Biography
I have come to Cambridge after four years working as a curator in the Anthropology Department of the Horniman Museum, South London.
My research focuses on the Kalasha of northwest Pakistan, the last followers of a pre-Islamic religion. Sources covering the past 100 years or so reveal a remarkable flexibility in the practice of Kalasha culture. The Kalasha, it appears achieve the seemingly paradoxical feat of maintaining an identity which is at once oppositional to the communities around them whilst also accommodating those communities. I aim to uncover the mechanisms through which Kalasha actors produce their distinctively adaptive identity and bring this data to bear on existing theories of heritage and identity.
Other Academic Interests
Museum collections from Arctic cultures
Museum collections of English folk and magical objects
Museum Collections from Tibetan speaking peoples
Ethnographic weaponry
Curatorial practice and public engagement
Landscape Archaeology of the Western Isles
Publications
- Crowley, Tom, 2015. 'Rediscovering the Samson and Bailey collections: lost landscapes and London's Tibetans'. In Journal of Museum Ethnography, 28, pp173-183.
- Crowley, Tom, Forthcoming. 'Bringing Questions of Authenticity and Identity from Northwest Pakistan to Southeast London: Collecting Kalasha dresses for the Horniman Museum'. In The Future of South Asian Collections.
- Crowley, Tom and Mills, Andrew (eds.) 2018 Weapons, Violence and the Anthropology Museum. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
- Crowley, Tom, 2018 'Horror in the Horniman: living with the Cuenca torture chair'. In Crowley, Tom and Mills, Andrew (eds.), Weapons, Violence and the Anthropology Museum. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
