In this section you can discover outside material such as videos of Kaxinawa rituals, articles about the Almshouse, and a link to a downloadable Kaxinawa learning video game!
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"Disembodied Marionette Hands" by Curious Expeditions is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Collecting Colonialism:
Disembodied Culture at the Temple Anthropology Museum
You may think that culture is saved in spaces much like the one you’re standing in. If culture is embodied in objects, then we have loads of it right here in special archival bags intended for safe-keeping.
But many museum collections were created in a colonial process that excised the cultural value from material objects. Many of the artifacts housed at Temple have been robbed of meaning, first through removal and then through time and poor record keeping. Colonialism’s obsession with materialism strips artifacts of their contexts, leaving them disembodied and untethered.
We imagine that museums are places of preservation, but a glimpse at two of Temple’s earliest collections reveals that, while the objects themselves might be preserved, their cultural value is not. The snippet of hand-written catalogs you see here are often the only piece of information we have for objects from these two collections.
Penn Collection
First page of the Penn Collection catalogue.
Oval metal plate, possibly a belt.
Glazed pitcher.
First page of the Penn Collection catalogue.
Rose Collection
An inquiry from the Rose family about donating the collection.
Example of clay pipe mentioned in correspondence.
Counting device mentioned.
An inquiry from the Rose family about donating the collection.
We reflect on the colonialism that created our museum while trying to envision a museum of the future, where collections are replaced by collaboration, connection, and creation.
Penn Collection
This collection was a donation by the Penn Museum in 1966, soon after the establishment of an anthropology museum at Temple. It includes a wide variety of objects, sourced from at least 3 continents. Though the collection is expansive, we know almost nothing about these objects, how they were collected, or who collected them.
The selections you see illustrate both the breadth of items in this collection and how poorly the records were kept. They have been organized by object type, regardless of cultural origin, to illustrate their disembodied nature. Original, handwritten catalog entries provide all of the information that accompanied these objects.
Arched black ceramic vessel.
Glazed pitcher with applied ceramic decorations.
White glazed vase with moddled blue coloring.
Arched black ceramic vessel.
The “Penn Collection” accession form below refers to the material as a “study collection of ethnographic materials” but provides little to no additional information. It was filled out in 1976, twenty years after it was received. The earliest known catalog dates to 1977. If a catalog existed when the collection was received, it has been lost, although a few objects retain original tags (see below) or other immediately identifying information.
1966.03.132.01, women's nose ornaments.
These nose ornaments are among the few objects in the collection of which we have original tags from donation in 1966. While the script on the tag indicates that these may have belonged to a Muslim woman, these pieces have long been detached from their purpose and history.
Original tag for 1966.03.132, reads "Mohamadian woman's nose ornament."
1966.03.132.02, women's nose ornaments.