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The Italian nineteenth-century ethnographic fascination with regional folklore was a phenomenon linked, in part, to the country's unification. As Italians sought to define their new kingdom, popular and scholarly studies emerged on the peninsula's indigenous regional traditions. Although valuable for cultural preservation, such investigations reinforced stereotypes regarding the ‘backwards’ or ‘barbaric’ nature of Italy's poorer areas, many of them in the Meridione. This article investigates late-nineteenth-century constructions of ‘primitive’ social fictions about Sicily – that positioned the region as the ‘other’ Africa – through an exploration of the ethno-anthropological work of Giuseppe Pitrè (1841–1916), and, in particular, his Mostra Etnografica Siciliana at Palermo's 1891–2 Esposizione Nazionale. Sicily's historical engagement with Arab culture and its geographical and cultural proximity to Africa are a backdrop for this study. The related, often derogatory, analogy between Sicily and Africa are also considered in the context of Italy's vainglorious colonial ventures in east Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Preparations for a centenary exhibition to mark the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait incorporated cross-cultural collaborative work, reflecting the changing roles of museums as sites for contact and research combining curatorial expertise and indigenous knowledge. Specific objects in the collections of the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology continue to be active intermediaries in the relationship between museum staff and Torres Strait Islanders and the museum itself has become an important field site. This paper provides an ethnography of the process of creating the exhibition and explores different ways that many of the objects displayed have resonance for Islanders today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]