Confluences: An American Expedition to Northern Burma, 1935

In January 1935, the Vernay-Hopwood Chindwin Expedition set out from Rangoon to explore the upper reaches of the "mighty Chindwin River" on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History.

The three-month expedition gathered the museum’s founding biological and anthropological collections from an under-researched area to the east of Burma’s border with Assam and to the south of Tibet.
Confluences: An American Expedition to Northern Burma, 1935, the exhibition on view at the Bard Graduate Center Focus Gallery from April 4 - August 3, 2013 explored the complex social life of this extraordinary enterprise through the working relations among participants of every kind, whose encounters shaped the collections that were to enter the museum. The exhibition included a fascinating selection of the objects the expedition carried and collected, including basketry hats, a pack saddle, sandals, indigenous clothing, a pellet bow, spear, crossbow, and knives. These, along with documentation, photographs, and film footage drawn from various departments of the AMNH, were displayed here for the first time.
For the detailed description of the exhibit please download Exhibition Press Brochure in PDF.

Erin L. Hasinoff, BGC-AMNH postdoctoral fellow in museum anthropology and AMNH research associate, organized the exhibition in collaboration with BGC graduate students. She wrote the extensively illustrated catalogue that accompanies the exhibit: Erin L. Hasinoff. Confluences: An American Expedition to Northern Burma, 1935 (New York: Bard Graduate Center). Distributed by Yale University Press. Book Cover