P Basu
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 55313 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | P Basu |
| NOMBRES | P |
| APELLIDO | Basu |
| FIRMA | BASU P |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Sussex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4536-9528 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 27 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 211 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1939 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
(Re)Sounding images
The first of two special sections exploring the relationships between sound and the photographic image. The section's articles by Darren Newbury, Richard Vokes, and Paul Basu are concerned with issues of sound, voice, and silence in relation to archival photographs. The introductory essay discusses these visual anthropologies of silence and voice, both acknowledging their debt to Elizabeth Edward's theorizing of the “orality of photographs,” but …
Voicing silences in the colonial photographic archive
Drawing on re‐engagement work with physical type portraits made by Government Anthropologist N. W. Thomas in West Africa in the early 20th century, the article discusses strategies of “re‐sounding images”’ to address silences in the colonial photographic archive. Acknowledging that archival silences may result both from acts of epistemic violence and from acts of resistance again such violence, the essay explores three approaches to bringing voic…
It is all about bringing the archive back into visibility
Anthropologist Paul Basu and filmmaker Christopher Thomas Allen discuss their collaborative documentary Ichi: Marks in time (2023), which documents the return of colonial‐era photographs to the Umudioka community in Neni, Nigeria. The film follows community responses to images from 1911 of facial scarification marks ( ichi ) taken by British anthropologist Northcote Thomas. Basu and Allen reflect on community‐initiated collaboration, the theory o…
Uli
It is one of the ironies of the European colonization of Africa that the same forces that were responsible for destroying indigenous ways of life were also concerned with recording them for posterity. In Southern Nigeria, in the early decades of the twentieth century, British colonial administration, as well as Christian missionary activity, had a devastating impact on all aspects of traditional Igbo culture and society. The cosmological order of…
Towards the pluriversal museum
Climate change, species extinction and accelerating inequalities are manifestations of a more fundamental crisis facing humanity: the global dominance of a capitalist/colonialist world order based on logics of extraction and exploitation. The modern, "universal" museum is implicated in this history. It is not only that the accumulation of exotic things was made possible through mercantile and colonial territorial expansion, but the transformation…
Pour un musée pluriversel
Changement climatique, disparition des espèces et accélération des inégalités sont les manifestations d’une crise plus fondamentale à laquelle fait face l’humanité : la domination globale d’un ordre colonialiste et capitaliste mondial fondé sur la logique d’extraction et d’exploitation. Le musée moderne « universel » joue un rôle dans cette histoire. Non seulement l’accumulation de choses exotiques était rendue possible par l’expansion territoria…
Hunting Down Home
‘Hunting Down Home’, the title of this chapter, is taken from a semi-autobiographical novel by a Scots-Canadian writer and sometime colleague, Jean McNeil. It is a novel about journeys – some imagined, some painfully real – in which the quest for one kind of home is often the flight from another. Its narrative crosses worlds: from Kodachrome coloured slides of southern Africa – in which occasionally appear glimpses of a mother never known and alw…
A museum for Sierra Leone
The introduction of museums and legislation to protect monuments, antiquities and artworks came late to British West Africa in relation to many other territories of the British Empire. The likes of Kenneth Murray, E. H. Duckworth and H. V. Meyerowitz, who tirelessly campaigned for a colonial museum policy, were only too aware that West Africa's past was being emptied out by the very hegemonic forces they represented. Toward the end of his speech …
Roots tourism as return movement
This chapter concerns with the contemporary phenomenon of 'roots tourism' in the Scottish Highlands and Islands: journeys made by people of Scottish Highland descent ordinarily living in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In diasporic contexts there are return movements such as Zionism and Rastafarianism, movements that are at once religious, political and aesthetic. In LaCapra's terms, the Highland Clearances emerge as the his…
Palimpsest Memoryscapes
This chapter explores tempting to employ an image of conflicting regimes of memory in Sierra Leone, drawing imaginary battle lines between 'indigenous' and 'colonizing' forms; it is this process of mnemonic creolization. It characterizes an opposition between competing regimes of memory, such that traditional mnemonic practices are regarded as being suppressed by modern historicizing ones, and local conceptualizations as being displaced by global…
Utopian archives, decolonial affordances Introduction to special issue
Colonial archives constituted a technology that enabled the collection, storage, ordering, retrieval and exchange of knowledge as an instrument of colonial governance. It is not surprising that when such archives were inherited by independent nation-states they were not given the authority previously granted them and have often been neglected. What, then, is the future of colonial archives in postcolonial nations? How should we rethink these arch…
Anthropology education and public engagement
This guest editorial considers educational initiatives in the field of anthropology, with a particular focus on what has been learnt from the RAI experiences in setting up the now aborted A-level
N.W. Thomas and colonial anthropology in British West Africa
As the first government anthropologist to be appointed by the British Colonial Office, Northcote Whitridge Thomas (1868‐1936) has earned a place in the footnotes of anthropological history. Historians of the discipline have discussed his career in West Africa in their wider explorations of the relationship between anthropology and colonial administration in the early twentieth century. Through this work, an orthodox account of Thomas has emerged …
Colonial Histories of Heritage
Journal Article Colonial Histories of Heritage: Legislative Migrations and the Politics of Preservation Get access Paul Basu, Paul Basu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Vinita Damodaran Vinita Damodaran Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 226, Issue suppl_10, 2015, Pages 240–271, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtu028 Published: 02 February 2015
Recasting the National Narrative
September 01 2013 Recasting the National Narrative: Postcolonial Pastiche and the New Sierra Leone Peace and Cultural Monument Paul Basu Paul Basu Paul Basu is Reader in Material Culture and Museum Studies at University College London and a managing editor of the Journal of Material Culture. He recently led a three-year research project resulting in the creation of the www.sierraleoneheritage.org digital heritage resource. [email protected] Sea…
Object Diasporas, Resourcing Communities
This article is concerned with pursuing the issue of transnational museological relationality and responsibility in the context of Sierra Leonean cultural heritage. In particular it draws upon vocabularies more commonly associated with the study of human migration to consider both historical and contemporary transnational flows of Sierra Leonean material culture and associated knowledges. It does so in order to help rethink the status, value, and…
Pathways to Anthropology
At the time of preparing this special doubleissue of Anthropology in Action, British anthropologists are debating the implications of current British government policy aimed at evaluating the infl uence of academic disciplines. One of the key functions of the Research Evaluation Framework (REF) is to measure the ‘impact’ of a subject-area’s activity, the extent to which it can be shown to have economic and social eff ects beyond the quoting circl…
Culture, Identity, Difference
In its 2002-3 Strategic Review, the Royal Anthropological Institute reasserted the importance of the public communication of anthropology for the future of the discipline. Two significant venues for public engagement activity were identified: museums and pre-university education contexts. We present an account of the development and piloting of an anthropology teaching and learning resource that bridges these two arenas. Complementing efforts to …
Introduction
While much scholarly work exists on both migration and material culture, there is remarkably little literature explicitly concerned with how these areas of study converge. In this introduction we suggest a number of points of departure for the exploration of the relationships between 'migrant worlds‚ and 'material cultures‚ and we link these points with the contributions to this Special Issue. We hope thereby to shift the theoretical framing of m…
Confronting the Past
Cultural heritage is not a priority in Sierra Leone. As one of the poorest countries in the world and one only gradually recovering from civil war, there are more immediate concerns. Despite long-term neglect, this article considers whether there is, however, a role for Sierra Leone's cultural heritage in post-conflict recovery. It examines two arenas for the production of Sierra Leone's national past: its list of proclaimed national monuments no…
Extending the educational reach of anthropology? Reflections on London Anthropology Day 2008
Highland Homecomings
The first full-length ethnographic study of its kind, Highland Homecomings examines the role of place, ancestry and territorial attachment in the context of a modern age characterized by mobility and rootlessness. With an interdisciplinary approach, speaking to current themes in anthropology, archaeology, history, historical geography, cultural studies, migration studies, tourism studies, Scottish studies, Paul Basu explores the journeys made to …
Macpherson Country
This paper explores the intertwining of personal or autobiographical narratives with broader cultural and historical narratives associated with particular regions, nations and diasporas. More particularly, it is concerned with the intertwining of surnames, place names and 'place-stories', and with notions of clanship, clanlore and clanlands, as resources used in the negotiation of self-identity among members of the transnational Scottish heritage…
My Own Island Home
The notion of 'home' has become a powerful motif in the contemporary popular and academic project to (re)locate identity in a globalized world of movement. Home is, however, also materialized in 'homeland' and, as the discourse of 'diaspora' has been ever more widely appropriated by a diverse range of dispersed populations, so the phenomenon of diasporic ' homecoming' has burgeoned - journeys, that is, in which members of diasporic communities 'r…
Navigating Leskernick
I hope this short, informal, navigational tour of the Leskernick Project web site will be useful to others who are considering electronic publication of archaeological and anthropological field research. This is not to suggest that it ought to stand as some kind of model: it is exemplary of nothing more than a continued experimentation with the form of this particular medium. As always, such tours - in real as well as virtual worlds - provide amp…
Introduction
While much scholarly work exists on both migration and material culture, there is remarkably little literature explicitly concerned with how these areas of study converge. In this introduction we suggest a number of points of departure for the exploration of the relationships between 'migrant worlds‚ and 'material cultures‚ and we link these points with the contributions to this Special Issue. We hope thereby to shift the theoretical framing of m…
Utopian archives, decolonial affordances Introduction to special issue
Colonial archives constituted a technology that enabled the collection, storage, ordering, retrieval and exchange of knowledge as an instrument of colonial governance. It is not surprising that when such archives were inherited by independent nation-states they were not given the authority previously granted them and have often been neglected. What, then, is the future of colonial archives in postcolonial nations? How should we rethink these arch…
Macpherson Country
This paper explores the intertwining of personal or autobiographical narratives with broader cultural and historical narratives associated with particular regions, nations and diasporas. More particularly, it is concerned with the intertwining of surnames, place names and 'place-stories', and with notions of clanship, clanlore and clanlands, as resources used in the negotiation of self-identity among members of the transnational Scottish heritage…
Object Diasporas, Resourcing Communities
This article is concerned with pursuing the issue of transnational museological relationality and responsibility in the context of Sierra Leonean cultural heritage. In particular it draws upon vocabularies more commonly associated with the study of human migration to consider both historical and contemporary transnational flows of Sierra Leonean material culture and associated knowledges. It does so in order to help rethink the status, value, and…
My Own Island Home
The notion of 'home' has become a powerful motif in the contemporary popular and academic project to (re)locate identity in a globalized world of movement. Home is, however, also materialized in 'homeland' and, as the discourse of 'diaspora' has been ever more widely appropriated by a diverse range of dispersed populations, so the phenomenon of diasporic ' homecoming' has burgeoned - journeys, that is, in which members of diasporic communities 'r…
Confronting the Past
Cultural heritage is not a priority in Sierra Leone. As one of the poorest countries in the world and one only gradually recovering from civil war, there are more immediate concerns. Despite long-term neglect, this article considers whether there is, however, a role for Sierra Leone's cultural heritage in post-conflict recovery. It examines two arenas for the production of Sierra Leone's national past: its list of proclaimed national monuments no…
N.W. Thomas and colonial anthropology in British West Africa
As the first government anthropologist to be appointed by the British Colonial Office, Northcote Whitridge Thomas (1868‐1936) has earned a place in the footnotes of anthropological history. Historians of the discipline have discussed his career in West Africa in their wider explorations of the relationship between anthropology and colonial administration in the early twentieth century. Through this work, an orthodox account of Thomas has emerged …
Colonial Histories of Heritage
Journal Article Colonial Histories of Heritage: Legislative Migrations and the Politics of Preservation Get access Paul Basu, Paul Basu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Vinita Damodaran Vinita Damodaran Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 226, Issue suppl_10, 2015, Pages 240–271, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtu028 Published: 02 February 2015
Towards the pluriversal museum
Climate change, species extinction and accelerating inequalities are manifestations of a more fundamental crisis facing humanity: the global dominance of a capitalist/colonialist world order based on logics of extraction and exploitation. The modern, "universal" museum is implicated in this history. It is not only that the accumulation of exotic things was made possible through mercantile and colonial territorial expansion, but the transformation…
Recasting the National Narrative
September 01 2013 Recasting the National Narrative: Postcolonial Pastiche and the New Sierra Leone Peace and Cultural Monument Paul Basu Paul Basu Paul Basu is Reader in Material Culture and Museum Studies at University College London and a managing editor of the Journal of Material Culture. He recently led a three-year research project resulting in the creation of the www.sierraleoneheritage.org digital heritage resource. [email protected] Sea…
Voicing silences in the colonial photographic archive
Drawing on re‐engagement work with physical type portraits made by Government Anthropologist N. W. Thomas in West Africa in the early 20th century, the article discusses strategies of “re‐sounding images”’ to address silences in the colonial photographic archive. Acknowledging that archival silences may result both from acts of epistemic violence and from acts of resistance again such violence, the essay explores three approaches to bringing voic…
Pour un musée pluriversel
Changement climatique, disparition des espèces et accélération des inégalités sont les manifestations d’une crise plus fondamentale à laquelle fait face l’humanité : la domination globale d’un ordre colonialiste et capitaliste mondial fondé sur la logique d’extraction et d’exploitation. Le musée moderne « universel » joue un rôle dans cette histoire. Non seulement l’accumulation de choses exotiques était rendue possible par l’expansion territoria…
Extending the educational reach of anthropology? Reflections on London Anthropology Day 2008
The relations between Oudh and the East India company, from 1785 to 1801
No specific history of Oudh has been written, except a recent work on the first two Nawabs by Dr. Ashirbadi Lai Srivastava, but none since Oudh came in contact with the English. General historians have dealt at some length with its relations with the Company during the periods of Warren Hastings and Wellesley, but only in general manner with the intervening period. I have endeavoured to trace, from both English and Persian sources, the state of O…
The Indian Historical Records Commission
Journal Article THE INDIAN HISTORICAL RECORDS COMMISSION Get access P. Basu P. Basu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, Volume 21, Issue 62, May 1946, Pages 27–32, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2281.1946.tb01089.x Published: 12 October 2007
Navigating Leskernick
I hope this short, informal, navigational tour of the Leskernick Project web site will be useful to others who are considering electronic publication of archaeological and anthropological field research. This is not to suggest that it ought to stand as some kind of model: it is exemplary of nothing more than a continued experimentation with the form of this particular medium. As always, such tours - in real as well as virtual worlds - provide amp…
My Own Island Home
The notion of 'home' has become a powerful motif in the contemporary popular and academic project to (re)locate identity in a globalized world of movement. Home is, however, also materialized in 'homeland' and, as the discourse of 'diaspora' has been ever more widely appropriated by a diverse range of dispersed populations, so the phenomenon of diasporic ' homecoming' has burgeoned - journeys, that is, in which members of diasporic communities 'r…
Macpherson Country
This paper explores the intertwining of personal or autobiographical narratives with broader cultural and historical narratives associated with particular regions, nations and diasporas. More particularly, it is concerned with the intertwining of surnames, place names and 'place-stories', and with notions of clanship, clanlore and clanlands, as resources used in the negotiation of self-identity among members of the transnational Scottish heritage…
Highland Homecomings
The first full-length ethnographic study of its kind, Highland Homecomings examines the role of place, ancestry and territorial attachment in the context of a modern age characterized by mobility and rootlessness. With an interdisciplinary approach, speaking to current themes in anthropology, archaeology, history, historical geography, cultural studies, migration studies, tourism studies, Scottish studies, Paul Basu explores the journeys made to …
Introduction
While much scholarly work exists on both migration and material culture, there is remarkably little literature explicitly concerned with how these areas of study converge. In this introduction we suggest a number of points of departure for the exploration of the relationships between 'migrant worlds‚ and 'material cultures‚ and we link these points with the contributions to this Special Issue. We hope thereby to shift the theoretical framing of m…
Confronting the Past
Cultural heritage is not a priority in Sierra Leone. As one of the poorest countries in the world and one only gradually recovering from civil war, there are more immediate concerns. Despite long-term neglect, this article considers whether there is, however, a role for Sierra Leone's cultural heritage in post-conflict recovery. It examines two arenas for the production of Sierra Leone's national past: its list of proclaimed national monuments no…
Extending the educational reach of anthropology? Reflections on London Anthropology Day 2008
Pathways to Anthropology
At the time of preparing this special doubleissue of Anthropology in Action, British anthropologists are debating the implications of current British government policy aimed at evaluating the infl uence of academic disciplines. One of the key functions of the Research Evaluation Framework (REF) is to measure the ‘impact’ of a subject-area’s activity, the extent to which it can be shown to have economic and social eff ects beyond the quoting circl…
Culture, Identity, Difference
In its 2002-3 Strategic Review, the Royal Anthropological Institute reasserted the importance of the public communication of anthropology for the future of the discipline. Two significant venues for public engagement activity were identified: museums and pre-university education contexts. We present an account of the development and piloting of an anthropology teaching and learning resource that bridges these two arenas. Complementing efforts to …
Object Diasporas, Resourcing Communities
This article is concerned with pursuing the issue of transnational museological relationality and responsibility in the context of Sierra Leonean cultural heritage. In particular it draws upon vocabularies more commonly associated with the study of human migration to consider both historical and contemporary transnational flows of Sierra Leonean material culture and associated knowledges. It does so in order to help rethink the status, value, and…
Recasting the National Narrative
September 01 2013 Recasting the National Narrative: Postcolonial Pastiche and the New Sierra Leone Peace and Cultural Monument Paul Basu Paul Basu Paul Basu is Reader in Material Culture and Museum Studies at University College London and a managing editor of the Journal of Material Culture. He recently led a three-year research project resulting in the creation of the www.sierraleoneheritage.org digital heritage resource. [email protected] Sea…
N.W. Thomas and colonial anthropology in British West Africa
As the first government anthropologist to be appointed by the British Colonial Office, Northcote Whitridge Thomas (1868‐1936) has earned a place in the footnotes of anthropological history. Historians of the discipline have discussed his career in West Africa in their wider explorations of the relationship between anthropology and colonial administration in the early twentieth century. Through this work, an orthodox account of Thomas has emerged …
Colonial Histories of Heritage
Journal Article Colonial Histories of Heritage: Legislative Migrations and the Politics of Preservation Get access Paul Basu, Paul Basu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Vinita Damodaran Vinita Damodaran Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 226, Issue suppl_10, 2015, Pages 240–271, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtu028 Published: 02 February 2015
Palimpsest Memoryscapes
This chapter explores tempting to employ an image of conflicting regimes of memory in Sierra Leone, drawing imaginary battle lines between 'indigenous' and 'colonizing' forms; it is this process of mnemonic creolization. It characterizes an opposition between competing regimes of memory, such that traditional mnemonic practices are regarded as being suppressed by modern historicizing ones, and local conceptualizations as being displaced by global…
Utopian archives, decolonial affordances Introduction to special issue
Colonial archives constituted a technology that enabled the collection, storage, ordering, retrieval and exchange of knowledge as an instrument of colonial governance. It is not surprising that when such archives were inherited by independent nation-states they were not given the authority previously granted them and have often been neglected. What, then, is the future of colonial archives in postcolonial nations? How should we rethink these arch…
Anthropology education and public engagement
This guest editorial considers educational initiatives in the field of anthropology, with a particular focus on what has been learnt from the RAI experiences in setting up the now aborted A-level
A museum for Sierra Leone
The introduction of museums and legislation to protect monuments, antiquities and artworks came late to British West Africa in relation to many other territories of the British Empire. The likes of Kenneth Murray, E. H. Duckworth and H. V. Meyerowitz, who tirelessly campaigned for a colonial museum policy, were only too aware that West Africa's past was being emptied out by the very hegemonic forces they represented. Toward the end of his speech …
Roots tourism as return movement
This chapter concerns with the contemporary phenomenon of 'roots tourism' in the Scottish Highlands and Islands: journeys made by people of Scottish Highland descent ordinarily living in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In diasporic contexts there are return movements such as Zionism and Rastafarianism, movements that are at once religious, political and aesthetic. In LaCapra's terms, the Highland Clearances emerge as the his…
Hunting Down Home
‘Hunting Down Home’, the title of this chapter, is taken from a semi-autobiographical novel by a Scots-Canadian writer and sometime colleague, Jean McNeil. It is a novel about journeys – some imagined, some painfully real – in which the quest for one kind of home is often the flight from another. Its narrative crosses worlds: from Kodachrome coloured slides of southern Africa – in which occasionally appear glimpses of a mother never known and alw…
Pour un musée pluriversel
Changement climatique, disparition des espèces et accélération des inégalités sont les manifestations d’une crise plus fondamentale à laquelle fait face l’humanité : la domination globale d’un ordre colonialiste et capitaliste mondial fondé sur la logique d’extraction et d’exploitation. Le musée moderne « universel » joue un rôle dans cette histoire. Non seulement l’accumulation de choses exotiques était rendue possible par l’expansion territoria…
Uli
It is one of the ironies of the European colonization of Africa that the same forces that were responsible for destroying indigenous ways of life were also concerned with recording them for posterity. In Southern Nigeria, in the early decades of the twentieth century, British colonial administration, as well as Christian missionary activity, had a devastating impact on all aspects of traditional Igbo culture and society. The cosmological order of…
Towards the pluriversal museum
Climate change, species extinction and accelerating inequalities are manifestations of a more fundamental crisis facing humanity: the global dominance of a capitalist/colonialist world order based on logics of extraction and exploitation. The modern, "universal" museum is implicated in this history. It is not only that the accumulation of exotic things was made possible through mercantile and colonial territorial expansion, but the transformation…
(Re)Sounding images
The first of two special sections exploring the relationships between sound and the photographic image. The section's articles by Darren Newbury, Richard Vokes, and Paul Basu are concerned with issues of sound, voice, and silence in relation to archival photographs. The introductory essay discusses these visual anthropologies of silence and voice, both acknowledging their debt to Elizabeth Edward's theorizing of the “orality of photographs,” but …
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