Stanford University.
The students, from
these primary sources,
generate their own perspectives
and ideas about things.
We started this class
to really integrate
the Stanford University
archeology collections, which
is a global collection of
ethnographic and archeological
materials, with the
campus community
and give students an opportunity
to do their own knowledge
production, hands on research
with material culture
and actually put out
an exhibit at the end.
The theme of this year's exhibit
is Oceania and Pacific links.
So we have objects from Hawaii,
and from Papua New Guinea,
and from New Zealand.
We're trying to tell
a collective story
about life in the Pacific.
Stanford's always been
involved in the Pacific world,
since the ocean voyages of Jane
Stanford and her kind of cohort
in the turn of the 20th century.
We have students,
faculty, staff on campus
from that area of the world.
And so it's a really
great way to connect
to the local community,
which itself is global,
to the world around them
through these material culture
collections.
Students chose what they
were most interested in,
based either on the topic
or region of the world.
And once they
chose their object,
that object went through
data verification.
And then in addition,
the students
do research on
that object and see
what they can find out about
it for their interpretive text
on the labels for
their exhibits.
I chose the tanoa
'ava, the kava bowl.
The kava bowl is made from
the ifilele tree in Samoa.
So it's about this
large. it has many legs.
It's fairly deep.
And so the kava root is
ground up and then mixed
with water in the bowl.
Students really go through
that hands on process
of installation themselves.
So we do a lot of training
on object handling,
on how to do safe mount
making, on exhibit design.
We talk with colleagues
over at the Cantor.
There's a responsibility
to the objects
and to the stories they tell and
to the cultures they represent.
The idea that whatever
they have in terms
of ideas and
interpretation is going
to be out there in the
world for the public to see,
for dissenting community
members potentially to see,
is part of the responsibility
that they take on
and part of what makes
this class special.
For more, please visit
us at Stanford.edu.
