Day 1 wrap-up

The unusual format of this weeklong event in Oxford, combined with several quick warnings that we would be videotaped and the tape might appear somewhere (even on television, I think it once said) actually had me speculating seriously as to whether we were being lured into an academic reality show and were going to be voted off one-by-one throughout the week.

But no, it’s actually just a very well-organized and innovative event using Mellon-Swayer funds. Everyone they invited (and we’re from numerous different fields) has some sort of professional interest in objects. For example, Jane Bennett is here, just to mention the one person who works in closest proximity to me in professional terms. Ian Hacking should be showing up tomorrow, to mention the other person from a “Department of Philosophy” background.

There are around 20 people involved in total, many of them either currently at Oxford or former students at Oxford, and a few of us are total outsiders. I’m one of only three who have never set foot in the Pitt-Rivers Museum before. It’s quite an impressive collection of millions of different objects from around the world– a case filled with knives from around the world, another with snowshoes/skis/ice skates from around the world, etc.

They first split us up into eight pairs and assigned each pair an object. I was paired up, as I knew in advance, with Oxford musicologist Eric Clarke. The object we were assigned was– a musical instrument, the LESIBA, said to be the only stringed wind instrument currently in use in the world. It is the national instrument of Lesotho.

We couldn’t play the one we were given, of course. It dates to 1905. But we did hear a recording, and the basic sound is surprisingly harmonica-like, though given the circular breathing of the musician there’s also a bit of a didgeridoo undertone.

Oh yes, the photo that I linked to isn’t very good. The lesiba looks like a bow for shooting arrows, though the string is much closer to the wood then on a bow. A small vulture feather is attached to one end of the string (which is twisted to a certain degree), and the musician blows on the feather. There are actually three sounds at once: that made by the feather, that made by the harmonics of the string, and that made by the vocal cords of the musician while playing. A Pitt-Rivers staff member there has built a replica and tried to play it, and he says it’s almost impossibly demanding.

In any case, it was an intriguing and challenging first day, and I look forward to tomorrow.

A big group dinner is coming up at a boathouse on the river, and I will pretend that it’s for my birthday.