by Ana Garcia-Casillas, 19 September 2024. Chair of the Educational Committee, Itiwana, Leiden University
How do traditional museums treat and present objects? What is the origin of the distinction between art and craftsmanship? Why have we in the last century moved away from teaching technical skills to children? These are some of the questions which were discussed during the visit of Itiwana (Leiden University's Study Association for Anthropology) to the Textile Research Centre in Leiden.
Itiwana students of anthropology at Leiden University visit the TRC, 18 September 2024.
Students of the Leiden degree of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology attend some classes that focus on museums and objects. For example, all students have to do a project during their first year in which they pick an object from the Wereldmuseum in Leiden and reimagine the way it is exhibited. This is why the Education Committee of Itiwana thought a visit to the TRC could be an important addition to their study.
Current exhibition at the TRC of 'traditional' Indian embroidery, worked with small mirrors made from glass, mica, and ... plastic. Photograph by Augusta de Gunzbourg.Around tea and cookies, Dr. Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood (director) and Christina de Korte (intern) incited the students to explore new approaches to the study of material culture and to question the way Anthropology has traditionally dealt with world regions or the study of objects. At the end some of the students who attended were asked to talk about their main takeaway:
“I was very interested in the topic of skills vs. creativity. How we have left behind the teaching of skills, and instead are encouraging children to ‘just be creative’, and how this relates to the late-medieval, Eurocentric division between art and craftsmanship. I felt very alluded to in the call for young people to learn technical skills again.” - Pablo, 21 years old, third year Anthropology student
Sample of Siberian, woolly mammoth hair (Mammuthus primigenius), from Siberia (TRC 2023.1510).“I was surprised by the discussion on the returning of museum objects, how in some cases having certain objects away from the modern nation state in which they were made can actually inspire diasporic communities and reconnect them to their roots.” - Iulia, 21 years old, third year Anthropology student
“I was left thinking about how the current exhibition showed the falseness of the traditional/modern dichotomy. We might imagine shisha embroidery to be ‘traditional’, and therefore ‘frozen in time’, but actually the technique and form have adapted to the changes in the technology of glassmaking, even using plastic nowadays.” - Szonja, 20 years old, second year Anthropology student
During the meeting Gillian and Christina talked about the diverse roles the TRC has adopted as an open access international hub for textile research. These roles ranged from the study of mammoth hair, within the context of the law against the smuggling of ivory, to safe-keeping a collection of Yemeni textiles, in collaboration with Yemeni diplomats. The Yemen collection at the TRC, it may be added, has inspired an award-winning, British/Yemeni fashion designer to use her cultural background to develop her own line of clothing. All the students were amazed at how such a seemingly small building in a little street of Leiden can play such a key role in international textile knowledge.
Kaftan from Morocco made out of a length of Japanese cloth for making a kimono sash (obi) (second half 20th century) (TRC 2001.0074).The visit concluded with a tour of the building and the TRC’s immense collection. Many students were excited to see boxes with tags of their countries, challenging the us/them division, which many traditional anthropological or ethnographic studies tend to emphasise: "we study them, we go to a museum to see things we have never seen before, from places which are far away." Instead, the students found themselves building connections between the debates they had just heard and the objects they had seen in their family’s house or the clothes they were wearing.
There is an increasing interest among younger generations to learn technical skills, and as we saw among the students of Itiwana, textile techniques, such as knitting, tailoring and mending one’s clothes or embroidering, are also being picked up again. An institute such as the Textile Research Centre can play a vibrant role in the fabric (no pun intended) of a university city such as Leiden.
From Itiwana, we hope the TRC can continue growing, and hope many more fellow students will be introduced to its workshops and exhibitions, as they complement, challenge and build on key questions of their studies, and fulfill a desire in their personal lives to go back to learn practical skills and to be more connected with the objects we use in our everyday lives.
