Journey of a Visual Anthropologist with Ilisa Barbash, Curator of Visual Anthropology at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology

Two women peering at tableware in the Resetting The Table exhibit

Transcript

Jennifer Berglund  00:04

Welcome to HMSC Connects!, where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the exhibits team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and I’ll be your host. Today, I’m speaking with Ilisa Barbash, the curator of Visual Anthropology for the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and a documentary filmmaker. In this episode, Ilisa describes her journey through visual anthropology, from film to Peabody curator. We also discuss an upcoming photography exhibition for the Peabody Museum’s Gardner Fellowship, which Ilisa curates. This year’s exhibition, titled Shehuo: Community Fire, features the work of Zhang Xiao, who explores the transformation of Shehuo, a traditional spring festival held in rural northern China that coincides with the Lunar New Year. It opens on May 13. Here’s Ilisa. Ilisa Barbash, welcome to the show. 

Ilisa Barbash  01:25

Hi, Jennie. It’s wonderful to be here.

Jennifer Berglund  01:31

You first decided to pursue documentary film after attending the Margaret Mead Documentary Film Festival in New York. Describe that experience, and what about it captivated you?

Ilisa Barbash  01:45

I grew up across the street from the Museum of Natural History, and after college, moved back into my childhood home and looked around New York. I was interested in going into publishing, and across the street from me at the Museum of Natural History was the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and I started attending that and found that at the time, it was very loose. You could go into four of different screening rooms at any moment, and I saw all of these wonderful worlds being portrayed on film, and I had always liked to travel. I had done my junior year abroad in France and thought, “Wow, this is a great way to look at the world, to talk about the world, and communicate ideas about the world.”

Jennifer Berglund  02:37

It must have been something that grew up across the street from the American Museum of Natural History. You were telling me before that when you were commuting back and forth from school, you would walk through the building to get home. 

Ilisa Barbash  02:47

Yeah, well, at the time I was growing up there, New York was a really different place, and the Upper West Side was known to be kind of dangerous, and you could get mugged on Central Park West. And on my way home, I would skip Central Park West. I’d go from the 81st Street Crosstown into the entrance of the museum on Central Park West and run through the museum to get home, and part of that was because the blue whale was hanging over a hall that I had to go through, and I was so afraid the whale would fall on me. And I would end up wandering through the halls that Franz Boas would have created along with Margaret Mead, and ended up at this giant canoe and then would leave the museum and cross the street to go home. 

Jennifer Berglund  03:43

I feel like having that experience as a kid, it’s such a unique opportunity to experience the world in a small place, and so it’s very appropriate, I think, that you attended the Margaret Mead Film Festival and were inspired in that way.

Ilisa Barbash  03:59

Yeah, and apparently the apartment I grew up on how to good view of Margaret Meads’ tower office. Only at the time, I didn’t know that. Someone came to my house and told me that later. Margaret Mead was one of the world’s most important anthropologists not only because of her fieldwork, but also because she really publicized anthropology very well. And she had a longtime job at the Museum of Natural History, where she wrote many, many books about her fieldwork, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” other important works, and she really was this wonderful figure. Sort of tiny woman who walked around with a large cloak and a staff, and there was a great film that the filmmaker Jean Rouch, who was one of the preeminent French filmmakers made about Margaret Mead and he goes into her office and he films her and she was rather old fashioned. She was talking about “my people,” “your people,” and the film ends with her standing outside at the entrance to Central Park West on 77th street wearing her cloak and carrying her cane. And Jean Rouch is waving to her saying “bye bye Marguerite. Bye bye. Say goodbye, Marguerite.” I always love that these two seminal figures in ethnographic film and anthropology having this very friendly relationship captured on film.

Jennifer Berglund  05:41

After this Margaret Mead Film Festival, you were so inspired you decided you wanted to pursue documentary film and specifically visual anthropology. Can you describe what visual anthropology is? 

Ilisa Barbash  05:53

When I arrived at the University of Southern California to study visual anthropology, we define visual anthropology very broadly, and it would have been at the time, the visual expression of culture, but what we were studying was more how to document the expression of culture. And that could be either through photography, or through film or video, and I chose the film/video avenue, and that meant going out into what we called back then, and Margaret Mead called back then, “the field,” which would be someplace other than where one lived. Although anthropologists document their homes and their own surroundings now, but it would be going somewhere else. Requirements were learning the language that people spoke, spending a significant amount of time with the people you were documenting, trying to build a kind of collaborative relationship with some reciprocity. We were told no, you never pay your subjects, but I always found ways to reimburse people through airline tickets or something to compensate them for the time they spent talking to me and missing out on some of their lives when I was interviewing them, and then performing their lives in a way, allowing me to have a window into how they live their lives and documenting that on film and video. I think the idea that an anthropologist couldn’t go into the field, and do extractive research, and make their career based on that, and leave the people that they have been studying behind, maybe forever, is outdated, antiquated and ethically problematic. Even when I started visual anthropology, we were told, as I said, don’t pay your subjects, but people were. I studied with Tim Asch, and he had set up a fund to support one of his film subjects, a Balinese healer named Jero, and other anthropologists told me they had, say, gotten money from doing a BBC documentary with the Mende in Sierra Leone and built a school. There’s always something complicated by compensating people. You don’t want people to answer your questions because they’re being paid because you run the risk of they’re telling you things that they think you want to hear, and that has happened to anthropologists; they’ve been led down corridors that were exciting to them, but turned out to not necessarily be true. And also, there’s a certain amount of competition among people if you introduce cash into a particular village that doesn’t have a lot of cash, doesn’t have a lot of resources. So those kinds of compensations need to be thought out very carefully in collaboration with the people that one is working with.

Jennifer Berglund  09:11

When you first started your degree, you’re in LA, and it was an exciting time to be in LA. 

Ilisa Barbash  09:17

Well, at the time, we took a fieldwork class all together, and everybody had their own field sites, and one person had sororities and fraternities at USC. And as we talked about it in class, it was really interesting to see how upper class people formed alliances in a way that would be similar to the ways in which we would look at, say, hunter gatherer societies where alliances were formed between families, and certain people could belong to certain fraternities and certain people belong to certain sororities and certain sororities would date only people from certain fraternities. So this idea of all of our lives being structured by concerns about economics and hierarchies and alliances really struck home. I did field work among homeless people on Skid Row in Los Angeles and looked at different ways in which people were interacting with business people who own warehouses down there, and the power dynamics between the people doing the work for the business people being paid an hourly wage, and then not being able to use the bathroom in the warehouse. Other people did other projects. There were a lot of immigrant populations in Los Angeles at the time. Somebody did work on her own attachment to Judaism through marriage. Somebody did work with a Tibetan monk who was in the area. Things like that. 

Jennifer Berglund  11:06

What do you think you learned there that you probably wouldn’t have learned anywhere else, in LA specifically? 

Ilisa Barbash  11:11

I don’t know if it was LA specifically that I learned something. It was the program. It was being run by Tim Asch, who is a renowned ethnographic filmmaker, and he was very dynamic. He was also at a moment of crisis, and I think the whole field of anthropology at the time was at a moment where they were questioning this idea of objectivity. In anthropology, Margaret Mead, and one of her husbands, Gregory Bateson, had a wonderful debate about the objectivity of the camera in ethnographic film, and Margaret Mead believed that you could just set up the camera and it would document life as it was, and Gregory Bateson argued with her that the camera was more subjective. And that was the prevailing notion at the time I entered the field was that the camera was very subjective. It mattered who you chose to film, how you chose to film, where you placed your camera, what kind of microphone you use, and then all sorts of considerations and editing, and the idea was really to acknowledge one’s own subject position within the community that one was filming, which meant that, as a woman, one of my first films that I worked on was the transnational trade in African art. I worked with a fellow student, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, and he had access to this male world in a way that I didn’t so when we did interviews, he would do the interviews, and I would film them with the male subjects, and then vice versa. So it really was the program understanding that you weren’t really there to do science, a social science, you were there to try to acknowledge one’s own biases, and then work through them and capture something interesting about other people’s lives. How has that view changed since then?

Jennifer Berglund  13:27

At a certain point, if you were not studying in a country other than your own and learning a language, you weren’t considered a real anthropologist, and now you put an anthropological framework around anything, and you can learn something about your own culture or a culture similar to yours. Tell me about the first films you made in the program. 

Ilisa Barbash  13:55

Well, the first films I made in the program were Super 8 films. It was an incredible medium, because you could shoot a lot and editing was very creative. I was in the anthropology department, and we were taking films in the film school at USC, and the students in the film school were making films about heists, and guns, and all these sexist films about womens swooning. Not literally swooning, but kind of like that. All the anthropology students were making much more intellectual films, and the very first film I made was a film about a romantic relationship. It was called “The Date,” but it was the date filmed from three different points of view, because that’s what I was beginning to consider: how different people can see the same situation. So I staged a date, where it was fiction, and the date goes horribly wrong when the young man comes to the woman’s house for dinner, and the dog steals the dinner. That’s simply it. So, I use color film to film the point of view of the young man, color film to film the point of view of the young woman, and then I used black and white film to film the point of view of the dog. So we have one person’s point of view where the date starts, then the day progresses, and then the dog runs away with the piece of chicken, I think, and I was crawling all over the floor, waving my Super 8 camera around to simulate the dog.

Jennifer Berglund  15:39

As the dog.

Ilisa Barbash  15:40

 Yeah, as the dog, simulating running away with the chicken and we didn’t have sync sound for our work, and we’re encouraged to use music or other kinds of sounds and I used, “It’s Just One of Those Things,” sung by Frank Sinatra for the male point of view, same song sung by Ella Fitzgerald for the woman’s point of view, and then Miles Davis’s sort of crazy trumpet version for the dog’s point of view. It was funny, too, and that’s always been a trademark of most of my work is to find humor in life. It connects me to my work, and I think it also connects an audience to my work. 

Jennifer Berglund  16:25

I would love to see that film.

Ilisa Barbash  16:26

Yes, I would, too. So our thesis film, I worked with Lucien Castaing-Taylor on our thesis film, “In and Out of Africa,” and it was based on fieldwork by a Harvard PhD graduate, Chris Steiner, who had done research with traders in African art. That meant he went to the Ivory Coast, Côte d’Ivoire, and worked with traders who were from Niger, they were Muslim, and they would act as a middleman between the producers of art, say, in villages around in the outskirts of the Ivory Coast, and then they would bring the objects. These objects would be religious objects, they would be utilitarian objects, and some of the objects were made for tourists or for American buyers such as colonial statues, which would be statues that looked like white people dressed in African clothes or African people dressed in western clothes, although most Africans had the time, then there wore western clothes. One of the things we film when we were there was a workshop, where they were artificially aging a statue, and we saw them from beginning to end: bathe the statue in a kind of mud, then rub the mud off, then spit bits of food, grain, onto the statue and put it in the yard and have chickens peck at it, so that it artificially aged. So we followed the main art trader we were working with, Gabai Baare, who we credit as one of the four filmmakers, Lucien, Chris Steiner, Baare, and me. We follow him to the United States, where he sells the art to galleries. Well, he sells out of his hotel room on the Upper West Side not far from the Museum of Natural History, and then he sells to a gallery in East Hampton. The film is structured around a journey, but there are a lot of ideas that play around in and out of that journey. That’s the idea of authenticity. What is authentic African art? Is an art that comes from Africa? Is it something that has been used? Is it something that looks old? Is it something that actually is old? And we interviewed people like the head of Tribal Arts at Sotheby’s, we interviewed the American Ambassador to the Ivory Coast, we interviewed a Côte d’Ivoirian artist named Werewere Liking, we interviewed some of the people doing the carving, we interviewed Baare and other traders, and structured a kind of debate about authenticity, about taste. How do you determine your taste? Is it particular to you? Or are there sort of criteria from what makes for good African art, things like that? What I came away with was a main concept voiced by Chris Steiner, which was that as an object moves from one sphere to another, it changes meaning. So this object, like an African art object goes from being a utilitarian or useful object then it becomes a commodity in the hands of Muslim traders who are aniconic, which means what they’re handling, if they’re handling objects that look like people or look like gods, it’s kind of dirty business. And then it goes to the United States or Europe, and the object becomes capital “A” art, and the ways in which value can be added to these objects, aside from just authenticating their authenticity, however you define that, was to tell stories about the art. So Baare, would tell, say, Wendy Angle, the gallery owner, “this piece is very special.” And she says, “No, it looks new.” And he goes, “No, this stool is old because only the king was allowed to sit on it, only the king.” And so adding some kind of embellishment that this was owned by the king of I don’t know where… 

Jennifer Berglund  20:59

Yeah. 

Ilisa Barbash  20:59

…who the king is, that would make it more valuable. In the same way in the United States within galleries, pedigree was very important. We found that out. Baare wasn’t really involved in that, but people would tell us, you know, if something had been in the collection of Helena Rubinstein, it would be more valuable, one, because it was older, and two because the aura of Helena Rubinstein would have added value to that object.

Jennifer Berglund  21:29

Fascinatin. Very revealing.

Ilisa Barbash  21:35

I had started teaching in grad school teaching freshman writing, which paid for grad school, and then really enjoyed teaching after that, and continued a teaching career. I taught at Berkeley and I taught at University of Colorado in Boulder. I also worked on a film with Lucien Castaing-Taylor called “Sweet Grass,” which was about sheep ranching in Montana. And again, initially, we thought it might be something like “In and Out of Africa,” where we would explore different points of view about land use, and it became clear that actually what was interesting was another theme in “In and Out of Africa,” which is the journey. You know, the journey where people go up into the mountains, and spend a certain amount of time there with the sheep on a annual sheep drive to actually feed the sheep. That is the basis of their living, and then come back down the hill and sell the sheep off. We’re interested in this topic: one, because we’re in Colorado, and we wanted to do something about the American West, and the tagline for this film was “The Last Ride of the American Cowboy.” They’re not cowboys, they’re sheep herders, but they look like cowboys, because they wear cowboy hats, but also there was this idea of salvage anthropology, which was something Margaret Mead did, which is this rush to go and document a culture before it changes drastically, partly because of the presence of an anthropologist, but also missionaries and colonial forces just trying to take over people’s land. And we really liked the idea that there was this salvage anthropology that we could do in the American West. You know, this four generations of a family going up into the mountains to feed their sheep, we’re not going to be doing it much longer. And so we decided to film what we thought would be the last sheep drive. They kept going for two more years, so we had to keep coming back with our children to film. In the beginning of the sheep drive, they go through town and we document that. The whole main street is just crowded, filled with 3000 sheep. We would bring our kids on the sheep drive for a certain point, walking on this long road until they got to the mountains, at which point we’d whisk our kids back home because there were wolves and bears in the mountains, and the sheep would be up there, and when they came back down, apparently, they were about three times as big, because they took up three times as much room because the lambs had been all fattened up in the mountains.

Jennifer Berglund  24:27

So this is like one of the last times this happened, right? 

Ilisa Barbash  24:30

Yeah, in that area. I mean, there’s still herders in the area, but not doing these sheep drives.

Jennifer Berglund  24:38

Wow, so you really succeeded in that.

Ilisa Barbash  24:41

Yes, we did. 

Jennifer Berglund  24:42

Yeah. 

Ilisa Barbash  24:42

And the son ended up getting some of the profits. The son of the family who’s also in the film, and building a cattle ranch up near the Canadian border and lives there with his family. We were at UC boulder, and then we were sort of lured to Harvard by Robert Gardner, and continued editing the film once we got to Harvard. Robert Gardner was one of the most important ethnographic filmmakers. We studied his films at USC. Tim Asch had worked with Robert Gardner, and had regaled us with stories about Bob and John. John being John Marshall, who made films about the Ju/’hoansi in Namibia. And I always regretted that I didn’t take better notes or didn’t save my notes, because I was getting a lot of really wonderful insights into a person I would later meet, and then into a place I would later work in which would be the Peabody Museum. Tim and Bob and John Marshall had edited films in the basement of the Peabody Museum, so I met Robert Gardner when he was visiting Boulder for a conference, and I interviewed him there. And at a certain point, a few years later, he invited Lucien Castaing-Taylor to apply for a job, and I said, “Is there anything at Harvard for me, too?” And it looked like the Peabody Museum was very interested in Visual Anthropology, so Lucien, took over the reins of the Film Study Center at Harvard, and I started working as Curator of Visual Anthropology at the Peabody Museum. And in the beginning, we worked closely with Gardner, and at a certain point, Gardner established a fellowship at the Peabody Museum, for a photographer, a mid career photographer, to go out and document the human condition anywhere in the world, and the photographer had about a year. Many have taken longer than that, to do this, and $50,000 of unrestrained money, they could just use it to live on or to buy their film equipment. Most people probably did both, and produce a project that would end up with a book that would be published by Peabody Press, and often I would then work with the photographer to do a photographic exhibit at the Peabody Museum. We’ve had an incredible variety of artists awarded the fellowship. The first one was Guy Tillim, from South Africa, and he documented traces of colonialism in various African countries – Mozambique, the Belgian Congo, Angola – and sort of documented architecture and what was left behind once the colonizing forces had left. We’ve had photographer from India, Dayanita Singh; Australia, Stephen Dupont, who photographed in Papua New Guinea, which really spoke to Robert Gardner’s work as a filmmaker who worked in New Guinea, so there was a kind of dialogue with Gardener’s work through Stephen Dupont’s work. 

Jennifer Berglund  28:22

I remember that exhibit. That was an incredible…

Ilisa Barbash  28:26

What’s wonderful is not only do these photographers represent all different corners of the world, and interesting viewpoints on the world, but they also are very strongly involved with how their work is displayed. Every exhibition looks drastically different from the previous one. 

Jennifer Berglund  28:49

Yeah, yeah. 

Ilisa Barbash  28:50

We had Chloe Dewe Mathews, who documented the extraction of resources from five countries around the Caspian Sea, near Azerbaijan and Iran, and she created murals that would engulf the museum visitor, and then hung pictures from all of the different places she documented on top of the murals, and the murals represented the elements: fire and water and earth. So really exciting opportunities to present something within a more traditional museum to present something really dynamic and contemporary. We have Deborah Luster coming up and she’s done a lot of work, a lot of collaborative work, in Louisiana’s Angola State Prison, and she’s worked with inmates doing portraits of them, and the portion of work she did with our fellowship is to take pictures of landscape and she uses tintypes and collodion wet photography processes. We have Wendel White is probably going to be coming up his exhibit in a couple of years in 2024. He is the first person who really has no living humans in his photography, and I never would have thought that that would happen because they’re supposed to be documenting the human condition. And he is a Black American photographer who went into archives in the 13 original US colonies, and found elements of Black history that had been collected, so multiple copies of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Frederick Douglass’s hair in a couple of places. In the Peabody, he’s documented some of our photography, and also research by a woman named Caroline Bond Day, who was looking at Black families in the 1930s. The person who’s coming up next is name is Zhang Xiao, and his project is called “Shehuo,” and I apologize for my terrible pronunciation. Xiao produced his book, which is going to be released this summer. There will be some copies available to look at at the exhibition. He started out as a photo journalist. He was born in northern China, and he went to school and studied architecture, and while he was a journalist, he carried two cameras around; one to do his journalistic work, and the second to do his own personal photography. And he found that at a certain point that the journalists were not interested as much in the photographs he really liked, which were his personal photos. In translation, he uses the terms “absurd,” or “odd” or “out of place,” and he really has a sense of humor, looking for the kind of interesting and quirky moments that happen in human lives. He had done a number of projects, one called “Coastline,” about leisure time on beaches. He had started a project around 2009 documenting a ritual called Qiqiao in northern China, which was a series of celebrations particular to each village. Each version of it was unique to each village, and they would time their celebrations so that villagers could attend other villages’ celebrations, and this would immediately follow the New Year, and “Shehuo” literally means community fire. It involves the worship of the hearth, and the earth and the fire and community. The work he did there, he used a very cheap camera that created a kind of misty, mystical kind of effect, so we have two of those works in the exhibition. You look like what you’re walking through what he calls a dream world, and you’re sort of sleepwalking through it, and he felt like he was sleepwalking as he was doing the photography. And those are the moments of belief in the gods and a continuance of tradition, people wearing costumes that had been handed down through generations. He went back 10 years later, and saw that much had changed, that the celebrations have been embraced by Chinese tourism agencies, that all of the costumes had become mass produced, that the entire ritualized performances had turned into big parades, and he documented that to how things had changed. And while he was doing that, he again, found the absurd, so you see, in the photo exhibit, you see piles of masks, you see people being made up to perform, you see a kind of melancholia among various performers, and that is prevalent also in Xiao’s work, is that he sees a sadness, too, in the enormous economic boom that China has experienced, and a kind of sadness that traditions change and get diluted somewhat, yet, because of the brightness of all of the images that you see, there’s also kind of a celebration of of commercialism, which I think is kind of ironic for him. I think he’s creating the irony. Over the years, there’s been sort of a change in the fellows that you accept into the fellowship. Can you tell me a little bit about that change, and how is he representative of this change? I would say that over the years, the fellows who’ve been awarded the Gardner Fellowship have become more and more diverse, and that hasn’t really been deliberate but I think it’s been important. It’s occurred, partly because we’ve expanded our nomination pool to include many more parts of the globe. I think it’s a growth in photography worldwide, and growth in galleries worldwide. Whereas the first photographer, Guy Tillim, the first fellow was a white, South African documenting in Africa, we have Xiao, who is Chinese documenting villages close to the village where he grew up. Similarly, we have waiting in the wings. Joana Choumali, who’s a Cote d’Ivoirian photographer who is documenting the market in western T-shirts, cast off Western T-shirts in markets in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. We have Azadeh Akhlaghi, who is documenting Iranian history in her own native Iran.

Jennifer Berglund  36:44

As you have seen this art come through the pipeline, what is the strength that you recognize, as a visual anthropologist?

Ilisa Barbash  36:53

I strongly believe that all people who have a project, have a right to do the project that they want to do, even if they are an outsider. But it’s imperative that there’ll be a degree of reciprocity and collaboration. I would say that more and more of the people who are being awarded the fellowship are members of adjacent or the same community where they are photographing. Sammy Baloji is from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and he is documenting historically and contemporary people in his own region, the Katanga region of Congo. What you get with that is a kind of understanding of what is going on that is intense, but interestingly enough, needs to be interpreted for outsiders, you know, an American audience, so I hadn’t really thought of it this way, but it presents a kind of challenge to someone like me, who wants to make sure that anyone who comes into the museum, who is not familiar with a particular country, is able to glean a certain amount of information easily, and to put what they’re seeing in context, and we have very international audiences. Things that seem quite complicated, need to be boiled down in fairly simple terms, so that all of our visitors can access what the photographers are photographing. 

Jennifer Berglund  38:41

And how are you working with the photographers to shape that interpretation?

Ilisa Barbash  38:48

With Xiao, it’s been very interesting, because he is the first fellow who does not speak English, and I do not speak Mandarin and we’ve been working through an interpreter so it’s kind of takes three days to get answers through the interpreter, which has been quite interesting. He designed the exhibition, and I looked at it, and I made some changes because I felt that there were images that wouldn’t quite be comprehensible to an American audience, or our international audience. Say he had an image where there were policemen in the picture, and I thought, well, that’s going to make people think that there is a strong police presence in China, because this is a picture of Chinese rituals, and in fact, that wasn’t really what was going on in the picture and we substituted a different image more of a performance, someone walking on stilts instead of that image. I asked for a couple more behind the scenes pictures of people putting on makeup because to me, as an anthropologist, I want to think that I’m not just seeing something that is a finished product. I want to see an anthropologist want to see what’s behind the scenes, what makes something the way it is, and so I asked him to add some of those photographs to people being made up.

Jennifer Berglund  40:31

Having had this long career in Visual Anthropology, having seen the many changes, how do you think you personally have changed as a visual anthropologist?

Ilisa Barbash  40:43

It’s interesting because I always thought that film was a more compelling medium than photography because I started working with photography. As soon as I got to the Peabody photography, I find fascinating. I’ve worked with other people’s images, which is an enormous responsibility when I work with photography, whereas in film, I created my own images, I had my own relationships with people. When I work with other people’s photography, I not only have some kind of obligation, to stay true to what the people, what the subjects of the photography, might want, but also what the artists, what the photographer, might want. And that goes for working with contemporary photographers, as well as working with our historical collections. It’s all about staying sensitive to different points of view and trying to imagine that there’s some way I can tap into that.

Jennifer Berglund  41:59

Ilisa Barbash, thank you so much for being here. This has been wonderful. 

Ilisa Barbash  42:03

Thank you, Jennie. I really enjoyed speaking with you.

Jennifer Berglund  42:09

Today’s HMSC Connects! podcast was edited by Eden Piacitelli, and produced by me, Jennifer Berglund, and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Special thanks to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and to Ilisa Barbash for her wisdom and expertise. And thank you so much for listening. If you like today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean or wherever you get your podcasts. See in a couple of weeks.