Martedì 17 maggio, alle 10,00
Sala Conferenze
Seminario in lingua inglese
Martedì 17 maggio alle ore 10,00, nella sede del Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico ‘Luigi Pigorini’, Music and Historical Collections in Ethnographic Museums, uno Smithsonian Seminar in onore del centenario della nascita di Glauco Luchetti (1916), fondatore del Museo Beltrami, Filottrano, del 150° anniversario dell'istituzione della Beltrami County, Minnesota, USA (1866) e del 140° anniversario della fondazione del Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico “Luigi Pigorini” (1876).
Programma del seminario, in lingua inglese:
Francesco Rubat Borel, Paul Michael Taylor
Presentation
Francesco Rubat Borel, Archaeologist, Director of Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico "Luigi Pigorini".
Paul Michael Taylor, anthropologist at the Smithsonian's Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, is Director of that museum's Asian Cultural History Program.
Valeria Bellomia1,2, Luca Bondioli2, Antonio Bonuomo2, Ivana Fiore1,2, Alessandra Sperduti2,3, Donatella Saviola2
The Social Life of Human Bones: the Mesoamerican omichicāhuaztli
According to the western organological categories the omichicāhuaztli is classified as a scraper idiophone made of animal hard tissues. In Prehispanic times, also human long bones, mostly femur and tibia, were used, a habit presumably discarded after the Conquest. According to Spanish colonial sources the Aztecs played such musical instrument during the funerary rituals of warrior élites. Most of the omichicāhuaztli come from burials and a lot of them are broken as if they were ritually “killed” before being deposited beside the body of the deceased.
The Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico “Luigi Pigorini” exhibits two omichicāhuaztli characterized by different origins and histories. The main details of their "life history" come from a recent interdisciplinary study aimed at reconstructing: the cultural biographies (as artifacts), the biological features (as bones), the organological properties (as musical instruments), and the funerary rituals (as witnesses of a past civilization).
The two items are differently made: one consists of a notched human left femur, polished and encrusted with mosaic and associated with a notched shell Oliva. The other one is a notched human right femur associated with a human right fibula. The detailed analysis of the bones’ surfaces allowed us to reconstruct the taphonomic processes that affected the bones and the activities performed to transform them into musical instruments, organizing traces into an operational stratigraphy. Another important aspect of this research was the playing and recording session, thanks to the exceptional preservation of the instruments together with the original scrapers used to play it, that is the Oliva shell and the fibula. This allowed us to analyze the sound of the instruments and to make it replicable in the exhibiting space, giving the two omichicāhuaztli the possibility to "keep on playing", though they are now exhibited behind a museum glass.
1. "Sapienza" Università di Roma, Italy - 2. Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico "Luigi Pigorini", Polo Museale del Lazio, Rome, Italy -
3. "L'Orientale", Università di Napoli, Italy.
Paul Michael Taylor
Observations on the Role of Museums in the Origins of Anthropological Science, and on the Study of Early Ethnographic Collections Today
This paper summarizes our Smithsonian research team’s current re-assessment of early ethnographic collections from Indonesia, Japan, and American Indian groups, comparable to those within the world’s first Anthropology Museum, founded in the same year (1869) as the first formal professorship positions in Anthropology as well as the first formal position in Museum Anthropology, all in Italy (Firenze). This work on European (especially Italian) “proto-anthropology” is still preliminary, but has a surprising and productive resonance with current trends in American anthropological work. American historians have noted that in this same period some American fraternal organizations including the Masons were active in creating early museums in America. The Tammany Society's museum in New York City eventually formed the core of P. T. Barnum's American Museum. Masonic lodges founded museums, e.g. the Alexandria Museum (1812), as did some Freemasons, e.g. William Clark's museum (St. Louis, Missouri, 1816), for Native American material. Lewis Henry Morgan's pioneering work in anthropology directly resulted from his participation in fraternal organizations. Recently we began exploring connections between early Italian explorer/collectors and these fraternal and Masonic organizations – recently identifying for example the Masonic membership of Giacomo Beltrami, early Italian explorer of the Mississippi River. Other Italian explorers and anthropologists influenced American collectors as well. Indonesian collections assembled by the Smithsonian naturalist William Louis Abbott (1860-1936) were influenced by the earlier work of Elio Modigliani. This paper presents examples of our research on some early ethnographic collections, and suggests preliminary conclusions about the relationship between the “proto-anthropology” of Italian traveler/collectors, and Italy’s development of the first museum and professorship of anthropology.
Paul Michael Taylor, a research anthropologist at the Smithsonian's Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, is Director of that museum's Asian Cultural History Program, and serves as Curator of Asian, European, and Middle Eastern Ethnology. He has written numerous books and scholarly articles on the ethnography, ethnobiology, languages, and art (or material culture) of Asia, especially Indonesia. He has also curated seventeen museum exhibitions, and served as the consulting anthropologist for many documentary anthropological films. The recipient of numerous international grants and awards, he has served on the Board of Directors of the Association for Asian Studies.
Cesare Marino
Upper Mississippi River Sounds: American Indian Musical Instruments Collected by Giacomo Beltrami in 1823
This paper discusses the Italian traveler and naturalist, Giacomo Costantino Beltrami, and his explorations and research among the American Indians of the Upper Mississippi River in 1823. During his so-called ‘pilgrimage’ travels to the United States, Beltrami collected a large number of American Indian objects, including musical instruments, and natural specimens that are now on exhibit at the Museo Civico di Scienze Naturali in Bergamo, Italy. The late Count Glauco Luchetti, heir and moral trustee of the Beltrami legacy, was among the first to study systematically the Beltrami collection, and to promote the image and significance of Beltrami’s contributions to American Indian research. In the 1970s, in his private Palazzo Beltrami-Luchetti in Filottrano, Glauco Luchetti founded the Beltrami Museum with the remainder of the North American Indian objects and rare specimens collected by Beltrami.
Cesare Marino was a researcher, author, and acting bibliographer for the Smithsonian Institution’s Handbook of North American Indians (Department of Anthropology) from 1983 to 2008. After his retirement he became a senior Postdoctoral Fellow and Researcher within the Smithsonian’s Asian Cultural History Program (Department of Anthropology), where he is currently carrying out research on historic presentations of Japanese swords among American Indians, and on early Italian travelers in North America and their ethnographic collections in Italian museums.
William Bradford Smith
Recent examples of Culture Days and International Cooperation for the Presentation and Interpretation of Central Asian Music in Museums and Cultural Centers
This paper presents some comparative perspectives on how music heritage collections are preserved and studied; and also how they are presented as components of museum and library exhibitions in the United States. With the increasing development and changes in technologies for music storage and playback, the standards for preservation and the means of public presentation present an evolving dilemma for librarians and archivists. Music notation alone is inadequate, partly due to differences in annotation methods over time and in different parts of the world, while audio recording in various formats also presents challenges of long-term preservation. This paper reviews the practices of American institutions such as the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution in four areas of musical heritage activities: 1. Music collecting and collection management; 2. Preservation; 3. Curatorship of the collection’s content; and 4. Educational outreach and exhibitions.
William Bradford Smith, a Researcher in the Asian Cultural History Program of the Smithsonian Institution, is a musician and ethnomusicologist who has lectured on comparative musicology in Korea, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and the Republic of Georgia. He is co-author of the Smithsonian Publications: Turkmenistan: Arts from the Land of Magtymguly (2013) and Turkmenistan: Ancient Arts Today (2011) and has composed commissioned music works for New York University, Hofstra University, and Virginia Commonwealth University. He was a recipient of the Emily Lowe Grant for Performance in Music and the Hofstra University Provost Scholarship for Academics. He has served as a visiting faculty member of the traditional music department at Yong In University (Republic of Korea) and as staff at the Levine School of Music (Washington D.C.). He currently holds a Master of Arts degree in ethnomusicology from George Mason University.
Trevor Merrion
Museum Collections and Transformed Traditions: Studying Tradition and its Reinvention in Turkmenistan
Prior to the establishment of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Turkmenistan in 1924, the various tribes of the Turkmen were a loosely organized ethnic group and political entity that had for centuries been on the fringes of many Silk Road empires. In part due to the exigencies of a largely nomadic and pastoral Turkmen lifestyle, the art traditions of carpet-weaving and jewelry-making were both an aesthetic and practical concern for the Turkmen. This paper, based on the study of museum collections in Turkmenistan, discusses trends in Turkmen visual art that developed as a result of modernization and an increase in Soviet influence in the twentieth century. These exemplify such changes as the establishment of carpet-weaving factories, the hybridization of Turkmen traditional weavings with Western pictorial aesthetics, the advent of Western-style paintings by Turkmen artists, and the emergence of Russian-model “gobelin” tapestries produced by Turkmen artists. The paper will conclude by showing how a strong adherence to traditional aesthetics continues to inform the cultural elite in Turkmenistan today, who shape an understanding of national identity and culture through artistic productions.
Trevor Merrion is an anthropologist and museum specialist in the Asian Cultural History Program (ACHP) at the Smithsonian Institution. He has co-authored several publications on the art traditions of Turkmenistan and most recently co-authored the publication Undiscovered Art from the Korean War: Explorations in the Collection of Chester and Wanda Chang. He also serves as webmaster for the ACHP, currently developing a virtual archive of correspondence by a 19th-century ethnographic and biological collector, W.L. Abbott. He received his BA in anthropology from the University of Virginia in 2010.