Introductory exhibit

Left side of entrance from Main Green: Welcome to the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University s teaching museum. A resource across the university, the museum inspires creative and critical thinking about culture by fostering interdisciplinary understanding of the material world. The museum s collections include some 100,000 archaeological and ethnographic objects from around the world. This gallery presents changing exhibitions curated by Brown faculty, staff, and students, and the CultureLab, our visible storage and teaching space. The rest of the museum s collections are in the Collections Research Center, in Bristol RI. All are available for teaching and research. The Museum originated with the private collection of Rudolf F. Haffenreffer. An enthusiastic collector of Native American artifacts, he founded the King Philip Museum on in Bristol RI. In 1955, the Haffenreffer family donated the museum to Brown. The museum s educational programs reach thousands of elementary and secondary school students each year, and its curatorial staff and collections support research and teaching in anthropology and related fields at Brown, at other universities, and in the community.

Right side of entrance from Main Green: Museums of anthropology have a complicated history. In the first half of the twentieth century they were key institutions in anthropological study, filling the role that university anthropology departments do now. They undertook research in anthropology as well as organizing expeditions, collecting and preserving millions of artifacts, and presenting public exhibitions. While much of that work remains of great value to the field, some of it is outdated. Some of the collections Native American material excavated from graves and objects of ongoing spiritual value, as well as objects illegally imported - have been repatriated. Much of the work on scientific racialism and social evolution has been repudiated. Anthropology museums today acknowledge that complex, difficult legacy. They have rebuilt their ties with the source communities their collections are from, and today museum artifacts and research find new uses in sustaining indigenous cultures, and in cultural heritage. Their artifacts provide materials for learning about cultures that might otherwise be lost, or less well understood. And they serve as centers for understanding the beauty, complexity and diversity of the world s cultures.

Center case: rear label

These ethnographical busts were created by sculptor Caspar Mayer for the American Museum of Natural History in New York between 1897 and 1904. Mayer and his associates made some 500 of these for research and exhibitions, on expeditions, at the 1904 St. Louis Worlds Fair, and at the 1900 Coney Island Indian Conference. They considered the individuals portrayed here as racial types, part of the scientific racialism that underlay anthropology in the early twentieth century. The museum wanted to build a collection in which all the physical types of man shall be represented. i For the museum, individuals became stereotypes, idealized images of racially and culturally classified groups. ii But they also represent real people. Research at the American Museum has revealed the names of the individuals portrayed, and we display them here with their names, and what we know about them as individuals. Their race, the category to which anthropologists assigned them a century ago, remains, inscribed on the bust. In bringing these busts out of the attic, we acknowledge the fraught history of the anthropology museum, and the challenge museums face in displaying the other. Behind these busts, on the other side of the case, are a different kind of representation of people, and culture. We invite you to compare, and consider their meanings.

Center case, object labels for ethnographical busts: Lyman Lay Lyman Lay, eight years old when this bust was made, was a Seneca boy. , age 8 Lyman Lay later went to the Carlisle Indian School, collected on Caspar Mayers Expedition 1897-28. (but this was Pacific Northwest?)

Washeba Wesheba, 18 years old, was of Padowa Congo ethnicity, brought to the St. Louis Exposition from the Belgian Congo by Samuel Phillips Verner for exhibition as part of a display of Pigmies. He was probably exhibited along with Ota Benga, a Congolese Pygmy, as well as about a dozen other Africans; Pigmies were considered the lowest form of human development. Ota Benga was later displayed in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo; after considerable controversy, he was allowed free. It is not know what happened to Wesheba.iii Sogag Sogag, 21 years old, was part of a very large display of people from the Philippines at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition 100 buildings on a 47 acre site, 75,000 artifacts, and 1100

representatives of the different peoples of the archipelago. He was, according to the records, a member of the Bontoc Igarot tribe. The Philipines, along with Guam and Puerto Rico, were newly part of the United States following the Spanish-American War, and there was considerable interest in seeing the people of these new territories. The Philippines were under the control of the War Department, which granted the American Museum permission to make type casts of the natives in the Philippine reservation, on the condition that a complete set of these type casts, be given to a museum in Manila. iv

Center case, front label These masks, like so many artifacts in the anthropology museum, represent identity, tradition, creativity, and community. They suggest both individual and group identity, an identity often built on religious and spiritual beliefs. They show communities defining themselves through material culture and communal practice. The Haffenreffer Museum has some 700 masks in its collections, from around the world. We choose them to introduce the museum because, more than many objects, they allow the communities that made them to introduce themselves, in their own way. These masks introduce the museum as well. We have chosen artifacts that represent some of the ways that objects enter the collections: archaeology, contracts with artists, ethnographic field collecting, and by purchase and generous gift. Behind these masks, on the other side of the case, are a different kind of representation of people, and culture. We invite you to compare, and consider their meanings.

Center case, object labels for masks TK

ii

The Series of Ethnographic Busts, Miller and Mathe, Drawing shadows to stone, p. 27
iii

The American Museum Journal. Vol. 6, No. 1. July 1906,. pp. 4-6.
ii

See: Bradford, Phillips Verner; Harvey Blume (1992). Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo.

New York: St. Martins Press. ISBN 0312082762.



Parezo, Nancy J.; Don D. Fowler (2007). Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.

iv

http://j.mp/o0YvBV