The special tour last Thursday of the Anthropology wing of the Museum collection was really fun. Although I have read about the ways in which every item is stored, seeing the storage system first hand was really amazing mainly because I could see the huge effort it took to design and construct this collection of 540,000 objects. I also appreciated the fact that our guide (I’m so sorry I forgot his name) cared so much about the preservation of these objects that he has been working on it since the seventies.
The most interesting part of the museum was the smudge room, the only room in the museum where a match can be lit. This relatively small room was built so that indigenous groups that visit the museum can perform smoke ceremonies. The room itself is very sterile, similar to the other parts of the storage facilities and yet various important rituals take place periodically in this room. He also said that groups come to the museum to perform smoke ceremonies on some of the objects in the collection, meaning that according to these indigenous populations, these objects do not lose their spiritual significance when they are removed from their place of origin. But when I saw all the objects themselves placed in climate controlled metal cabinets within the storage facilities, they looked so out of place, very far removed from their communities.