“Seen Again”: Ethnography, Immersive Technologies, and Temporality in the Siberian Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum

Abstract

This paper proposes Virtual Reality (VR) and 360 film as promising fieldwork tools for addressing problematic temporalities in ethnographic museums and for collaborating with communities of origin. Focusing on the Maria Czaplicka Siberian collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, we examine how previous methods of display marginalized the Evenki by denying their coevalness. Drawing on research in Evenkia in 2019 (part of the project Wandering in Other Worlds, Talking with the Spirits), we then analyze the potential of immersive technologies as fieldwork tools. While cautioning against the dangers of blindly trusting the promises of “empathy-production” and “immersion,” we emphasize ways in which immersive technologies can facilitate the decentering of “western” observational focus. We discuss how carrying the museum into the field via VR helped to challenge the observer-observed relationship prevalent in the museum. Studying how community members chose to share, create, and “re-see” their own footage, we further argue that the cocreation of VR/360 film with communities from Baǐkit, Surinda, Chirinda, Tura, and Sulomay destabilized temporalities prevalent in the Pitt Rivers Museum, facilitating a shift toward an Evenki, helical timeline.