“A dialogue about the fieldwork of the various participants who were active in producing a natural history of northern Burma, and, by extension, the world.”

In January 1935, the Vernay-Hopwood Chindwin Expedition set out from Rangoon to explore the upper reaches of the “mighty Chindwin River” on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). The three-month expedition gathered the museum’s founding biological and anthropological collections from an under researched area to the east of Burma’s border with Assam and to the south of Tibet. Confluences explores the complex social life of this extraordinary enterprise through an assortment of objects that were both carried to the field and collected en route.

Structured as an itinerary, the exhibition reveals working relations among participants of every kind, whose encounters shaped the collections that were to enter the museum. It comprises a compelling selection of the expedition’s ethnological objects and specimens, documentation, photographs, and film footage, drawn together from across various departments of the AMNH and exhibited for the first time. The exhibition includes alternative, contemporary readings of the three-day sojourn among the Nagas as it was depicted in photographs and on film. A “sound collage” by Dr. Sentienla Toy Threadgill, a New York–based Ao Naga ethnomusicologist, made up of interviews and music, accompanies a brief segment of the silent 110-minute expedition film, The Vernay-Hopwood Chindwin Expedition to Northern Burma, 1935. Dr. Threadgill’s piece brings the expedition to the present, moving the film beyond its archival life to address some of the sonic sensibilities and cultural interactions of the Burma–India borderland. Overall, Confluences sets in motion a dialogue about the fieldwork of the various participants who were active in producing a natural history of northern Burma, and, by extension, the world.

---

A Focus Project curated by Erin L. Hasinoff, Bard Graduate Center–American Museum of Natural History postdoctoral fellow in museum anthropology. Focus Projects are small-scale academically rigorous exhibitions and publications that are developed and executed by Bard Graduate Center faculty and postdoctoral fellows in collaboration with students in our MA and PhD programs.