Ethnographic

Photography and Anthropology in the Kalahari

Where the Roads All End tells the remarkable story of an American family’s eight anthropological expeditions to the remote Kalahari Desert in South-West Africa (Namibia) during the 1950s. Raytheon co-founder Laurence Marshall, his wife Lorna, and children John and Elizabeth recorded the lives of some of the last remaining hunter-gatherers, the so-called Bushmen, in what is now recognized as one of the most important ventures in the anthropology of Africa. Largely self-taught as ethnographers, the family supplemented their research with motion picture film and still photography to create an unparalleled archive that documents the Ju/’hoansi and the /Gwi just as they were being settled by the government onto a “Bushman Preserve.” The Marshalls’ films and publications popularized a strong counternarrative to existing negative stereotypes of the “Bushman” and revitalized academic studies of these southern African hunter-gatherers.

This vivid and multilayered account of a unique family enterprise focuses on 25,000 still photographs in the archives of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Illustrated with over 300 images, Where the Roads All End reflects on the enduring ethnographic record established by the Marshalls and the influential pathways they charted in anthropological fieldwork, visual anthropology, ethnographic film, and documentary photography.

Foreword by Robert Gardner
Essay by Bob Connolly

"Best Books 2013...The attraction of Dupont's books is that his photographs exhibit enormous passion and enthusiasm and are an effort to unlock the nature of the relationship between photographer and subject."
—THE Magazine

This publication records acclaimed Australian photographer Stephen Dupont’s journey through some of Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) most important cultural and historical zones: the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville, and the capital city of Port Moresby. Through images and personal diaries, Dupont’s remarkable body of work captures the human spirit of the people of PNG in their transition from tribalism to globalization. The project was conducted in 2011 with the support of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography given by Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology.

Piksa Niugini consists of two hardcover books inside a special slipcase. The first volume is a collection of portraits in luscious duotone and 4-color reproduction; the second is a vibrant collection of the diaries, drawings, contact sheets, and documentary photographs that chronicle Dupont’s experience and working process and richly contextualize the more formal images in volume one. An exhibition of Dupont's New Guinea photographs is on display at the Peabody through September 2, 2013.

Dupont’s photographs have received international acclaim for their artistic integrity and valuable insight into peoples, cultures, and communities that are under threat or in the process of rapid change. The photographer’s many awards include a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America, a Bayeux War Correspondent’s Prize, and first places in the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Australian Walkleys, and Leica/CCP Documentary Award. In 2007 Dupont was the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography for his ongoing project on Afghanistan. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Aperture, Newsweek, GQ, French and German GEO, Le Figaro, Liberation, The Sunday Times Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Stern, Time, and Vanity Fair.

In the late 1950s, Chauncey C. Nash started collecting Inuit carvings just as the art of printmaking was being introduced in Kinngait (Cape Dorset), an Inuit community on Baffin Island in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. Nash donated some 300 prints and sculptures to Harvard’s Peabody Museum—one of the oldest collections of early modern Inuit art. The Peabody collection includes not only early Inuit sculpture but also many of the earliest prints on paper made by the women and men who helped propel Inuit art onto the world stage.

Author Maija M. Lutz draws from ethnology, archaeology, art history, and cultural studies to tell the story of a little-known collection that represents one of the most vibrant and experimental periods in the development of contemporary Inuit art. Lavishly illustrated, Hunters, Carvers, and Collectors presents numerous never-before-published gems, including carvings by the artists John Kavik, Johnniebo Ashevak, and Peter Qumalu POV Assappa. This latest contribution to the award-winning Peabody Museum Collections Series fills an important gap in the literature of Native American art.

Winner, 2009 New England Book Show (General Trade, Illustrated)

Silver Medal, 2010 IPPY Awards (Multicultural Non-Fiction Adult)

Silver Medal, 2010 IPPY Awards (Religion & Multi-Cultural)

Bronze Medal, 2009 Foreword Magazine Awards (Religion)

With essays by Ali S. Asani, Carl W. Ernst, and Kamil Khan Mumtaz

Sufism, the mystical path of Islam, is a key feature of the complex Islamic culture of South Asia today. Influenced by philosophies and traditions from other Muslim lands and by pre-Islamic rites and practices, Sufism offers a corrective to the image of Islam as monolithic and uniform.

In Sacred Spaces, Pakistani artist and educator Samina Quraeshi provides a locally inflected vision of Islam in South Asia that is enriched by art and by a female perspective on the diversity of Islamic expressions of faith. A unique account of a journey through the author’s childhood homeland in search of the wisdom of the Sufis, the book reveals the deeply spiritual nature of major centers of Sufism in the central and northwestern heartlands of South Asia. Illuminating essays by Ali S. Asani, Carl W. Ernst, and Kamil Khan Mumtaz provide context to the journey, discussing aspects of Sufi music and dance, the role of Sufism in current South Asian culture and politics, and the spiritual geometry of Sufi architecture.

Quraeshi relies on memory, storytelling, and image making to create an imaginative personal history using a rich body of photographs and works of art to reflect the seeking heart of the Sufi way and to demonstrate the diversity of this global religion. Her vision builds on the centuries-old Sufi tradition of mystical messages of love, freedom, and tolerance that continue to offer the promise of building cultural and spiritual bridges between peoples of different faiths.

Samina Quraeshi is Gardner Fellow and Visiting Artist, Peabody Museum, Harvard University.

Ali S. Asani is Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures and Director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program, with a joint appointment in the Committee on the Study of Religion and the Departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations; Sanskrit and Indian Studies; and African and African-American Studies, at Harvard University.

Carl W. Ernst is William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Kamil Khan Mumtaz is an architect living in Pakistan.

Foreword by Susan Gilson Miller

Photographs by Hillel S. Burger & Mark Craig

Artistry of the Everyday presents the Peabody Museum’s collection of arts from the Berber-speaking regions of North Africa. The book gives an overview of Berber history and culture, focusing on the rich aesthetic traditions of Amazigh (Berber) craftsmen and women. From ancient times to the present day, working with limited materials but an extensive vocabulary of symbols and motifs, Imazighen (Berbers) across North Africa have created objects that are both beautiful and practical. Intricately woven textiles, incised metal locks and keys, painted pottery and richly embroidered leather bags are just a few examples of objects from the Peabody Museum’s collections that are highlighted in the color plates. The book also tells the stories of the collectors—both world-traveling Bostonians and Harvard-trained anthropologists—who brought these objects from Morocco or Algeria to their present home in Cambridge in the early twentieth century. The generosity of these donors has resulted in a collection of Berber arts, especially from the Tuareg regions of southern Algeria, that rivals that of major European and North African museums.

by Laurie D. Webster

 

Foreword by Tony Berlant

This is the first publication on a remarkable collection of sixty-six outstanding Pueblo and Navajo textiles donated to the Peabody Museum in the 1980s by William Claflin, Jr., a prominent Boston businessman, avocational anthropologist, and patron of Southwestern archaeology. Claflin bequeathed to the museum not only these beautiful textiles, but also his detailed accounts of their collection histories—a rare record of the individuals who had owned or traded these weavings before they found a home in his private museum. Textile scholar Laurie Webster tells the stories of the weavings as they left their native Southwest and traveled eastward, passing through the hands of such owners and traders as a Ute Indian chief, a New England schoolteacher, a renowned artist, and various military officers and Indian agents. Her concise overview of Navajo and Pueblo weaving traditions is enhanced by the reflections of noted artist and Navajo textile expert Tony Berlant in his foreword to the text.

Laurie D. Webster is an independent scholar and textile consultant, and Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona.

Tony Berlant is an artist and author, and collector, curator, and expert on Navajo textiles.

With style and depth, Lorna Marshall leads the reader through the intricacies, ambiguities, and silences of !Kung beliefs. Her narrative, based on fieldwork among the Bushmen of the Kalahari in the early 1950s, brings into focus a way of life that appears to have existed for millennia. She presents the culture, beliefs, and spirituality of one of the last true hunting-and-gathering peoples by focusing on members of different bands as they reveal their own views. This account, with photography by John Marshall, presents a system of beliefs, one in which personified deities and unpersonifled supernatural forces (n!ow and n/um) interact with man and the natural world. The !Kung believe that this interaction accounts for much of the mystery of life and the vicissitudes of the good and evil that befall mankind. The book also depicts an egalitarian lifestyle based on sharing and group awareness, a lifestyle that has not survived intact the increasing integration of the Bushmen into the modern world.

A companion volume to her 1976 work, The !Kung of Nyae Nyae, this book was published to mark the one-hundredth birthday of Lorna Marshall (1898 – 2002).

Peabody Museum Papers Volume 57

Peabody Museum Papers Volume 43, no. 2

Peabody Museum Papers Volume 52

Peabody Museum Papers Volume 45, no. 1

Peabody Museum Papers Volume 28, no. 2

Peabody Museum Papers Volume 30, no. 1

Peabody Museum Papers Volume 30, no. 2

Peabody Museum Papers Volume 41, no. 2

(Reports of the Rimrock Project Values Series, no. 2)

Peabody Museum Papers Volume 41, no. 3

(Reports of the Rimrock Project Values Series, no. 3)

Peabody Museum Papers Volume 42, no. 1

(Report no. 5, Ramah Project)

Peabody Museum Papers Volume 49, no. 2

Peabody Museum Papers Volume 42, no. 3

(Reports of the Rimrock Project Values Series, no. 5)

Peabody Museum Papers Volume 42, no. 2

(Report no. 6, Ramah Project)