Narrative Objects

Narrative Objects is concerned with the conversations that arise when artists, scholars, and museum practitioners come together with historic objects. Its focus is a unique mammoth ivory model of yhyakh – the annual celebration of the Sakha people in the Russian Far East – which has been in the collection of the British Museum since 1867. Almost 150 years later, the model was loaned to the National Arts Museum of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) for exhibition and public engagement. As Sakha people revisit past histories and reconstitute cultural knowledge following decades of Soviet rule, this book considers narratives generated by the return of the model which speak to wider concerns in anthropology, material culture studies, and history about how knowledge is both suppressed and engaged with. The book also explores how art can be a focus for cultural pride, how skilled practices are entwined with oral histories, and how historic objects can contribute to wider processes of cultural revival. The chapters draw on fieldwork and museum and archival research in Sakha Sire, Paris and London.

Narrative Objects is particularly relevant to scholars of anthropology and museum studies as well as those with an interest in the subarctic and post-Soviet states.

*Winner of the Council for Museum Anthropology book award 2025*