Museum, Magic, Memory

Curating Paul Denys Montague

Julie Adams | 2021

Museum, Magic, Memory

Curating Paul Denys Montague

Julie Adams | 2021


Paperback ISBN: 9789088906350 | Hardback ISBN: 9789088906367 | Imprint: Sidestone Press | Format: 182x257mm | 318 pp. | Pacific Presences 8 | Language: English | 5 illus. (bw) | 85 illus. (fc) | Keywords: museums, memory, curating, New Caledonia, World War One | download cover

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In 2012, a chance encounter between a curator and a century-old expedition journal occurred in the archives of a Cambridge museum. The journal was written by a young anthropologist, Paul Denys Montague, and recorded his travels in the South Pacific Islands of New Caledonia in 1914, where he became fascinated with the culture of the local Kanak people. Returning to Cambridge at the outbreak of World War One, Montague deposited his journal and a collection of Kanak objects in the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology and left to join the Royal Flying Corps. A talented artist, musician and member of Rupert Brooke’s ‘Neo-pagan’ set, his promising career was cut short when his plane was shot down in Salonika in 1917.

Montague’s research and the objects he collected lay untouched for a century. Their rediscovery brought these materials and the histories they contained to new life, opening up a range of contemporary connections between past and present, Britain and New Caledonia, Europeans and Kanak, the idea of the museum and the art of curation.

Museum, Magic, Memory explores the complex encounters between history, biography, museology and collecting that characterise the work of curation in the twenty-first century.

This books is part of the Pacific Presences series. Click here to see the other volumes in this series.

Part I
Introduction: Museum, Magic, Memory

Part II
Vignettes

Part III
Epilogue: Curating Paul Denys Montague

Acknowledgements
Bibliography
List of Figures

Dr. Julie Adams

Julie Adams is Curator of the Oceania collections at The British Museum. For the last decade she has curated, researched and written on the histories of Pacific collections in European museums. From 2011-2015, she was Senior Research Fellow at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge and was editor of Artefacts of Encounter: Cook’s Voyages, Colonial Collecting and Museum Histories published by Otago University Press in 2016.

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Abstract:

In 2012, a chance encounter between a curator and a century-old expedition journal occurred in the archives of a Cambridge museum. The journal was written by a young anthropologist, Paul Denys Montague, and recorded his travels in the South Pacific Islands of New Caledonia in 1914, where he became fascinated with the culture of the local Kanak people. Returning to Cambridge at the outbreak of World War One, Montague deposited his journal and a collection of Kanak objects in the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology and left to join the Royal Flying Corps. A talented artist, musician and member of Rupert Brooke’s ‘Neo-pagan’ set, his promising career was cut short when his plane was shot down in Salonika in 1917.

Montague’s research and the objects he collected lay untouched for a century. Their rediscovery brought these materials and the histories they contained to new life, opening up a range of contemporary connections between past and present, Britain and New Caledonia, Europeans and Kanak, the idea of the museum and the art of curation.

Museum, Magic, Memory explores the complex encounters between history, biography, museology and collecting that characterise the work of curation in the twenty-first century.

This books is part of the Pacific Presences series. Click here to see the other volumes in this series.

Contents

Part I
Introduction: Museum, Magic, Memory

Part II
Vignettes

Part III
Epilogue: Curating Paul Denys Montague

Acknowledgements
Bibliography
List of Figures

Dr. Julie Adams

Julie Adams is Curator of the Oceania collections at The British Museum. For the last decade she has curated, researched and written on the histories of Pacific collections in European museums. From 2011-2015, she was Senior Research Fellow at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge and was editor of Artefacts of Encounter: Cook’s Voyages, Colonial Collecting and Museum Histories published by Otago University Press in 2016.

read more










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