Refocusing ethnographic museums through oceanic lenses

2015

Over the past decade or more the Southwest Pacific has provided a type of laboratory for new cultural developments. For the study of culture, particularly in material form displayed in museums, the region has, as in the eighteenth century, offered novel perspectives to scholars and the public both in the region as well as elsewhere in the world. This book examines the growth of cultural centres in the area and seeks reasons both for their genesis and their continued popularity. In so doing the authors here are following up a landmark publication, Soroi Eoe and Pamela Swadling's 1991 study entitled Museums and Cultural Centres in the Pacific. Eoe and Swadling solicited contributions from over forty different locations across the Pacific. Each provided a pithy account of the salient features of their respective centre. Eoe and Swadling have provided the region with a benchmark against which to measure subsequent developments. This volume studies many of the same locations as the earlier study but with some notable differences. Firstly, the field of study is narrower: the focus is on Melanesia, excluding Micronesia and Polynesia. The study also includes three groups to the west of Melanesia, around the Arafura Sea: the Tiwi of Melville and Bathurst Islands in the Australian Northern Territory, the Torres Strait Islanders, and the Asmat of West Papua. The intention is to provide greater space for authors to develop the theme of the growth of indigenous museums and cultural centres in a more geographically specific region, and thereby, hopefully, to indicate the linked thinking and practice that unites them loosely. The geographic closeness of all the case studies in this book also means that some common themes can be discerned and explored in the region. The role of the Big Man is often exmined in discussions about Melanesia. This concept is certainly important when considering the key role of the museum director or curator throughout the region. But what also should be recognized is that women often have vital roles. This can be seen particularly in Bolton's chapter on Vanuatu, and Bein Juda, Herle and Philp's discussion of the Torres Strait. Another key theme in this region is the future orientation that these centres exhibit. The objects that are collected are not merely historic relics but a source for future reemployment. This contrasts sharply with the tradition of interpretation and heritage centres so widespread in Europe and North America. There have been agents at work to promote the development of indigenous popular display. Prominent support has come throughout the decade from the Australian South Pacific Cultures Fund, which has assisted in the building of cultural centres throughout the region. The Tourism Council of the South Pacific (1990) has also played a significant role, commissioning reports on economic diversification through the tourist industry. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has also, through its Pacific Office, contributed to such discussions, and through the Pacific Islands Museums Association, it has encouraged the growth of cultural centres throughout the region. These agencies all argue that the economic problems facing the region and the logistical difficulties of an extremely small population dispersed over the largest region of the globe, militate in favour of diversification into the realm of culture as a sustainable commodity in an otherwise restricted environment. The Concept of an Indigenous Museum In 1908 Richard Thurnwald settled in Buin, an island to the north of Bougainville and here, as Marion Melk-Koch documents (2000: 59-60) 'after considerable effort, he started his own open-air museum consisting of models of houses from different parts of the colony, furnished with true indigenous items. People from the remote areas of Buin flocked to see them and according to a caption of a photograph, they paid an entrance fee in natural products'. Through this device Thurnwald was exporting the newly emergent European concept of an open-air museum devoted to local and often threatened indigenous culture. This model thrives today in most of the cultural centres across the Pacific. This vignette in the history of European incursion into the Western Pacific raises a host of questions about the status of museums in the region, which I will seek to explore in this chapter. Firstly, one might ask, what was going on? Whose interests were being served and on what terms? Secondly, does this example suggest a model for museums and museum visiting? Thirdly, are there specific circumstances that either enhance or threaten the transfer of the concept of museum to this region and to this people? Fourthly, do the indigenous people as both subject and object of attention and display, see the exhibition in the same way as the designer? In particular, are the items of display, 'the different parts of the colony', recognizable to the inhabitants of Buin? Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, can Richard Thurnwald's exhibition be legitimately described as a prototype for indigenous museums? At the end of the day, is the very term 'indigenous museum' an oxymoron or a misplaced concept? What is at stake throughout this litany of questions is a deeper concern as to whether the concept of museum and the practice of museological classification and display can have any use outside Europe and north America, and especially in those parts of the world where contestation between settler groups and prior inhabitants remains so acute. Here, I have in mind Australia, Hawai'i, New Zealand and French-ruled areas of Polynesia.

Pacific Science, 1998

Museums are the medium of our age. As such, the museum world cannot be isolated from political realities. On the contrary, far from their idealized image as institutional constants, innocently engaged in the "collection, conservation, classification, and display of objects," most important museumswhether of art, history, anthropology, or natural history-are in a state of change, in management, in motivation, and in their capacities to attract visitors, engage attention, and mediate between what objects "say" and what visitors expect to hear. What is evident in Europe and North America is equally apparent in Australasia and the Pacific-with certain important differences. Today, Pacific museums are exploring a rich mix of postcolonial alternatives. Amongst many institutions seeking to speak to indigenous peoples and to hear their voices, they are focusing attention upon the rituals of cultural affirmation and the local character of knowledge production, as distinct from its global reception and legitimation. As such, they offer the historian of science an object lesson in the entangled relationship between Western and indigenous modes of thought. This paper outlines some of the characteristics and ambivalences currently accompanying the passage from colonial to postcolonial ways of thinking in the museum world of the Pacific.

Records of the Australian Museum, Supplement, 2004

The ethnographic collection made by Sir Raymond Firth in Tikopia, Solomon Islands, in 1928 and is used as a case study for the examination of the different meanings and interpretations attributed to museum collections. This collection is now housed at the Australian Museum in Sydney. In the 1970s the collection was subject to a repatriation request by the National Museum of the Solomon Islands, but the collection was not returned. In examining the progress of this request the history of the collection is traced, including acquisition in the field and subsequent re-locations between university, state and national bodies in Australia. I suggest that the reasons for the failure of the National Museum of the Solomon Islands to successfully negotiate the return of this collection lie in the nature of the repatriation request as an expression of political difference at a national level rather than cultural difference at the local level, and in the specific social relationships, past and present, surrounding the collection. However, the contemporary attitudes to the collection identified in this study should not be assumed to remain constant, as future generations of Tikopia may well reassess the cultural value of this collection. I conclude that museums are sites which mediate specific social relationships, at specific times in history.

Visual Anthropology Review, 2009

ABSTRACT: The Pacific Cultures collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) holds significant artefacts from the islands of East Polynesia, including the Austral Islands, Society Islands, Marquesas Islands, Tuamotu Archipelago, Pitcairn Island and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Some artefacts are important because of their historical association with the voyages of eighteenth-century English explorer James Cook. Others are less well documented but of outstanding aesthetic quality and once belonged to the early twentieth-century English collector William Oldman. In this survey article, we outline the history and relevance of East Polynesian material culture in the context of a national museum like Te Papa. We also examine other holdings in the museum that have associations with East Polynesia, and outline a short history of outreach and engagement with communities from this region.

museum and society, 2007

Anthropological Forum, 2013

The Contemporary Pacific, 2001

Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press] concept of immutable combinable mobiles to illustrate how Henry Devenish Skinner, ethnologist and anthropology lecturer at the Otago Museum and University sought to form and shape Māori identity, history, culture and populations as subjects of liberal government. It does this through an exploration of Skinner's fieldwork and collecting practices. The paper suggests that forms of analysis mediated through the American History School, and the culture area concept were deployed during the emergence of anthropology as a discipline in New Zealand (between 1919 and 1940) to produce ethnographic authority that then acted as a point of connection between scientific networks and the colonial administrative field.