How do you know when you are reading an ethnography? What makes a book or article ethnographic? This past semester I taught a new undergraduate course titled Reading Ethnography in which the students and I asked these questions as a means of appraising the specificity and content of ethnographic knowledge. Our first challenge was to [...]
A very small “wedding jug” by Eastern Cherokee potter Maude Welch (1894-1953). William C. Sturtevant collected this piece from Ms. Welch on September 15, 1951, about two years before her death. Drawing upon her experience visiting Catawba potters, Mrs. Welch was central to the revitalization of pottery making among the Eastern Cherokee. A rich profile [...]
The William C. Sturtevant collection includes a nice group of coiled, sea grass baskets created by the African American weavers of the Sea Island region near Charleston, South Carolina. The better documented of these were collected by William C. Sturtevant in 1959. In this group is the basket shown above. It was made by Mary [...]
The diversity of materials used by Native peoples in the Americas to make hand rattles is pretty staggering. Among the farming peoples of the Southwest, Plains, Northeast and Southeast, gourds are one important material used for this purpose. Having the same basic form as gourd rattles, but unique to some Southeastern Indian peoples, are rattles, [...]
Here is an image of a double woven river cane basket with lid from the Chitimacha people of Louisiana. It was purchased at auction in 1972 by William C. Sturtevant and is now in the collections of the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution (T070). Filed under: Chitimacha, Craft, Ethnographic Archives, [...]
When wearing my curator hat, I have seen how ubiquitous love of tiny baskets seems to be, at least among fans of hand made objects. While I am sure that some engineer is doing nano-scale weaving already, tiny-scale seems good enough for fans of Native American basketry. The best known heroes in this area are [...]
I have been offline and not able to post on the Smithsonian work over the past few days. Today I need to get back to work, so here is a quick picture post. Shown above is a pine needle basket made by Rosa J. Pierite. In the artist’s information tag that accompanies the basket, she [...]
Museum collections are made by people who gather together the things that other people make. Earlier this week I was looking at a group of objects in the William C. Sturtevant Collection that were gathered together and documented by then-University of Oklahoma doctoral student Michael Davis. This is an exceptional collection of German silver jewelry [...]This week Savage Minds turns seven years old. It’s been a great, tumultuous seven years. Although regular readers may not know it, behind the scenes we at Savage Minds have contemplated closing down the blog numerous times, mostly because it is so much trouble to keep posting things to it. But blogging is a habit that’s hard [...]
I was not able to put together a post last night, so here is just one of the couple hundred pictures I shot yesterday. This one is another array of Florida Seminole patchwork samples. These were all collected in 1969 and are by the same seamstress. As with the other objects that I am looking [...]
Yesterday my work with the William C. Sturtevant collection focused on the material culture side of his efforts to document the history, practice, and significance of the unique Florida Seminole art form known as “patchwork.” Basically, I organized and quickly looked at a couple of hundred patchwork samples such as those arrayed in the image [...]
Somatosphere Science , Medicine , and Anthropology A collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology , science and technology studies , cultural psychiatry , psychology and bioethics . Skip to content Search : for Home Masthead Our Contributors Submissions Feedback Resources Back to Somatosphere Transcriptions Home Contributors Submissions Masthead Follow : us rss Follow us via our rss feed email list Sign up for our email list twitter Follow us on Twitter facebook Follow us on Facebook Post navigation In the Journals April 2012 DSM-5 : Plus ça change ⦠In the Journals May 8, 2012 In the journals May 2012 By Lara Braff Articles in this month’s issue of Cultural Anthropology concern the body , humanitarianism , and or sovereignty variously conceived in the