Congo Great Lakes Community/Session 3: Community fieldwork

Written by Carys Wilkins, MA Material and Visual Culture, UCL Anthropology



Horniman Museum, session 3

The third session was organised by Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp (Assistant Curator at Horniman Museum and Co-ordinator for the MA in Museum studies at UCL), and took place at the Horniman Museum. The session aimed to introduce the participants to fieldwork and collections’ documentation. The session began with theoretical workshops. The group learnt about anthropology, fieldwork, ethnography and the role of an anthropologist. The session also involved a practical workshop, for which the participants worked in small groups. The participants learnt a range of skills including how to research for greater detail about an object, how to tell a story from multiple viewpoints and how to create an ethnographic field diary. At the end of the session, all participants were given a fieldwork diary and asked to investigate either the choice of objects from the Horniman or UCL collections included in the diary, or of objects of their choice using the skills gained during the two workshops.