Ep. 115 - Hidden Gem at CSUSB: The Anthropology Museum

Step into one of CSUSB’s best-kept secrets—the Anthropology Museum! In this episode, cohosts Matt Markin and Julian Trujillo chat with Dr. Arianna Huhn, Museum Director and Anthropology Professor, about how this student-powered space blends culture, creativity, and community. From powerful exhibits that share hidden stories to hands-on opportunities where students curate, research, and design their own displays, the museum is more than just a place to look—it’s a place to think, create, and connect. Whether you’re an anthropology major, a future educator, or just looking for new places, this episode shows why the Anthropology Museum is a must-visit on campus!

Visit the Anthropology Museum in SBS, Rm 306.

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Transcript

Matt Markin  
Hello and welcome to the CSUSB Advising Podcast. This is Matt Markin, an academic advisor in the ASUA Academic Advising Office and co-hosting with me today is...

Julian Trujillo  
 Advisor Julian. 

Matt Markin  
Hey, Julian, how are you?

Speaker 1  
I'm good as well. And then we also have another guest speaker. And then you're going to be talking about from the anthropology department. You can go ahead and introduce yourself....

Dr. Arianna Huhn  
Hi. My name is Arianna Huhn, and I'm a professor in the Department of Anthropology as well as the director of the campus Anthropology Museum.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, and that's a great segue, because we're going to talk about the Anthropology Museum and helping our students learn more about it. But before we get to that, can you share with us a little bit about your journey and path into higher ed and being at CSUSB?

Dr. Arianna Huhn  
Sure. Yeah, I think I have a journey into higher ed that I would classify as unplanned. I didn't intend to become an academic. It just sort of happened, and it came by way of museums. So I did my undergraduate education in anthropology. But by the end of my time there, I didn't really feel an, if any, an affinity towards the discipline, actually, and I I was living in California at the time, but moved out to the east coast to take an internship in a different field that I also did not end up having much affinity with. But while I was there, it was an unpaid internship, and I started working in a local museum. This was in Baltimore, and I was working in the Children's Museum in Baltimore, and I it was an entry level job. I was working with kids and essentially a glorified playground attendant. But while I was there, I started interning in the exhibits department, and I found that I really loved putting exhibits together, taking concepts and molding them into something that we could present in a way that would be interesting to a wide variety of audiences. So taking that, I decided to pursue a certificate in museum studies. I took a course at Georgetown University, and loved it so much that I decided to pursue a master's degree in museum studies at George Washington University. And while I was there, I met a an archeologist, Julio Mercader, who now works at University of Calgary, and he was looking for a student to work with him to open a museum in Mozambique. And I jumped on the opportunity. I had spent a little bit of time in Africa before, same continent, very different place, in Ghana, but was really excited to go back for that opportunity. And so I applied, got that position, and ended up working with Dr. Mercader for, gosh, five years, working to open a museum. And of course, that took a lot of time and patience and free time. So the best way to get free time, I found, was to enter a PhD program so that I could get some credit while I was doing this. And lo and behold, ended up with a PhD in anthropology, and in a pretty unique position where I had a PhD in anthropology, Master's degree in museum studies. It was a perfect combination for coming to Cal State San Bernardino, where they were looking for someone in the anthropology department to also run the anthropology museum. So here I am, 11 years later. 

Matt Markin  
Wow, that's awesome. Thank you for sharing that.

Julian Trujillo  
Yeah, that was great to be able to hear that you've been navigating different spaces, entering different spaces, and getting a lot of experience with different populations. The next question I'm going to go ahead and ask, is it be, can you give us an overview of the anthropology museum, and what makes it unique compared to other campus museums? 

Dr. Arianna Huhn  
Yeah, our anthropology museum really is. Well, I guess I should start by saying where it is. So the Anthropology Museum is located in the Social and Behavioral Sciences building. It's a little hidden gem. A lot of folks don't know that it exists. But if you're walking along Coyote, what do we call it? Coyote walkway? Coyote? What do we call it? 

Matt Markin  
Yeah, I think it is Coyote Walk. 

Dr. Arianna Huhn  
So if you're walking along Coyote Walk, and you look up when you're passing through social behavioral sciences right before you enter in that little like would you I don't even know what to call it's like a tunnel that you walk through right by the Einstein's bagel. If you look up, you'll see the Anthropology Museum on the third floor. It's in room 306, it's always open. So you whenever the building's open, you can go and visit the museum. There's no entrance fee, there's no attendant, and you are encouraged to make yourself at home, there's a lot of little study nooks in there for you to hang out with your friends, get some work done in a lovely space with a lot of natural light, great views and a lot of really cool things to look at. So the anthropology museum at Cal State San Bernardino is a unique space in that it's really focused on students. So it's the students are welcomed in any time. It's not an elite space. It's not meant to just revere the beauty of the objects. It's meant to be there with the objects. So not just the visitors, but also the folks who are creating the exhibits in the museum are students also. So I'm the only, I guess, full time employee of the museum, though. It's amongst my many other duties, but otherwise it's me and working with students. So the students are creating the content, the students are doing the research of the objects, the students are doing the collections management, the students are putting the exhibits up. The students are selecting the objects that are going on display. So they're doing it in a way that is quite unique in that you can get internships at a lot of different museums as a student, but oftentimes when you do that, you're seeing just a very small part of the exhibit process or curation process or the collections management process. But we're such a small operation and so student focused that you can that the students that work in the anthropology museum as interns or through coursework, or sometimes through employment, are able to see a project from their own design, from the ground up all the way to completion, and that's really rare in in a museum space. So that makes us pretty unique. I think the other thing that makes us unique is that we have traditionally been very community focused, so really executing the best of museum practices in seeking out co-curatorial opportunities that we work directly with folks who are associated with the artifacts that are on display, to ensure that they are presented in a way that is respectful of the source communities that objects are coming from.

Matt Markin  
Yeah, that is really cool. And I really like the fact that students are the ones that are working with you, and they can actually go in and say, yep, I did this part, you know. So the involvement and the hands on experience that they get wonderful, wonderful. Can you talk about maybe some of the exhibits or themes that the Anthropology Museum typically shows or is currently showing?

Dr. Arianna Huhn  
Sure, so we have, we've rotated between, I guess, larger exhibits that focus largely on the Inland Empire community or on other communities that we work directly with, and and then showcases of student like student created exhibits, smaller exhibits. So in the museum world, there's a difference between an exhibit and an exhibition. An exhibit is maybe like a small case that is taking on one small subject. An exhibition is when you walk into a room and the full thing is divided into different themes, and you go into different spaces. And those larger exhibitions are, of course, a lot more challenging to put together, and they require a lot more work, a lot more people, a lot more money. So we've done several larger exhibitions over time. So my very first exhibition that I put together at CSUSB was back in 2016 and it was called recollect. And we worked with members of the community. They brought in things that they had saved from their childhood, and students interviewed them about those objects, and we developed labels for them that really reflected on why it was that these individuals had maintained the objects over time and what meaning they had for them. I've continued in that vein and done a number of larger exhibitions where we focused on community storytelling. So for example, in 2018 myself, along with the Chair of sociology, Annika Anderson, we put together an exhibit called indignity, where we interviewed members of the Inland Empire community to who self identified as living on the margins of society, and we really wanted to amplify those hidden stories. Similarly, in 2019 we worked with members of the CSUSB community to tell stories about study abroad and the impactful nature of study abroad, which short plug here. Right now, I'm also serving as the Director of Education Abroad at Cal State San Bernardino, so it comes full circle. But in 2022 we did another really impactful community exhibit called into light where students working in the counseling program and the Department of Education worked with the museum to interview family members of individuals who had lost their lives to overdose. And so we paired that with portraits of those individuals that were done by a local artist. I really like incorporating art, like doing a true humanities program, art and social science in one space. And then in 2023 we did a very ambitious international project where we worked with four Afro descendant communities in Mexico and guided them through curating their own exhibits that took up the majority of the space of the show that lasted through 2024 and that was also paired with an Interview Project slash art project, where we spoke with 21 individuals In California who identified as Afro Latina, or had both Afro descendant, or, I should say, had both black ancestry and Latin American ancestry, and their families. And in all of those projects, students were integral to doing all of the parts right. They're writing labels, they're doing interviews, they're doing the collections management. They're the. Doing everything along the way like I could not have done these projects without students and and not just doing the work that I assigned them, but really guiding the way in which we approach the work. So those were the larger exhibitions. What I've moved towards now, given particular circumstances that we're in as a university and as a society, is less these larger exhibitions and more smaller exhibits that are student curated. So we did our first student showcase in 2021 and we did our second one in 24 and these, this is really the museum being filled with individual cases where each student is curating their own exhibit. They take their own idea. We call it a big idea in the museum world, it's kind of like a guiding filter for deciding what you want to say, right? A lot of times, people who are unfamiliar with museum work think about a museum exhibit as just being a bunch of pretty things in a case, right? And I work with students to help them understand it needs to be more than that. There needs to be a message, right? You're talking about a thing. You're talking about, you're also putting an interpretive spin on that thing. So you're not just talking about or you're not just filling a case with, let's say, wooden masks from around the world, and saying, Here's a wooden mask from Indonesia, and here's a wooden mask from New Guinea instead, you're saying something about those masks, like what, what is interesting about them, that they and grouping the content together in a way that helps people who are unfamiliar with the places and unfamiliar with the objects to understand not just new things, but to Think new things about those objects that they're encountering. So it's not just a case full of masks, but it's trying to convey the idea that through masks, people are connecting with the ancestors. Through masks, people are pursuing economic aims, right? So the general idea is that the students are putting together these exhibits. Each case is unique, and what I'm doing now is rotating out these student exhibits as new students create exhibits. I do teach a course that's called museum research and exhibition development. It's anthropology, 460, 3l as the undergrad, and then the graduate students can take it as 6603 L, and those are the students who are going through the process of learning how to develop an exhibit. They start with one object from the museum collection, and then they start researching it, and they move outward to go from that big idea to a thematic structure where they're dividing their content into different themes and finding different objects to illustrate those themes. And that's what you see in the museum now, and that's what you'll see for the foreseeable future, is student exhibits rotating out as they're curated by students in that class.

Julian Trujillo  
All right, perfect. That was a lot of information that, honestly, for me, sounded very motivating. I have never myself been to this museum, so I think I'm curious to go visit that space and appreciate you sharing that information as I think it's going to be helpful for a lot of students. I was going to ask a little bit about how this museum experience can enhance this overall experience for a student. So I would kind of address it as as a visitor. How can this museum expand beyond the classroom? And I know you touched a bit about on it, you know, navigating the conversation about saying that there's a lot of students that get to experience hands on, moving and working with the projects and whatnot. Sounds like you were collabing a lot with other departments. And then you did touch a bit on hidden stories, right? Unmasking that essentially, and providing input on how that represents an item, represents a story. But what about majors? I know you touched a little bit of a about a class, but is there any majors that you think could benefit the students? Do they have to be an anthropology major, or could it be someone that's outside of that anthropology major?

Dr. Arianna Huhn  
Yeah, great question. And there are kind of two questions there. I think. One was about just generally, what students might get from going to the museum. And the other one is, you know, if you're not an anthropology major, what could you get from this? I'll start with the second question, first, which is, you know, I do tend to get mostly students from anthropology, but also from art, art history, history, right? There's a museum certificate program within the Department of History, and I get some of their students as well, but I also get students from across the university. I've had several really successful biology students in my class and a variety of other disciplines as well. But what I think is really interesting is that working in a museum can be so beneficial for just about any major, any discipline that is interested in conveying complex information to the public, because that's really what a museum is about. It's about figuring out how to take facts and to present them in a way that people can respond to and find an affinity with right we. Museum work is a lot about storytelling. It's about narrative. It's about finding a way to get people to connect to content. And that's super important for the sciences. That's super important for folks who are going to go into an educational space. It's super important for folks in business who are going to be pitching their ideas to figure out how to present your ideas in a way that gets them out of your head right, and present it in a way that is logical, that makes sense and that people can relate to. So I know that coming into specifically an anthropology museum and to learn this kind of technique can be a bit daunting, but I've found that the students that I have, they really thrive when they throw themselves into it and learn this new technique. And I'll I'll add that learning how to do museum work is hard, even for anthropology students, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that it asks students to do something that's really different than what they're otherwise being asked to do in most of their classes. It's not just like doing research with secondary sources and repeating what other people have said. It's a matter of finding some unique, creative way to present things that nobody has thought of before, and you're restricted, in a way, by the objects that are in a collection. So I often tell my students that the objects that you're working with, they really guide your your research adventure, because dependent on what you start with and what strikes your interest, you're going to go down all these amazing different pathways. So like, I've had a student start, for example, one of the exhibits that's in the museum right now, it's focused on human animal relations. And it started because the student who curated this exhibit, Christina Livingston, she was a master's student in the applied archeology program, and Christina started with an object that was a a stone seal. And she started looking into the stone seal, and she was learning about Alaskan populations and their relationships with seals, and it got her thinking about how restrictions have been created for these populations to hunt the seals, even though they are important to their local life livelihoods. So she took that and she said, Huh, I wonder what would happen if I looked at different ways that animals are engaging with human populations, and how different populations around the world are reliant in animals, and that comes into conflict with various political organizations that are advocating for human rights. This wasn't what she intended to study at all, but she started with the one object, and it led her down this path, and she ended up researching a variety of things, right? She ended up looking at bull fighting in Mexico, and she ended up looking at cock fighting in Bali, and all of these things that she never would have encountered before, but the object started this amazing research adventure. So I think that that idea of being led by your object and kind of creating your own pathway is rare in a lot of especially undergraduate research classes, where oftentimes you're regurgitating rather than creating right and especially when you go on in your education, you start to create. You start to be the person who is the expert on the thing. And in museum work, and in my museum class, students really get the opportunity to do that, and it's scary and hard, but you know, I'm there for you, right? I love working with the students, and see them going from this germ of an idea to putting their exhibit in the museum. And I love when the students take their selfies with the exhibits once they're up, and it becomes just this proud moment that they finished this thing right. And it's more than a research paper. It is a creative endeavor. So this combination of creativity, research skills and becoming an expert is something that could benefit anyone, as far as going to the museum. Likewise, I think this can be a really beneficial experience for any student one. It's a beautiful space. The lighting is lovely. Unfortunately, the lighting is not great for conservation of museum objects, but that's another story. But it's a lovely space to work in, to study and to just hang out, to relax, to recollect oneself. And that's enhanced by a large two story mural that was a part of the frontal lo exhibit that was open from 2023 to 2024 we had a muralist come up from Cuicuilco, Mexico, by the name of Julio Antuna. It goes by Hunter. That's his artist name, and he created a really lovely three part mural that explores the Afro descendant rituals in the town of coyote. And a lot of people just enjoy coming into the museum and taking in that mural and the color that it brings to an otherwise very sterile space. But also, I think that if you want to enjoy more than the space and look through the exhibits, you know, college, I think it's it's a time for engaging new things, engaging new ideas, thinking about new things, thinking new things, about new things. And I think that the museum, like museum spaces, generally, their strength is not there. It's not about it's not about being the expert. It's not about filling you as the empty vessel with new information. It's about helping you to think about those new things, right? And I think if you give yourself the opportunity to look through the exhibits and read the labels that the students have painstakingly written, you'll learn not just new things, but it'll get you thinking in new ways. And that's what the college experience is about, right? Learning how to be a critical thinker, and think the museum can really enhance that for any student.

Matt Markin  
This has been fantastic. I've learned so much about the anthropology museum, and I know Julie and I are probably looking forward to visiting probably very, very soon. So thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast and telling us more about the anthropology museum.

Dr. Arianna Huhn  
Sure My pleasure. Thanks for having me. I appreciate your your interest, and I hope more students will stop by.