Aim of the Anthrozine series 

Our Anthrozine series follows the imaginative reflections of a cohort of anthropology students looking at the themes of neglect and renewal. Contemporary anthropological discourse is plagued with a conflicted legacy of imperial narratives that are constantly embedded into our academic enquiries, lived realities and material worlds.  

Our Anthrozine series is inspired by the ‘Anthropology Teaching Collection’ located at the University of Edinburgh. Each edition will focus on different artefacts from this collection, producing a creative reflection on the anthropological themes and topics we elicit from the selected objects. We explore how we can disentangle complex ethical understandings of material culture that have forgotten pasts and how decolonising these spaces involves reimbursing autonomy in new and creative ways.  

As eight undergraduate students, we position ourselves alongside these objects, acknowledging our own complicity and positionality. Through this work, we present an emotional chronicle of our encounters, revealing how collective memory can reclaim what institutions of power have allowed to fade into obscurity. By directly engaging with objects and their legacies in visual and multimodal ways, we want to consider what these collections can ‘teach’ us in an anti-racist and anti-colonial academic space.  

The first edition of the Anthrozine will centre around the four masks in this collection: three sowei masks and a gongoli mask. The first half of the zine focuses on these particular objects, bringing together our research and provenance work, whilst the second half of the zine explores the topic of masks more broadly, where each student within the group has produced a personal and creative reflection based on our anthropological understanding of masks.