Arianna Huhn

I am a sociocultural anthropologist with training in both African Studies and Museum Studies.

My research in Africa has centered on the Lake Malawi corridor, and specifically the Mozambican shore of Lake Niassa (also known as Lake Malawi), where I have focused on foodways, spirituality, and medicine to understand how the local Nyanja population conceptualizes what food is and what it does to the body. This work is published as Nourishing Life: The Dietary Ethnography of an African Town (Berghahn Books, 2020). I have also conducted fieldwork in Ghana. I am currently working on a project tracing a research expedition to South Africa that contributed toward an exhibition at the Panama-California Exposition in 1915 (which I became interested in while completing a faculty fellowship with the Smithsonian's Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology).

As Director of the CSUSB Anthropology Museum, I develop exhibitions, maintain a collection of over 500 objects, and develop community partnerships. I also supervise internships, which have resulted in numerous student-curated exhibits and educational programming. Past exhibits include Re|Collect, In|Dignity, and INTO LIGHT. 

Students who are interested in completing an internship with the Anthropology Museum should contact me and consider enrolling in ANTH 4603L Museum Research and Exhibit Development, which fulfils the laboratory methods requirement or a sociocultural requirement for Anthropology majors, and the upper-division WI requirement for all students. This course provides a foundation for museum work and will allow you to jump right into projects of collections management, curation, museum education, and exhibition development.