This book deals with the origins of the present-day National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, and covers the period from 1816 to 1883.

With the foundation of the Royal Cabinet of Rarities in The Hague in 1816, a transformation took place from mainly private collections to national state-owned collections. The founding of the Royal Cabinet was one of the first attempts to create something like a National Museum. This book traces the purposes and motives of private collecting and the emergence of cabinets of curiosities, the composition of the collections, and the move towards a National Museum. At the time of its establishment, the Royal Cabinet of Rarities consisted of a bequest of mainly Chinese objects, objects from the Royal House, and objects concerning the national history of the Netherlands. However, the first director of this Royal Cabinet, R.P. van de Kasteele, actively stimulated civil servants and travellers to collect for the cabinet and before long, the focus moved to Japan. Through the VOC settlement at Deshima, VOC officials had a unique access to things Japanese. The three main collectors in Japan in the first half of the nineteenth century were Jan Cock Blomhoff, Johannes van Overmeer Fisscher, and Philip Franz Von Siebold.

Von Siebold established himself and his private collection in Leiden in 1832. This collection was considered a branch of the cabinet in The Hague, initially known as Rijks Japansch Museum Von Siebold. Conrad Leemans, then director of the Rijksmuseum voor Oudheden (National Museum of Antiquities), took over the management from Von Siebold in 1859. In 1864, the name changed to Rijks Ethnographisch Museum (National Museum of Ethnography). Leemans concentrated on the Netherlands East Indies, present-day Indonesia. His successor, Serrurier, who took over in 1880, was the first director with an ethnological background. Meanwhile, The Royal Cabinet in The Hague was popular with the public until its closure in 1883 when the ethnographic collections were finally united in Leiden, and where they still form the basis of the National Museum of Ethnology.

Rudolf Effert studied Cultural Anthropology in Leiden and obtained his Ph.D. in 2003. His research concerns the history of Dutch Ethnography and Cultural Anthropology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on which he has published several monographs and articles, including Vol. 7 in the CNWS Publications Series. This book is based on extensive research in the archives of the Royal Cabinet of Rarities. In this book, Effert proposes new perspectives on the relationship between the three main collectors in Japan in the first half of the nineteenth century and he argues that the scholarly contributions of two of them, Cock Blomhoff and Overmeer Fisscher, have been seriously underestimated.

(In English, 340 pp. ill., incl. index, bibl. and annexes)

(In English, 260 pp. ill.)

Connecting and Correcting is a case study of Sami healers in Porsanger, Finnmark, Norway, and focuses on two Coastal Sami healers, their worldview and healing practices. Barbara Miller explores the cultural and historic context of Sami healing practices, most notably Sami folk beliefs, the Laestadian branch of Lutheranism, and the changes in the discourse on the noaidi , a Sami term that is often translated as ?shaman'. As she point out, healers today may be connected historically to the noaidi of the past, but they cannot be identified with the noaidi . The healers are Christian and conceive of their healing gift as a special connection to God. This gift resembles important Laestadian concepts. In Laestadianism the ?congregation of the reborn' holds the Keys to Heaven, which are the binding and unbinding keys received from the Savior.

Barbara Miller conducted fieldwork from 1995-2006 and made extensive interviews with healers and their patients. These interviews comprise a great part of the book. She was in the rare position to witness the transfer of the healing gift between her two main informants, a process that occurred in the years 2000-2002.

(In English, 300 pp. ill.)

Since the 1980s, the study of material culture has become a central focus in cultural anthropology. This book explores the philosophical roots and reviews recent studies of this anthropological discourse. Based on his own experience of working intensively with museum collections throughout the world, Pieter ter Keurs proposes a new approach towards material objects.

It is now generally acknowledged that material objects are dynamic entities in culture. In this study the author suggests that this flexible approach towards form and meaning is, however, not useful without fully recognizing the materiality of the object. He argues that the inherent static nature of matter is crucial in shaping cultural realities. Objects are best seen as items in which reality is materialized, or condensed . Apart from condensation he looks at the opposite process of evaporation, namely of extracting meanings from their material bases when viewed in different contexts.

The concrete ethnographic examples illustrating this model come from Papua New Guinea (the Siassi Islands) and Indonesia (Enggano Island).

On the Siassi Islands extensively decorated wooden bowls play a major role in local ritual life and in the trade with neighbouring people. The designs on the bowls can be interpreted as being part of the mariam complex: a system of mythical beings that was of crucial importance in pre-Christian Siassi. The mariam beings no longer appear during rituals, but their presence is secured (condensed) in the carvings the Siassi people still make.

On Enggano Island the main designs used in the woodcarvings represent images of slain enemies. In former ritual life the carvings were meant to secure the welfare of society and to stimulate fertility of the people and the soil. Nowadays the people of Enggano no longer remember much of their old culture. In Jakarta their woodcarvings have acquired a new meaning, in the sense that they are found for sale as tourist items representing indigenous "primitive" objects. The author introduces the concept evaporation to indicate that although the materiality of the objects is similar (they "look" the same), their meanings have completely changed.

Pieter ter Keurs is curator for Indonesian collections at the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde (National Museum of Ethnology), Leiden, the Netherlands.

(In English, 240 pp. ill.)

Site-Seeing: Places in Culture, Time and Space is a collection of essays about people ascribing meaning to places, a phenomenon found in all cultures and throughout history. The essays are presented from both an interdisciplinary and a cross-cultural point of view. The case studies in this volume show how a tree in Sri Lanka, a fortress in the Netherlands, a cave in China, a market place in Papua New Guinea, a shopping mall in Jakarta and a burial place in Egypt, have been places of worship, wonder, love, respect and inspiration. People interact with these places, thereby transforming the location and giving it new meanings. It is because of the way that people use these places that the sites can come alive time and time again.

The authors in this volume are all experts in their field, and include an art historian, an anthropologist, an Egyptologist, as well as scholars of the language and culture studies of India and China . They found common ground by looking at the phenomenon of meaningful places from the perspective of users and usage. Pragmatics, a term borrowed from the field of linguistics, offered a useful model to approach the heterogeneity of the places discussed. Pragmatics is usually defined as the study of the way in which language is used in particular situations; it is therefore concerned with the function of words as opposed to their morphology. It is this approach that the various authors have applied to the concept of meaningful places.

This is the first time that scholars from such diverse, scholarly backgrounds have worked together on the topic of ?meaningful places' worldwide. The volume demonstrates the existence of both parallels and differences in what is in itself a pan-human phenomenon: people's intimate attachment to specific sites.

With essays by Karel R. van Kooij, Kitty Zijlmans, Oliver Moore, Pieter ter Keurs, René van Walsem and Wilfried van Damme.

(In English, 150 pp.+ X, ill.)

Visual anthropology has many faces. One of them is using the camera in anthropological fieldwork. It is this application that we prefer to call Visual Ethnography. Essential to this approach is its direct connection to anthropology as an academic endeavour. Although visual ethnographers situate their practice within anthropology as an academic discipline they have, for long, complained that writing anthropology neglects the theoretical and ethnographic value of their contributions. In this volume, the complaint was turned into a challenge, and the encounter between the two approaches is displayed on its pages.
Renowned writing and filming anthropologists engage in a dialogue by which they explore new understandings of aspects of specific realities, that visual representation has made possible. Examples are: the relation between vision and reliving passed experiences through film, visibility as an existential feature of identity, sociality as embodied practice, ritual space and its representation in text, by means of maps or in the image, and the inherent narrative of lived experience.
The visual ethnographers in this volume discuss the methods they have applied and the choices they have made during the production process of particular films and explore the ethnographic value of their projects. Ethnographic filmmakers and anthropological writers, in addition, question the impact of cinematographic form on ethnographic content.
The film fragments that are discussed in the various chapters have been added to the volume on a DVD.

Contributors to this volume are (in order of appearance): Dirk Nijland, Jos Platenkamp, Erik de Maaker, Yasuhiro Omori, Jan van Bremen, Jean Lydall & Ivo Strecker, Carla Risseeuw, Rossella Ragazzi, Bert van den Hoek, Bal Gopal Shrestha, Karl Heider, Nadine Wanono, Sabine Luning, Peter I. Crawford, Metje Postma, Colette Piault, and Paul Henley.

(In English, 428 pp. ill. with DVD. This DVD is designed for stand-alone players (MTSC/PAL/SECAN); PC: Windows Media Player)

OUT OF PRINT, BUT...
Unfortunately, this book is out of print at our office. But the book was published in cooperation with Intervention Press, Denmark, and they still have copies available.

'(...) an exciting and much needed reference work for research in visual ethnography.' - Eduardo da Veiga in Visual Anthropology 20:4 (2007), 315-317.

Durante los tres últimos siglos prehispánicos artistas alfareros de la ciudad sagrada de Cholula, y de otros lugares del centro y sur de México elaboraron finas vasijas polícromas con motivos parecidos a los de los libros pintados del centro de Mesoamérica. Éstas ahora se conocen como cerámica polícroma tipo códice del estilo Mixteca-Puebla. Desde principios del siglo XX los especialistas han reconocido que fueron una de las más complejas cerámicas de Mesoamérica y que sus motivos pintados contienen información sobre la cosmovisión antigua; sin embargo, hasta ahora no se había hecho un análisis extensivo de su iconografía.

Este estudio se enfoca en la interpretación de la iconografía pintada en una muestra grande de cerámica tipo códice procedente del valle de Puebla-Tlaxcala, el estado de Oaxaca, el centro del estado de Veracruz y la cuenca de México, que son las regiones donde estas vasijas se elaboraron y usaron. El objetivo central es el análisis de los diferentes temas iconográficos pintados en las vasijas, es decir, de los complejos de motivos que suelen ocurrir juntos en un mismo objeto y que muestran un arreglo estándar. Varios de estos complejos se asocian a ciertas formas de vasijas o a ciertas regiones geográficas. También, interesantemente, refieren a algunas importantes prácticas rituales en Mesoamérica y a conceptos asociados a ellas, como piedad, ofrenda, contacto con la divinidad, preciosidad, oscuridad o misterio. Así, los motivos pintados en las vasijas debieron ser mensajes pictográficos que referían a su uso ritual. Además, la forma de las vasijas y su alta calidad sugieren que muchas de ellas eran parte de la vajilla reservada para banquetes festivos. En las crónicas coloniales está bien documentado que esos grandes banquetes comunales, donde la comida era el principal medio de expresión, eran parte central de las celebraciones religiosas, y de las festividades de la nobleza, del gobierno y de la familia.

Las vasijas tipo códice fueron objetos diseñados para cuestiones ceremoniales; algunas de ellas debieron ser contenedores para ofrendas, otras eran parte de la vajilla para banquetes festivos. Los artistas pintores les plasmaron mensajes –esenciales, repetitivos y formales- que referían a los principales intereses rituales en la región Mixteca-Puebla. Hoy, después de 500 años, todavía es posible interpretar la pictografía para aproximarnos a los mensajes que las convirtieron en vasijas para ceremonia.

(In Spanish, 296 pp. richly ill., incl. poster)

The archaeological site of Chichén Itzá, one of the best known ancient Maya cities, is located in the northern section of the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico.
Chichén Itzá has figured prominently in both past and present discussions on the Terminal Classic and Early Postclassic periods in the northern Maya lowlands. Based on archaeological information and information derived from ethnohistorical sources, this city can be dated to a period from circa A.D. 700 to circa A.D. 1250, with its apogee placed between about A.D. 800 to A.D. 1050. The past and present discussions were directed specifically towards the origin of the inhabitants of the city, the arrival of K'uk'ulkán (“Feathered Serpent”), the origin of non-Mayan (“Toltec”) architecture and sculptural programmes at the site, and the model of its political organization.
The centre of Chichén Itzá is dominated by a raised platform, which harbours buildings now known as El Castillo (The Castle), the Great Ballcourt, and the Temple of the Warriors. These buildings contain various non-Mayan architectural and sculptural traits. Buildings south of the centre, erected in a regional Maya style, contain a large number of inscribed monuments (mostly lintels) carrying long hieroglyphic texts, which provide Chichén Itzá with the largest corpus of surviving inscriptions in the northern Maya lowlands. Chichén Itzá figures prominently in a wide range of ethnohistorical sources from the Colonial period, such as the “Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán” by Fray Diego de Landa and the “Relaciones Geográficas” by various authors, all in Spanish, and the so-called “Books of Chilam Balam” of Chumayel, Maní, and Tizimín, all in Yucatec Maya.
In this study Erik Boot discusses the southern Maya lowland origin of the inhabitants of Chichén Itzá, the arrival of K'uk'ulkán and the introduction of so-called Toltec architecture and iconography, the identification of both gods and human beings in the inscriptions, and the political organization at Chichén Itzá. He presents extensive and detailed analyses of architectural and sculptural programmes, hieroglyphic inscriptions, and the Yucatec Maya “chronicles” from the Books of Chilam Balam.
(In English, 580 pp. ill., incl. bibl., appendices and a Dutch summary)

'This book will be indispensable to all Mayanists with serious interests in the Late Terminal Classic and Postclassic periods of that civilisation's history' - Prudence M. Rice in Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 61, 2005.

A la fin du XIXe siècle, les missionaires jugeaient les Inuit "inconvertissables". Un siècle plus tard, les aînés de l'Arctique canadien revendiquent leur identité chrétienne, soulignant avec fierté les concordances entre le christianisme et leurs traditions millénaires. Ce livre offre quelques pistes pour comprendre ce retournement de situation.
(En Français, 560 pp., avec photogr., bibl. et annexes)

See also: Arctic Studies