From chisungu to the museum: a historical ethnography of the images, objects and anthropological texts of the chisungu female initiation ceremony in the Moto Moto Museum in Zambia, 1931 to 2016
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Date
2023
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Universty of the Western Cape
Abstract
This study examines the processes through which sacred cultural practices and people were made subjects of ethnological studies. It considers these histories through a renewed examination of the contexts under which the chisungu female initiation ceremony of the Bemba-speaking people of northern Zambia came to be studied, and how the sacred belongings of the ceremony were collected and turned into objects of ethnography in museums. This project is conceived not only as a biographic study of these collections and their histories but is also a study of processes of meaning-making about cultural practices and people in a museum in Zambia, the Moto Moto Museum. Founded by the missionary Jean Jacques Corbeil in the 1950s, this museum had its origins in particular colonial contexts and was formalised as a national museum in the period after colonialism. The project involves a critical examination of the work of the British anthropologist Audrey Isabella Richards (1899-1982), and the missionary ethnographer Jean Jacques Corbeil (1913-1990) who respectively studied and conducted collecting on the ceremony in the 1930s and in the 1950s respectively. Their studies led to the collection of images, texts and objects for museums and institutions in Britain, South Africa, and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). This transformation of sacred cultural belongings into museum objects, and the mobilities that resulted in their circulation were part of the making of empire. This was done within processes of colonial knowledge construction that were disruptive, extractive, and epistemologically violent. Ethnological studies and resultant ethnographic museums were part of colonial governance and control, within the broader contexts of indirect rule, which operated through the use of local systems to rule over colonised people
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Keywords
museum, photography, colonial ethnography, social anthropology, chisungu female