The Oscar Mamen Collection

Oscar Mamen was a Norwegian adventurer and salesman who travelled in Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, China and Russia for almost 30 years. In 2016, Oscar Mamen’s grandchildren donated the collection from his travels to the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. The collection consists of 8000 photographies, 500 objects, diaries, letters, travel documents and a manuscript. The photographies were digitized and released to the museum database.

Mongolian New Years celebration, Tsagaan Tsar, 1913.
Photo by Oscar Mamen, Niislel Khureheh, 1913.

Book release in Ulaanbaatar

Oscar Mamen’s manuscript “Going East” was released in Ulaanbaatar March 31st. 2022 at the National University of Mongolia. Doctoral research fellow Maria Kartveit from the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, Norway, collaborated with Dr. Lhagvademchig Jadamba, Academic Secretary of the Institute for Mongolian Studies, National University of Mongolia to publish the manuscript. The text was translated by Erdenebat Jamaa, a senior lecturer of the Department of British and American Studies. The book is for sale at the university bookshop in Ulaanbaatar and in the museum shop at the Museum of Cultural History, Norway.

Dr. Lhagvademchig Jadamba, Maria Kartveit and Erdenebat Jamaa at the Zoom book launch. Photo: Taran Wold.

Oscar Mamen in Japan

The National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan, has opened the special exhibition “100 Years of Mongolia: Encounters through Photography”. The exhibition is open through May. The Oscar Mamen collection forms part of the exhibition. Read more.

Presidential visit from Mongolia

The President of Mongolia, Mr. Khaltmagiin Battulga, visited the Museum of Cultural History to see some of the pictures from the Oscar Mamen collection in January 2020. Read more.

Photo: Olav Hamran, Museum of Cultural History

Is it today…?

What happens with historic pictures when they are digitally colored?

Meditations of drawing

Inspired by anthropologist Tim Ingold, I spent easter 2020 drawing some of the photos from Oscar Mamen. Tim Ingold held a lecture at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo the 27th of November 2019. According to Ingold, anthropologists should learn how to draw as a way of seeing, a different way of observing.

"Based on my experience so far in life, I am far better lighting a fire in the woods than at home."

— Oscar Mamen

Oscar Mamen in the news

People

This research project is carried out by me, Maria Kartveit, a PhD research fellow at the Department of Ethnography, Numismatics, Classical Archaeology and University History (DENCAUH), at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo.

Project affiliations:

Olav Hamran Head of department, DENCAUH, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo — **Olav Hamran**
Head of department, DENCAUH, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo

Dr. Gro Ween Project supervisor. Associate professor, DENCAUH, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo — **Dr. Gro Ween**
Project supervisor. Associate professor, DENCAUH, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo

Prof. Ingjerd Hoëm Project supervisor. Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo — **Prof. Ingjerd Hoëm**
Project supervisor. Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

Arne Aleksej Perminow Associate professor, DENCAUH, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo — **Arne Aleksej Perminow**
Associate professor, DENCAUH, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo

Christmas Reflections

1913: «The third Christmas I spent in Kalgan, an inland Chinese city, just south of Mongolia. We had a joyful Christmas with many Europeans. A bit too joyful maybe, to one’s taste, but after all, we were all bachelors. What has stuck to my memory is all the comrades. They were Germans and Brits, all real men of the best sort, and all good friends, without the slightest idea, that next Christmas, they would be very far away from Kalgan having a less pleasant Christmas, perhaps the least pleasant Christmas of all, as they would stand in the trenches on the West Front with weapons in their hands, pointed against each other!»

Oscar Mamen reflects on the highly different Christmas eves he has spent in East-Asia from his first arrival in Mongolia in 1911, put in writing in his Christmas letter from 1927. Just after arrival a revolution broke out, followed by a war between China and Mongolia, the latter declaring independence from China that same fall. About his first Christmas in Urga (todays Ulan Bator), as the revolution rose outside his doors, he writes: