Abstract:

Ethnographic museums, now often rebranded as collections of ‘world cultures’, appear permanently problematic, even as their contexts and the orientation of their activities change. Across Europe and elsewhere, curators and other museum staff are committed to dialogue and collaboration with the peoples from whom collections were made. But their vast assemblages of artefacts, removed from countries of origin primarily during the colonial period, and assumed, mostly inaccurately, to have been looted, seem always in question.

Photo-Museology arises from an art project undertaken over 25 years. From the early 1990s, Mark Adams and Nicholas Thomas together investigated sites of cross-cultural encounter in the Pacific and associated places in Europe, ranging from Captain Cook memorials to ethnographic museums. Some of those museums still exhibited colonial symbols and forms of knowledge, others had attempted to displace such histories, foregrounding more inclusive or progressive stories. Complementing the academic studies in the Pacific Presences series, this book offers what John Berger referred to as ‘another way of telling’. Through photography, it revisits the places collections were made, and the places they ended up in. It is a meditation on presence and absence.

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

Contents

Introduction

1. New Zealand
2. Norfolk Island
3. Tahiti
4. Hawaiï
5. Samoa
6. Vanuatu
7. New Caledonia
8. Gottingen
9. Greenwich
10. Whitby
11. Lode
12. Hamburg
13. London
14. Oxford
15. Tring
16. Cambridge
17. Perpignan
18. Munich
19. Leiden
20. Paris
21. Berlin
22. Zurich
23. Tallinn
24. Birchington-on-Sea
25. Stockholm
26. Tubingen
27. Stuttgart

Epilogue

note: Each ‘chapter’ is a set of images of varying number – some 2-3, a few up to 20; preceded by a single page, contextualising text; a short select bibliography will list relevant texts.