"Not a tiger!" In the Chinese New Year of the Tiger ends the Museum of Ethnography's community engagement project

The Museum of Ethnography's tiger collection campaign, which has been running since 2019, has reached its final chapter. The finale of the spontaneous museum collection campaign coincides with the Chinese Lunar New Year, the Year of the Tiger, which starts on the 1st of February. The aim is to collect 999 museum tigers. Let's all cheer together for the museum to fulfil its Lunar New Year resolution as soon as possible!

The Museum of Ethnography is not only a place for research and presentation of past and present artefacts but also of social phenomena. Even during the period of its move, the Museum is striving to maintain its role in the scientific community and to maintain an inspiring intellectual environment. One particular result of this is the online museum collection campaign "Not a tiger!", which has been running for three years, organised by ethnographer Zsófia Frazon.

The Chinese New Year starts on 1 February 2022 and will last until 31 January 2023 - 2022 will be the year of the Tiger in Chinese zodiac signs. Launched in 2019, the museum collecting campaign "Not a Tiger!" aims to collect 999 tigers, with a new and final occasion being the start of the Chinese New Year. Now everyone can cheer the museum on to fulfil its New Year's resolution. Anyone can join the open Facebook group "Not a tiger!" to be part of this cool action. What's more, tigers are currently flooding the social media platforms of international museums.

The title of the Museum of Ethnography's social initiative action refers to a quote by Kenneth Hudson: " A tiger in a museum is a tiger in a museum and not a tiger." Hudson, a British journalist and museologist, uses the phrase to illustrate the difference between everyday reality and the museum world. In the space of the museum the relation between fiction and reality, the living and the inanimate are transformed, and the representation and the interpretation reinterpret the everyday reality.

In the tiger collection of the Museum of Ethnography, which was built in the framework of the action, the artefacts of the institution and pieces from private and public collections complement each other perfectly: among the collectors are museums, archives, circuses, confectioners, libraries, markets, galleries, schools, family archives, etc. An interesting collection is for example a 19th-century Persian panel painting from the Museum of Ethnography's Asia collection. The motif of the landscape ('paradise') surrounding the figures includes a tiger - both panthers and tigers are part of the Persian panel painting tradition. The artwork will be included in the ''Art and Ethnography'' section of the museum's forthcoming permanent collections exhibition, but the tiger was not a dominant feature in this context. An illustration of the decoration of a Haban guild jug also depicts a tiger. The guild jug of which it was made dates from 1754, and the watercolour painting of the jug dates from 1913. More exciting objects from the collection and fascinating descriptions of them can be found on the Not a Tiger Facebook group, where the organisers invite new tigers to join. 

In the open action of the Museum of Ethnography, the "museum" is thus a medium that can be interpreted broadly and transformed into a metaphor. And in the tigers, what is the same is that they are all "not a tiger". Because a tiger in the museum is a tiger in the museum and not a tiger.

Not a tiger! – collection campaign of the museum https://www.facebook.com/groups/963214647358445/