Hamilton forges connections during visit to Stockholm

13 Mar 2015
Visiting the exhibition "The Storage – An Ethnographic Treasury", The Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm. Photo: Rose-Marie Westling/The Museum of Ethnography
13 Mar 2015

 

In February, NRF Research Chair in Archive & Public Culture Carolyn Hamilton, visited the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Sweden as a special guest. 

As part of the Museum’s series of lectures and discussions on the History of Southern Africa, she gave a public lecture, “‘The Zulu’ and the Archive: From the ‘pre-colonial’ to the ‘pre-tribal’’’, (18 February, 2015) to highlight and contextualise the temporary photographic exhibition, The Other Camera, curated by Paul Weinberg. 

She also gave a seminar on ‘Archives, Ancestors and the Contingencies of Time’ at the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University (16 February, 2015). 

Hamilton introduced APC’s Five Hundred Year Archive Project to the Museum staff and Director, Lotten Gustafsson Reinius, and worked closely with her host, the Africa Curator, Michael Barrett, on an assessment of the possibility of including various collections at the Museum in the Five Hundred Year Archive Project, notably those of Swedish missionaries active in the KwaZulu-Natal region in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.  

These include the collections of Jonas Fredrik Ljungqvist who lived in the Oskarsberg and Appelsbosch areas and who donated 261 objects to the museum in 1907 – the period when many Swedish missionaries around the world collected for the museum following a commission in preparation for the grand Missionary Exhibition in Stockholm the same year; as well as those of Johan Wahlberg, 1845; KA Carlson, 1894; Otto Witt, 1896 (coll. from Ekutandaneni, but earlier he also served in Rorke’s Drift); Ivar Oscar Trägårdh, 1906, 1907; I Walberg, Emtulwa, 1907; Johan Norenius, 1907; Anders Kempe, 1907; H Facklam, 1926 (collected 1890-1899); and John Ekelöf, 1942 (collected 1878, Port Natal). 

Hamilton and Barrett visited the Church of Sweden Mission Archives in Uppsala and began the work of connecting the museum objects to the extensive related documentary archives, a task not previously attempted. The potential productivity of the connections that emerged indicates that there is a thesis topic of great richness waiting for the right student.