivals, suggesting that Thomas was not in Ibillo during a year when an age company was formed. Local respondents suggested that the mask was likely to have been made in Ekuya quarter, a community known for the thick weaving of the Ugolo mask form. The Ugolo, Ubvono and other woven masks are essentially the same, differentiated only by their context of use and the ‘finishing’ or decoration of the mask. For Uvbono, the Ugolo mask would have its feathers fixed differently from when it performs during Ikpishionua, and it does not perform fully in Ubvono because Uvbono is not a ‘serious’ festival, but more entertainment oriented. A nine-day festival, its function is to keep the community busy and engaged.
A description of the mask may be found in Thomas’s typed-up fieldnotes (Figure 4). He writes that, in Ibillo, ‘headdresses are woven of cord and made upon long pieces of wood carved to the shape of each man’s head. There is a stiff crest of cord surmounted by nuts of some sort. Eye holes are surrounded with cowries. There is a wooden nose; the mouth is represented by a ring of cowries without an aperture and from it hangs a double cord with a tassel at the end. The lower part of the mask is coloured with cam wood; the upper part is black; the intervening portion is white’. (Note that the tasselled cords extending from the mouth have become detached and lost, though one can see evidence of where it was attached.)
Figure 4: Except from Northcote Thomas’s typed-up fieldnotes describing the mask.
Many of the characteristics Thomas described can still be found in the Ugolo masks that are made in Ibillo today. The colours include red around eyes and mouth as well as on the beak-like nose. They have sagittal crests dramatized by the addition of feathers. The feathers have not been identified, but it is possible that they include the tail feathers of a rooster since the head with its crest and beak represents the head of a cock. The body covering is made of the pith from the bark of any healthy tree with a thick bark. Once the bark is removed, it is left to soften in the river for some days to allow for easy separation of the inner part or pith from the bark. The pith is further washed to increase its pliability. The resulting material, emue, is used to create the fronds covering the masqueraders’ bodies as well as the fiber employed in weaving the masks themselves.
Figure 5: Ugolo masquerade wearing a cloth in the initial stages of the Ikpishionua festival. Emmanuel Concept Video Productions.
During the initial outing of the masquerades during the Ikpishionua festival, all the masqueraders wear cloth covers over the costume of fronds as illustrated in another screenshot from the Emmanuel Concept video (Figure 5). The cloth covers are only worn during the full Ikpishionua age-grade festival, and not during the minor annual festivals in intervening years. The cloth covers are also seen as a symbolic definition of women’s involvement in the festival when they have license to dance alongside masquerades without committing offense, contrary to other festival celebrations. Women and family members often wear the same cloth to indicate their relationship to a particular masquerader who may be one of the newly initiated or someone being promoted to another level – tacitly identifying him. As the festival progresses, the masqueraders abandon their cloth shawls, revealing their masks more clearly for the audience to appreciate.
Figure 6: Northcote Thomas’s photograph of a similar mask ‘at rest’ in the ukpala, Ibillo,1910. The tasselled cords extending from the mouth mentioned in Thomas’s description of the mask can be seen here. NWT 1733. Royal Anthropological Institute 400.17686.
In 1910, Thomas also photographed a similar mask at rest in the masquerade stockade (ukpala or uyala) (Figure 6) where participants make their masks and prepare for the celebration of the festival in relative privacy, away from the gaze of women. This is also a place where those wearing masks can rehearse their dancing before coming out to display. The ukpala walls stand about 15 feet high and the interior space is as large as possible in the area allocated for its construction. It is a temporary structure with walls made of dry palm branches today as in the past.
Minor masquerades at the Ikpishionua festival, Ibillo. (Ibillo People Facebook page)
During Ikpishionua, Ugolo represents the elders and chiefly ancestors of Ibillo. It plays the metal gong, elo, as it sings historical songs, eulogies and epics (welaku), communicating with the people in specific areas or quarters it visits, speaking in parables. It is one of the four main mask types seen today, and probably the oldest type, the others being Umueku, Ulele and Obibia. There are numerous minor masquerades too that use the basic knit or woven form displayed by Ugolo, often without the crest. These minor masks are created by the incoming age group, and they sport different caps or headdresses created to amuse the community, inspiring jokes and nicknames. Such names refer especially to the addition of the objects to the top of the mask, such as a pouch of ‘pure water’ (ame) for the ‘hawker of water’ and ‘water as life’ masks. The label ‘fish cold-room’ (ehwena) suggests the seller of meat or food, a female hair-do (zo ehwo eh bio za) depicts young females and their fashion, a woman’s head-tie or igaleh suggests elderly women, mirrors (ugbegbe) represent eyes in the round as well as reflection, interpretation, or the foreshadowing of possibility. Costuming and accessories are meant to encourage women to make satirical comments on the masquerades. The festival is, after all, an ‘occasion for people of different ages – men, women and children – to work together creatively, making masks, costumes, musical instruments, engaging in body painting, and performing together as a community’ (Adejumoh 2017).
References
Adejumoh, W. E. (2017) ‘Masquerades and other art forms of the Ikpishionua festival in Ibillo, Akoko Edo Local Government Area, Edo State’, unpublished BA thesis, University of Benin.
Left: Otuoyema Group masquerades of the type referred to as Osa. Photographed by Jean Borgatti at the final performance of Igugu/Eliminya festival, Otuo, 1973. The performance was held in honor of Samuel Ogbemudia who served as military governor of what was then Midwest State. Right: Otuoyema Group masquerade photographed by Northcote Thomas (NWT 839) in Emafu (Imafun) Quarter, Otuo, in 1909.
In an earlier guest blog, the art historian Professor Jean Borgatti described her first encounter with the photographic archives of Northcote Thomas in the early 1970s. She recounted how she was able to track the changes and continuities in the masquerade traditions associated with the Eliminya Festival in Otuo from Thomas’s photographs from 1909 to her own documentation of the festival in 1973, 2003 and 2016. In this second guest blog, Jean discusses the Eliminya masquerade costumes themselves in greater detail.
Otuo community life is based on the principle of age-grading. Community member and teacher, I. Igbafe, described a series of 13 grades through which passed age sets formed every 5 years. (The anthropologist, R. E. Bradbury, described 11 such grades). Each grade bears a name and has specific tasks associated with it as well as specific ritual duties and roles. Masquerade and dance regalia characterize each group through the Otuoyema, or first title grade – the group moving upward in the Eliminya/Igugu festival. Igugu is a cognate with the Yoruba language term Egungun that refers to ancestors and ancestral masquerades, and was the name used by my informants in 1972-3. (Yoruba is spoken widely in Otuo as well as throughout northwest Edo communities.) Eliminya is cognate with the Edo term Erivi meaning the world of the dead and unborn, residence of the gods, the ancestors and masquerade-dancers (Melzian 1937: 55-6).
Osa type masquerades photographed by Jean Borgatti at the Igugu/Eliminya festival, Otuo, in 1973.
In Otuo, men between the ages of 45 and 50 both sponsor and wear masks and headdresses in festivals held to mark their entry into the group of community leaders. The sponsoring age group wears only two of the seven or eight mask types that appear, the others being worn by the age company above them. These masks are used for a season lasting 5-7 years and are thereafter destroyed. Consequently, they are almost unknown to the outside world. The masks incorporate a vast array of images that refer to ideas of power and leadership: leopards, equestrian figures, colonial officers, the Nigerian Army, heraldic angels and airplanes. The names of the masquerades belong to the esoteric lore associated with each age company, although the masks I refer to as ‘bowler hats’ are called by the popular names ‘umbrella’ or ‘helmet’ – names that suggest kingship or the military but in either case, authority. These and the ‘whipping masquerades’ are those costumes carried by the sponsoring age company [see illustrations in Jean’s previous guest blog]. The symbolism and significance of these masks also belongs to the esoteric lore of the association. However it is said that while the activity of whipping masquerades purifies the community, the ‘umbrella’ masquerades are enjoyed for their dancing.
From left to right: Obagege, crested, and Ogbigbia type masquerades photographed by Jean Borgatti at the Igugu/Eliminya festival, Otuo, in 1973.
All the masquerade headdresses are worn with a costume of woven raffia covering the performer’s head and torso, following the shape of his body. A fringed panel falls over his chest and shoulders. The section covering his head is embellished with a nose-like tassel. The lower hem of the costume terminates in long strands of fiber. The performer’s arms and legs, painted with linear designs, are partially visible through the fringe as is his cloth applique apron. (Today, shorts are worn rather than the backless apron worn in the past that left the buttocks exposed and visible as the fringe swayed.) Each headdress appears to give a distinctive name to the masquerade. In the parade of masked figures I witnessed in 1973, where the photographs that accompany this blog were taken, costumes worn with a towering feather headdress (Obagege), a central crest of straws bound together, and small wooden caps resembling women’s plaited hairstyles (Ogbigbia) precede the whipping masquerades (Olu), a type far outnumbering the rest since each member of the age group moving upward must wear this one. The wooden capped masqueraders are said to be for maintaining order during the public displays.
Left: Olu, ‘whipping masquerades’, whose role is to disperse malevolent spirits; right: Ogbogbomudu masquerade types, which perform humorous skits in the playing ground. Photographed by Jean Borgatti at the Igugu/Eliminya festival, Otuo, in 1973.
The ‘whipping masqueraders’ perform to disperse malevolent spiritual forces, each cracking his whip in an attempt to achieve a sound approximating a gunshot. (Those who succeeded were greeted with a resounding cheer.) These are followed by the ‘umbrellas’ (Ugbokpa) and the wooden helmet masks (Ogbogbomudu). These characters are said to be linked to the rains, and perform humorous skits in the playing ground. The most elaborate masks and headdresses featuring figural superstructures (Osa) come a stately last.
Northcote Thomas’s photograph of the Osa masquerade type in Otuo in 1909. NWT 837.
That each company moving upwards in the system must provide a new set of headdresses provides for the incorporation of new motifs into the compositions and new materials into their construction. Northcote Thomas photographed only three of these masquerade types in Otuo: the whipping masquerade (Olu) and the umbrella masquerade (Ugbokpa), whose later 20th- and 21st-century counterparts are dramatically similar, and one towering Osa masquerade that appears to have a canework superstructure into which are pegged multiple small figures. The final two types of masquerade I witnessed in the 1973 parade consisted of a helmet, usually janus-faced, surmounted by a superstructure containing multiple figures or simply a multi-tiered headdress with carved figures and animals attached to the basic structure, evoking the complex example photographed by Thomas.
My research in Nigeria was carried out between 1971 and 1974 under the auspices of the Federal Department of Antiquities and was partially funded by the following: UCLA Museum of Cultural History-Ralph Altman Fund and NDEA Title VI fellowships via the African Studies Center, UCLA. Research in 2002-04 and in 2014-16 was carried out under a Fulbright-Hays teaching and research fellowship at the University of Benin in Benin City. I would like to thank the people of Otuo for sharing information and experiences with me, particularly Chief Erukpe Omokhudu, Mr Isaac Adokhai Afekhai, and Teacher Igbafe of Otuo for their personal assistance in 1973. In 2003, his Highness, Julius Elugbe, the Ovie of Otuo, was instrumental in facilitating my documentation of the festival. In 2016, his nephew, Professor Ben Elugbe, was my host during the masquerades’ morning walk-about.
Further reading:
Borgatti, J. M. 1982. ‘Age Grades, Masquerades, and Leadership among the Northern Edo’, African Arts 16 (1): 36-51+96.
Bradbury, R. 1957. The Benin Kingdom and the Edo-Speaking Peoples of Southwestern Nigeria. London: International African Institute.
Igbafe, I. n.d. ‘Age Group Organization in Otuo’. Unpublished manuscript given to the author, and subsequently deposited in the Robbins Library, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC.
Melzian, H. 1937. A Concise History of the Bini Language of Southern Nigeria. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
Maiden spirit mask, recorded by Northcote Thomas as ‘Isi abogefi’, collected in either Agukwu-Nri or Nibo in present-day Anambra State, Nigeria, in 1910-11. Thomas noted that this spirit (manwu) would dance each dry season at the feast of Anuoye. (MAA Z 13689; Photograph by N. W. Thomas MAA N.78430.)
In an essay, ‘The buzz of displacement’, in the book The Inbetweenness of Things (Bloomsbury, 2017), Sandra Dudley draws upon the concept of an object-oriented ontology and conducts a thought-experiment to imagine how museum objects themselves might experience senses of displacement and liminality. Dudley considers the perspective of a carved wooden bee that once adorned the throne of King Thibaw in the Mandalay Palace in Burma, which has been caught in the liminal space of the Pitt Rivers Museum collection in Oxford since 1889. For the bee, the museum may be regarded as a liminal space where it is isolated from the contexts which originally animated it; the object yearns for reincorporation into that lost social and material world from which it is exiled. On the other hand, however, the museum is a space in which possibilities for incorporation into new social worlds abound as the bee forms relationships with other people and things. Dudley mentions, for example, the intimate relationship formed between the bee and a contemporary wood carver who was inspired by the bee to create a replica.
Ethnographic museum objects may be said to be displaced both spatially and temporally. As we have been rediscovering the collections of artefacts that Northcote Thomas assembled during his anthropological surveys in Nigeria and Sierra Leone, we have also been experiencing this sense of the objects’ dislocation, but also the possibilities for reconnection in the present. The idea of reconnection and re-entanglement with the ethnographic archive is, of course, at the heart of the [Re:]Entanglements project. However, we have been struck especially by the temporal reconnections brought about in our approach to collections-based research in the museum store too – especially through our use of Thomas’s original field photographs.
Shrine vessel, recorded by Northcote Thomas simply as ‘Pot for Olokun’, collected in Benin City in 1909. Such ‘akh olukun’ were made by women from river clay, symbolic of the cycle of life and the worlds of earth and water, human spirit. (MAA Z 12112; Photograph by N. W. Thomas MAA P.29327.)
Thomas did not systematically photograph all the objects he collected prior to dispatching them to what was then the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. In fact, only a small percentage of the collection was photographed either in the field or at the Museum at the time. Those photographs of ‘specimens of native manufacture’ that Thomas did take in West Africa are therefore especially valuable, and have been one of the starting points for us as we have been exploring the collections in stores. In most cases, it is only through painstaking archival research and detective work that we have been able to locate these objects today. But how thrilling when one is able to identify such objects and reunite them with their historical photographic portraits!
[Re:]Entanglements team member, Katrina Dring, updating the Museum record of the Olokun shrine vessel, comparing the Northcote Thomas’s field photograph of the pot with the object today. The vessel has evidently been badly damaged at some point in its biography and has been repaired.From the objects’ point of view, we wonder what the experience of being brought ‘face-to-face’ with themselves in this way must be like? Seeing their younger selves, as it were, from nearly 110 years ago, when they had newly been brought into being through the skills of artists and craftspeople in the areas in which N. W. Thomas was working. The exchange of gazes between historic photograph and object presences other times, places and people, most particularly the very moment in time when, in West Africa, Thomas clicked the shutter on his Videx camera, capturing the reflected light from these objects in the emulsion of his glass plate negatives, which we, in turn, have pored over and digitized, and used in our quest to discover those same objects in the anonymous wooden crates in which they are now housed in Cambridge. The museum affords such possibilities for presencing these temporal and spatial journeys. And this, we hope, will be just the beginning of these journeys and possibilities as we invite others to reconnect with the collections and the histories they are entangled in, both virtually, through the internet, and when we physically travel back to the locations where the objects were made with copies of Thomas’s historical photographs and the photographs we are now taking.
Recreating Thomas’s field photograph of two masks, labelled as ‘Ibonodike’ and ‘Wonodike’, collected in Fugar, in present-day Edo State, in 1909. (MAA Z 12252; Photograph by N. W. Thomas RAI 400.17528.) Thomas collected a large number of masks in Fugar; it seems likely that he commissioned a carver to produce various types of mask typical of the area.
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