Tag Archives for ethnography
“Are funerals like this in London?” asks my new Torajan friend. The dead man’s drum-shaped coffin emerges from the matrimonial bedroom where he has “slept”, preserved in formalin, with his family for the last eight months. Now he has left the house, he is finally dead, his soul winging its way towards the afterlife. “Not [...]
09Jun2010
Putting the Graphic into Ethnographic
As you can probably tell from the picture the Vietnamese Museum of Ethnography in Hanoi offers infinitely more fun than the rather cumbersome title would suggest. (It’s slightly shorter in Vietnamese. But not much.) This depicts, believe it or not, a traditional tribal tomb. Can you imagine what the funeral was like?! I mean, seriously. [...]
