Science versus Rumour: Artefaction and Counter-Narrative in the Egyptian Rooms of the British Museum (2012)
Luckhurst, Roger (Author)
History and Anthropology
Volume: 23, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 257-269
Edition Details: Part of a special issue, “Rethinking Encounters, Ethnography and Ethnology: Continuities and Ruptures”
Language: English
Stories of the mummy's curse persist, despite efforts of the enlightened museum to dismiss these tales as superstition. This article follows the story of one particular cursed artefact in the British Museum, using archives and other resources to reconstruct the true story behind the circulated rumour. The paper concludes that the mummy's curse is a displaced account of the violence of colonial and museal appropriation of objects, a counter-narrative of historical things that resist dispossession by the process of artefaction undertaken by museums.
...MoreDescription On the “mummy's curse” as “a displaced account of the violence of colonial and museal appropriation of objects.” (from the abstract)
Article Davies, Surekha; Whitehead, Neil L. (2012) From Maps to Mummy-Curses: Rethinking Encounters, Ethnography and Ethnology. History and Anthropology (pp. 173-182).
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