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Man's hair ornament topped by feather.
When asked by Fiona recently to comment on this object I thought that it was probably not from Asmat as I’d not seen red ones being worn. But I’ve recently looked again at Helfrich et al (1995) Asmat: Mythos und Kunst in Leben mit den Ahnen and there on p 215 is a red feather stick so I was wrong. It’s correctly described as a man’s hair ornament. I guess the feather must come from a parakeet.
These objects are only a part of our collections, of which there are more than 350,000 objects. This information comes from our collections database. Some of this is incomplete and there may be errors. This part of the website is also still under construction, so there may be some fields repeated or incorrectly formatted information.
The database sometimes uses language taken from historical documents to help research, which may now appear outdated and even offensive. The database also includes information on objects that are considered secret or sacred by some communities.
If you have any further information about objects in our collections or can suggest corrections to our information, please contact us: enquiry@horniman.ac.uk
