Anthropology

Wauja-English digital lexicon on open-source platform Wiktionary, is underway:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Wauja_lemmas

Phase 2: Summer 2015 Wauja lexicographers received initial training to allow them to participate in building their Wauja-Portuguese dictionary. Although Internet access is not always available in the Wauja villages, when they do have an internet connection, the Wauja can upload entries from any computer, or even from their smartphones. The dictionary can be used in their bilingual primary school curriculum.

Phase 3: The ultimate goal is to assist the Wauja in building a Wauja-Wauja online dictionary, with the interface in Wauja.

Find out what happened when the Chief of the Blue Cotinga birds took Dusky Parrot Woman and Green Parakeet Woman as his wives...

The Storyteller is a 1990 BBC production that runs for 46 minutes. It was shot in the Wauja village of Piyulaga in the Xingu Indigenous Park, located in the Amazon rainforest of Central Brazil. The story is told in Wauja (an Arawak language), with English subtitles.

Co-authors are Wauja storytellers recorded in the film: Aruta Wauja, Itsautaku Wauja, Katsiparu Wauja.

http://returnofthecapturedspirits.com/the-storyteller/

If you need a password, contact me via this site. Thanks!

This article presents for the first time transcriptions with illustrations
of eleven examples of Thai royal correspondence dated 1853-1868, including six
previously unpublished and two published but minimally accessible handwritten
letters from King Mongkut and from “Second King” Phra Pinklao to Sir John
Bowring and his son Edgar Bowring. The letters, purchased in London in 1985
and now at the Library of Congress (Washington), substantively add to the corpus
of primary source material on key historical figures from this period during which
the “Bowring Treaty” of 1855, between Siam and the United Kingdom, played a
role in transformations within Siam. Prior publications of such correspondence
rarely included illustrations of the original letters; here, illustrations show not
only the original handwritten missives but also the royal seals placed on them,
which are discussed in this article. In addition to these eight letters, transcriptions
and illustrations of three little-known other examples of related correspondence
from King Mongkut are included. One of the eight letters (from 16 January 1868)
consists of King Mongkut’s handwritten note on a two-page pre-printed New Year
greeting dated 1 January that year. Finally, though Bowring himself transcribed
and published examples of his correspondence with the “Major King” (Mongkut)
and “Second King” of Siam in his two-volume The Kingdom and People of Siam
(1857), he also included color lithographs of two letters, related to those published
here, that he did not transcribe. Transcriptions and illustrations of both those letters
are included here, from original 1857 lithographs in the Smithsonian Institution’s
Cullman library.

This article describes a unique grouping of seventy-one artworks, and examples of tools used for their production, collectively termed "Theatrical Images" when presented as royal gifts from King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) for display at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The US Navy prepared and printed copies of an English translation of the original (now lost) Thai list of over 900 objects for the Exposition, grouped into various categories (including that of "Theatrical Images"). This grouping has not previously been studied or considered as an apparently authentic Thai category of royal gift. Some items were photographed for the first time for this publication, and several new discoveries about these artworks are presented here.
= = = = =
See publisher's website for information on purchasing full journal:
https://www.artsofasianet.com/back_issues/back_issue.php?issue_code=2018_may_jun

This paper presents one case study of state-sponsored cultural activities that occurred throughout 2014, Turkmenistan’s Year of Magtymguly, the 290th anniversary of this Turkmen poet’s birth. Such activities constitute examples of public culture; they can organize representations of a society’s past and present to reaffirm for participants the values and power structure of their society and revalidate its philosophical underpinnings. After examining this Turkic poet’s iconicity, this paper compiles 2014’s celebratory events from disparate sources, complementing broader general literature on Central Asia’s spectacles of public culture and their role in nationbuilding and identity-formation. Rather than merely resulting from any top-down decision specifying required activities nationwide, the year’s events involved numerous synergies as artists, museum and theater administrators, composers, and other cultural-sector workers benefited by responding to the potential of  aligning their work with a theme as broad, as widely appreciated, and as eligible for various forms of support as this one. In addition, Turkmenistan’s strong central leadership benefited from this widely shared and highly visible celebration, especially emphasizing one element within Magtymguly’s eighteenth-century vision, an end to his people’s tribal conflicts within a unified Turkmenistan under one leader.

This paper introduces an important group of unpublished ethnographic and archival materials deriving from nine separate expeditions to Kashmir and Ladakh, between 1891 and 1915, by the American naturalist collector William Louis Abbott (1860-1935), and reassesses the importance of this region to him and to Smithsonian scientists of the time. The ethnographic collections from Kashmir and Ladakh Abbott assembled, along with his archival correspondence and field notes, form a little-known and largely unpublished resource at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Abbott is better known for biological collections he brought to America's " national museum, " the Smithsonian, from those expeditions; his ethnographic collections and fieldnotes remain largely unstudied. Abbott's trips to Kashmir and Ladakh are unlike his visits to other regions, because he returned so many times after his first trip, over a 24-year time span interspersed by many expeditions elsewhere. His collecting goals changed over time. This paper assesses the role Abbott and other " naturalist " collectors of this period played within the history of anthropology and museums, and points to some of the many new 21st-century uses of " legacy " collections and records of the kind he assembled about this region.

This paper discusses two groups of musical instruments gifted by Thai Monarchs to the United States: six instruments accompanying the Harris Treaty (1856) and nineteen instruments sent for Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition (1876). We suggest that the selection of these pieces was primarily for aesthetic quality or display, not for their acoustic properties. Though they are visually impressive, sometimes a single item was given of normally paired instruments; some pairs given are not of matching design; non-visible components required to play them were originally missing; and one cannot assemble the instruments given into most traditional ensembles. Yet they served well as symbols, in King Mongkut’s words to U.S. President Pierce, of “heartful and true friendship” and to confirm the “power in manufactures” of Thailand’s “workmen and artists.” We conclude by briefly contrasting these with the instruments presented to the Library of Congress by King Bhumipol Adulyadej, Rama IX (a musician himself), during his 1960 visit to Washington, D.C.

[Introductory chapter:]
Pp. 10-15 in: Paul Michael Taylor and Sonia Dhami, editors, Sikh Art from the Kapany Collection. Palo Alto, California: The Sikh Foundation.

This volume honors the remarkable art historical resource assembled by Narinder S. and Satinder K. Kapany on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Sikh Foundation, which Dr. Kapany founded. This compilation honors these achievements in the way we felt would be most appropriate—by bringing together leading scholars of Sikhism and of Sikh art to assess and interpret the Kapany Collection, using it to introduce Sikh art as well as the Sikh ethos to a broad public.

[Chapter 15 (pp. 286-309) in:] Paul Michael Taylor and Sonia Dhami, editors, Sikh Art from the Kapany Collection. Palo Alto, California: The Sikh Foundation.

This chapter, which follows the preceding chapters’ many detailed examinations of the Kapany Collection as both art and history, has a different purpose. It aims to illustrate how works in the Kapany Collection have enabled exhibitions to change our understanding of Sikhism and Sikh arts, and also to illustrate how the collection itself changed as a result of its use in and modification for exhibition. The treatment of the objects displayed in an exhibition context is quite different from traditional Sikh modes of handling and displaying materials. In many cases, Sikh arts (such as illuminated manuscripts) were not expected to endure, and over time as they wore out they could be replaced or even sometimes carefully and ritually destroyed. Museum preservation methods, by contrast, with their framing, rehousing, and mounting of objects, enhance long-term preservation. In addition, the museum setting itself is quite different from the “natural” setting of many objects, especially of sacred objects such as the Guru Granth Sahib, which should be opened, visible, and displayed only in settings far removed from those in standard museums. In all these areas, bringing the Kapany Collection to a broad public may transform the objects themselves while also transforming the public’s understanding of them. For this I draw many examples from the Smithsonian exhibition "Sikhs: Legacy of the Punjab".

This paper introduces an important group of archival records, with associated ethnographic and biological collections, from a Smithsonian collecting expedition to Turkestan (Xinjiang) in 1893 and 1894. This is part of a larger, on-going study of documents and collections by American naturalist William Louis Abbott (1860-1936), which has led to a re-assessment of the role of "naturalist" (natural science) collectors in the development of anthropology, and to reports on some other specific collecting expeditions such as those undertaken in Indonesia, Thailand, and Madagascar. Beyond summarizing the localities he visited in Turkestan, and the current organization and usefulness of his collections for research, the paper attempts to interpret Abbott’s unpublished archival correspondence to assess his collecting focus, biases, and purposes, as well as his perspectives on contemporaneous events in Turkestan and in the neighboring Russian-controlled border areas (today’s Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan) into which he also briefly traveled. This allows for some assessment of the role Abbott expected this Turkestan trip to have within his lifelong series of collecting expeditions for the Smithsonian, some conclusions about the role that he and other naturalist collectors of this period played within the history of anthropology, museums, and regional studies, and some suggestions for 21st-century uses of the collections and records that he assembled about this region.

Focusing on aspects of community involvement in the Smithsonian’s Sikh Heritage Project, which since its founding in 2000 has included an exhibition and many other public activities, this paper considers some differences in the conceptualization of what constitutes “heritage” as perceived by Sikh community members, museum staff, and the broader museum public. It also considers the negotiations that took place about how Sikh heritage should be represented, because at each venue, the exhibition provided an important space for local Sikh communities to debate and celebrate their traditions, and to introduce a broad non-Sikh public to a culture that many perceived as exotic and little-known. In this interaction, Sikh communities actively tried to learn from the “culture” of museums as well, especially in two areas: The first is finding effective methods for helping a broad public better understand the Sikhs who live among them. The second is the growing acceptance of museum approaches to care of valued objects. For this, communities helped send museum staff and conservators to India and into Sikh communities, advising on the many differences between traditional Sikh social practice in treatment of “heritage” objects, and museum methods that would ensure their physical survival for much longer.

This article introduces an important group of ethnographic, biological, and unpublished archival materials deriving from two expeditions to Madagascar by American naturalist William Louis Abbott (1860–1936). The first was from February to September 1890; the second from January to July 1895 when Abbott rushed back to Madagascar not only to collect for the Smithsonian but also to join the Merina in their unsuccessful war of independence against the encroaching French government. Beyond summarizing localities he visited and the current organization and usefulness of his collections for research, the article attempts to interpret archival records to assess Abbott’s collecting focus, biases, and purposes; his perspectives on contemporaneous events in Madagascar; and also the role that “naturalist” collectors such as Abbott played within the history of anthropology and of museums. Ethnographic information is embedded not only within the ethnographic collections but also within associated biological collections and archives.

Adding to the very few pre-1900 accounts of the Maniq groups of
Thailand, this paper presents new information from archives and ethnographic collections at the Smithsonian about two visits by William Louis Abbott at the end of the 19th century to the group now generally called the Maniq, considered a subgroup of the Semang and the northernmost Negrito group of the peninsular region of southern Thailand and Malaya. These sources indicate the position, within 19th century theories about evolutionary sequences of societies, that Thailand’s “Chow pah” came to serve, for Abbott himself and for the Smithsonian anthropologists with whom he corresponded.