Journal of a Sabbatical

May 21, 2000

hair wrapping demo

Today's Bird Sightings:
Watchemoket Cove
29 mute swans
4 mallards
8 Canada geese
65 ring billed gulls
11 herring gulls
1 snowy egret
2 domestic geese
2 common terns

Today's Reading: Uttermost Part of the Earth by E. Lucas Bridges

Today's Starting Pitcher:
Ramón Martinez

Brunch at Downcity. A brief visit to the cove to see if the egrets are back in numbers yet. They aren't but the ring billed gulls are. Swarms of them. Various ages. No sign of the goslings we saw last week.

Then on to a presentation on Talking Drums of Africa at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. This was billed as a "family event" and there were hordes of small children swarming around. Bisi Kolawole and Fatai Idififoye, Yoruba drummers from Nigeria demonstrated "talking drums" and described the history and use of drums in Nigeria. Bummi Imonah demonstrated head wrapping. Well, actually she described traditional Nigerian clothing, with plenty of examples - for sale of course - and talked about how women cover themselves so the men won't be jealous. One wonders what four and five year olds made of that. The core of the program was her demonstration of hair braiding in the Nigerian style. She braided a young woman's hair while the fours and fives grew more and more restless. She passed around a catalog of braided hairstyles. The fours and fives began to whine and scream and run around the unbearably small space. At last, the hair braiding demonstration was done and drumming and dancing resumed. The little kids who volunteered to play the big drum were surprisingly good after a little instruction.

Afterwards we toured the museum, which I've always wanted to visit. Despite the fact that Haffenreffer began his collecting career with an interest in King Philip, and the fact that museum is located on Mount Hope - site of King Philip's death and the location of his village - the museum is heavy on Plains tribes' artifacts, African tribes' artifacts, artifacts from everywhere else. The main exhibit rooms seemed to be an exhibit on "this is the kinds of things anthropologists collect" with a smattering of everything and not much context or interpretation. A small exhibit hall off the main room had an excellent collection of Hopi katsina dolls, which did give good context and interpretation and which I enjoyed having visited the southwest a billion times. And downstairs was a special exhibit on Tibetans in exile in Nepal, Ladakh, etc. The photographs were outstanding and the show was well curated. That was probably the best thing in the museum.

Nancy said she thought the best thing in the museum was the gift shop, which had shelves and shelves of books on various of the indigenous cultures, again light on New England woodland tribes but with more of that than the actual museum displays.

Maybe my expectations for the museum were too high. But I honestly feel like I got a better idea of how the local people lived around here at the time the white people came from the Robert S. Peabody Museum at Phillips Academy in Andover. I guess I thought a place as world-renowned as the Haffenreffer would be better than anything in my own backyard.

The museum grounds, however, were gorgeous. The view of Mount Hope Bay is stunning. If it hadn't been so humid and overcast and my allergies so miserable, I would have enjoyed a walk in the woods.

Afterwards we did stop at Colt State Park and walked around among the lilacs and flowering trees for awhile as there was a bit of a fresh breeze coming off Narragansett Bay.