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Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

 

Dr Anita Herle: Senior Research Fellow and Emeritus Professor

Anita Herle was Professor of Museum Anthropology and Senior Curator at MAA, with responsibility for Pacific, Americas and Photographic collections until September 2023. For over 25 years, she has worked to make collections accessible to communities of origin and has been involved in numerous collaborative research and exhibition projects at MAA and in Torres Strait, Fiji, Vanuatu and Canada.

Her ongoing research explores a range of ethnographic, disciplinary and colonial contexts for collections cared for by MAA. Within the early history of British anthropology, she has explored the intersection between different knowledge systems, the complex relations that develop in the anthropological field and the potency of objects and photographs in relational encounters.

Anita completed a long-term project with Dr Jude Philp (University of Sydney), in collaboration with Islander communities, to publish Recording Kastom: Alfred Haddon's Journals from the Torres Strait and New Guinea, 1888 and 1898. The book won the Australian Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime History Book Prize in 2022. She led a multidisciplinary project on colour culminating in an exhibition at MAA COLOUR: Art, Science & Power (26 July 2022 – 23 April 2023) and a virtual exhibition.

Current research includes: Museum histories, nature/culture relations with reference to the Amazonian practice of tapirage (changing the colour of feathers on living parrots), and exploring museum objects as repositories of environmental and cultural knowledge.

Publications

Key publications: 

Herle, Anita and Mark Elliott (2024) ‘Un-disciplining the Museum? Changing Practices of Care, Knowledge and Display’, Journal of Museum Anthropology. No. 37.

Herle, Anita (2024) ‘Value in things’ MAA Digital Lab Blog https://www.maadigitallab.org/blog/2024/05/21/value-in-things/

Herle, Anita (2023) ‘Curating Colour’, UCM Blog https://www.museums.cam.ac.uk/blog/2023/12/22/curating-colour-art-science-power/

Herle, Anita (2023) ‘Introduction’, In Virginia-Lee Web and Jonathan Fogel (eds) An English Girl in New Guinea: Kathleen Haddon’s Journal and Photographs from New Guinea, 1914. San Francisco: Premier Arts Editions and J.M. Fogel Media

Herle, Anita (2022) Colour: Art, Science and Power. Cambridge: MAA

Herle, Anita (2022) ‘Displaying, creating and mobilizing value in a museum exhibition’. Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value. In Howard Morphy and Robyn McKenzie (eds). Abington and New York: Routledge

Herle, Anita and Wright, Duncan (2022) ‘Alfred Haddon: A ‘palaeontologist’ in the Torres Strait’. In Hilary Howes, Tristen Jones and Matthew Spriggs (eds.) Uncovering Pacific Pasts, Histories of Archaeology in Oceania. Australian National University Press, 171-184

Herle, Anita and Jude Philp (2022) ‘Decolonising Anthropology’s Archive’: Alfred Haddon’s Journals from the Torres Strait and New Guinea, 1888 and 1898’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, No. 35, 24-45

Herle, Anita (2021) ‘Cambridge Anthropology and Torres Strait Islander Kastom', UCM Blog https://www.museums.cam.ac.uk/blog/2021/10/20/decolonising-the-archive-cambridge-anthropology-and-torres-strait-island-kastom/

Herle, Anita and Jude Philp (2020) Recording Kastom: Alfred Haddon's Journals from the Torres Strait and New Guinea, 1888 and 1898. Sydney: Sydney University Press 

Herle, Anita (2018) ‘Displaying Colonial Relations: from Government House in Fiji to the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’, Museum & Society, 16 (2): 279 – 297

Herle, Anita, Jude Philp and Jocelyne Dudding (2015)  ‘Reactivating Visual Histories: Haddon’s photographs from Mabuyag 1888, 1898’. In Ian McNiven and Garrick Hitchcock (eds) Goemulgaw Lagal: Cultural and Natural Histories of the Island of Mabuyag, Torres Strait. Brisbane: Memoirs of the Queensland Museum Volume 8 (1): 253-288

Herle, Anita (2013) ‘Exhibitions as Research: Displaying the Technologies that Make Bodies Visible’. In S. Dudley and K. Message (eds.) Museum Worlds: Advances in Research. Berghahn, Vol. 1: 113 – 135

Herle, Anita and Lucie Carreau (2013) Chiefs & Governors: Art and Power in Fiji. Cambridge: MAA

Herle, Anita (2012) ‘Creating the Anthropological Field in the Pacific’. In Kate Fullagar (ed.) The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformation since the eighteenth century. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 185-218

Herle, Anita and Haidy Geismar (2010) Moving Images: John Layard, Fieldwork and Photography in Malakula Since 1914. Crawford House Press/University of Hawaii Press.

Herle, Anita (2009) ‘John Layard long Malakula 1914–1915: the Potency of Field Photography’. In Christopher Morton and Elizabeth Edwards (eds.). Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame. Farnham: Ashgate, 241-264.

Herle, Anita, Mark Elliott and Rebecca Empson (2009) Assembling Bodies: Art, Science & Imagination. Cambridge: MAA

Herle, Anita (2008) ‘Relational Objects: Connecting People and Things through Pasifika Styles’.  In Rosanna Raymond and Amiria Salmond (eds.) Pasifika Styles: Artists inside the Museum. Otago University Press. 2008 (pp. 55-72)

Herle, Anita, Jude Philp, and Leilani Bin Juda (2007) ‘The Journey of the Stars: Gab Titui a Cultural Centre for the Torres Strait’. In Nick Stanley (ed.) The Future of Indigenous Museums. Berg, 93-116

Herle, Anita (2006) ‘Transforming Things: art and politics on the Northwest Coast’. In Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.) Making Things Public. Karlsruhe: Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie

Herle, Anita and Andrew Moutu (2004) Paired Brothers: Concealment and Revelation. Iatmul Ritual Art from the Sepik, Papua New Guinea. Cambridge: MAA

Herle, Anita (2004) ‘Objects, Agency and Museums: Continuing dialogues between the Torres Strait and Cambridge’. In Laura Peers and Alison Brown (eds.) Museums and Source Communities. Routledge, 194-207

Herle, Anita and Jude Philp (1998) Torres Strait Islanders: an Exhibition Marking the Centenary of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition. Cambridge: MAA

Herle, Anita (1998) ‘Introduction: Cambridge and the Torres Strait’ and ‘The life-histories of objects: collections of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait’. In Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse (eds.) Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-22, 77-105

Herle, Anita (1994) ‘Museums and Shamans: A Cross-Cultural Collaboration’, Anthropology Today. Vol. 10, No 1: 2-5

Senior Research Fellow and Emeritus Professor
A colour photograph of Anita Herle, Curator of Anthropology at MAA
Not available for consultancy