Scholar's Choice exhibition at Völkerkundemuseum

Collected 100 years ago by Victor Goldschmidt, numerous objects from Asia are on display at the
Völkerkundemuseum Heidelberg. He thus laid the foundations for numerous disciplines at Ruperto Carola such as sinology and ethnology. The Völkerkundemuseum and CATS scholars now conceived a new exhibition. Researchers from Asian and transcultural studies selected a favourite object from the museum's collection.

The result is a colourful mixture - cult objects, masks, statues, instruments, images - that reflects all spheres of life: love, ritual performance, religion, food, education, war, death. The exhibition illustrates the different approaches to the scientific indexing of objects, which illustrate a rich arc of tension between different ways of reading, and demonstrates how the view of the objects can change as a result of newly gained knowledge.

A
volume accompanying the exhibition was edited by
Prof. Axel Michaels, one of the founding directors of CATS, and Margarete Pavaloi, the director of the Völkerkundemusem, and published by Heidelberg University Publishing (HeiUp). 

The scholars who chose the pieces for the exhibtion will also introduce these in the
Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung (RNZ) in a new segment called "Lieblingsstücke" during the upcoming weeks. You can already read the
article by Prof. Christiane Brosius, the HCTS professor of
Visual and Media Anthropology about two depictions of lovers in India, as well as an
article by Prof. Axel Michaels about the economic and ritual significance of rice in India and Nepal. The latest
article written by
Prof. Barbara Mittler examines a Chinese lute, the pipa. In the weeks to follow, HCTS members Profs.
Nicolas Jaspert,
Monica Juneja and
Michael Radich will introduce their favorite objects in this segment.