This is the first study to examine in detail ritual objects known as 'Lamak', a fascinating and unique form of ephemeral material culture which is a prominent feature of Balinese creativity.A lamak is a long narrow ritual hanging that is an essential requirement at almost all rituals in Bali. It is hung from altars and shrines at temple festivals and on festive holy days. Made usually of palm leaves, it is by nature ephemeral and it is made time and again. Even though permanent forms of the l...

In 2012, a chance encounter between a curator and a century-old expedition journal occurred in the archives of a Cambridge museum. The journal was written by a young anthropologist, Paul Denys Montague, and recorded his travels in the South Pacific Islands of New Caledonia in 1914, where he became fascinated with the culture of the local Kanak people. Returning to Cambridge at the outbreak of World War One, Montague deposited his journal and a collection of Kanak objects in the Museum of Arch...

In this cahier, art historians Alette Fleischer (PhD) and Bart Krieger (M.A.) unravel the hidden messages of the black clocks of the Parnassia Collection and categorize them in a novel way. They have aimed to contextualize the pendulum clocks au Noir in the historic timeframe they were created in and displayed (ca 1790-1830) and uncovered some of their iconographic secrets with links to the transatlantic slavetrade, Eurocentrism and the French Enlightenment. Moreover, the two art historians p...