Living Cultures

COLLECTION

CURATOR: PASCALE BOUCICAUT

The Living Cultures Collection comprises over 21,000 cultural objects that are ordered and categorized according to the geographical regions of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania.

Pascale Boucicaut, Curator of the Living Cultures Collections, works with originating and diaspora communities to develop the collections in ways that express the caring, imaginative and inclusive purpose of Manchester Museum. This includes collaborative research, communities-led restitution, and returns.

The collections, which were formerly known as Ethnology, were mostly gathered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the aim of cataloguing representative objects from all human cultures. The collection name was changed to Living Cultures, as a reflection of the Museum’s recognition that communities and cultures around the world continue to endure despite legacies of colonialism, and that the objects themselves have ties to dynamic environments and complex social networks.

A beaded necklace displayed inside a glass case as part of the Anindilyakwa Arts: Stories from our Country exhibit at Mancheste Museum.

BUSH-DYE FABRIC AND BEADS DISPLAYED IN STORIES FROM OUR COUNTRY, BELONGING GALLERY, FLOOR 1.

Manchester Museum's Chinese Culture Gallery showing collections in a glass case, including a vividly embroidered robe.

LEE KAI HUNG CHINESE CULTURE GALLERY, FLOOR 1.

Projects and displays

  • Anindilyakwa Arts: Stories from our Country

Displays by the Anindilyakwa artists explore traditional practices and contemporary art, reflecting on past breaks in cultural transmission and building a strong future.

  • African Objects: Psychoactives, Spirituality & Mental Health

A collaborative project exploring the psychological and societal implications of African objects within the diaspora, reimagining the collection and engaging with community conversations. 

Young children playing drums at Manchester Museum's Africa Day celebrations while two men chat and smile in the foreground.

AFRICA DAY, CELEBRATORY EVENT IN 2024.

Visitors look at exhibits within cases in the South Asia Gallery at Manchester Museum.

SOUTH ASIA GALLERY, FLOOR 1.

Portrait of a woman with curly hair, wearing earrings and a dark top, outdoors with a blurred natural background.

Pascale Boucicaut Curator of Living Cultures

pascale.boucicaut@manchester.ac.uk

Pascale Boucicaut joined Manchester Museum in 2025 as Curator of Living Cultures, where she cares for a collection of over 35,000 cultural objects from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania, plus historic collections of firearms and archery materials. To date, her research has focused on theories of object agency and the materiality of power amongst objects used in healing, warfare, sacred rituals, and traditional magics. She is also interested in how complexities of postcolonial identity, diaspora and migration, and traditional knowledge are activated in the museum.

Before coming to Manchester, Pascale was a Peter Buck Research Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, where she worked with ethnological, archaeological, and archival collections from the Afro-Indigenous Caribbean and Latin America. With a background in folklore studies and anthropological archaeology from the University of California-Berkeley, Pascale brings nearly a decade of provenance, object-based, caring, and collaborative research methods to her work.