Abstract:

Hundreds of thousands of works of art and artefacts from many parts of the Pacific are dispersed across European museums. They range from seemingly quotidian things such as fish-hooks and baskets to great sculptures of divinities, architectural forms and canoes. These collections constitute a remarkable resource for understanding history and society across Oceania, cross-cultural encounters since the voyages of Captain Cook, and the colonial transformations that have taken place since. They are also collections of profound importance for Islanders today, who have varied responses to their displaced heritage, and renewed interest in ancestral forms and practices.

This two-volume book enlarges understandings of Oceanic art and enables new reflection upon museums and ways of working in and around them. In dialogue with Islanders’ perspectives, It exemplifies a growing commitment on the part of scholars and curators to work collaboratively and responsively.

Volume II illustrates the sheer variety of Pacific artefacts and histories in museums, and similarly the heterogeneity of the issues and opportunities that they raise. Over thirty essays explore materialities, collection histories, legacies of empire, and contemporary projects.

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

Contents

Preface
Introduction

Part one: Materialities

1. Fibre skirts: continuity and change
Erna Lilje

2. Shell money and context in Western Island Melanesia
Katherine Szabo

3. Aitutaki patterns or listening to the voices of the Ancestors: research on Aitutaki ta’unga in European Museums
Michaela Appel and Ngaa Kitai Taria Pureariki

4. Unpacking cosmologies: frigate bird and turtle shell headdresses in Nauru
Maia Nuku

5. Reaching across the Ocean’: Barkcloth in Oceania and beyond
Anna-Karina Hermkens

6. ‘U’u: an unfinished inquiry into the history and adornment of Marquesan clubs
Nicholas Thomas

Part two: Collection histories and exhibitions

7. Haphazard Histories: tracing Kanak collections in UK museums
Julie Adams

8. Inaccuracies, inconsistencies and implications: researching Kiribati coconut fibre armour in UK collections
Polly Bence

9. From Russia with love: Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay’s Pacific collections
Elena Govor

10. Collecting procedure unknown: contextualising the Max Biermann collection in the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich
Hilke Thode-Arora

11. Made to measure: photographs from the Templeton Crocker expedition
Lucie Carreau

12. German women collectors in the Pacific: Elizabeth Krämer-Bannow and Antonie Brandeis
Amiria Salmond

13. The illustration of culture: work on paper in the art history of Oceana
Nicholas Thomas

14. Two Germanies: ethnographic museums, (post)colonial exhibitions, and the ‘cold odyssey’ of Pacific Objects between East and West
Philipp Schorch

15. Museum Dreams: the rise and fall of a ‘Port-Vila Museum
Peter Brunt

Part three: Legacies of Empire

16. Kings, Rangatira and relationships: the enduring meanings of ‘treasure’ exchanges between Māori and Europeans in 1830s Whangaroa
Deidre Brown

17. An early Tongan ngatu tahina in Sweden
Nicholas Thomas

18. Wilful amnesia? Contemporary Dutch narratives about western New Guinea
Fanny Wonu Veys

19. A glimmering presence: the unheard Melanesian voices of St Barnabas Memorial Chapel, Norfolk Island
Lucie Carreau

20. The Titikaveka barkcloth: a preliminary account
Nicholas Thomas

21. ‘The woman who walks’: Lucy Evelyn Cheesman, her collecting and contacts in western New Guinea
Katharina Haslwanter

17. History and Cultural Identity: commemorating the arrival of the British in Kiribati
Alison Clark

23. Makereti and the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1921–1930, and beyond
Ngahuia Te Awekotuku and Jeremy Coote

Part four: Contemporary activations

24. ARCHIVES Te Wāhi Pounamu
Areta Wilkinson and Mark Adams

25. Hoe Whakairo: painted paddles from New Zealand
Steve Gibbs, Billie Lythberg and Amiria Salmond

26. Toi Hauiti and Hinematioro: a Māori ancestor in a German castle
Wayne Ngata, Billie Lythberg and Amiria Salmond

27. Reinvigorating the study of Micronesain objects in European museums: collections from Pohnpei and Kosrae, Federated States of Micronesia
Helen A. Alderson

28. Knowing and not knowing
Alana Jelinek

29. Interview
Kaetaeta Watson, Chris Charteris, Lizzy Leckie and Alison Clark

30. Piecing together the past: reflections on replicating and ancestral tiputa with contemporary fabrics
Pauline Reynolds

31. Interview
Dairi Arua and Erna Lilje

32. ‘In Process’
Alana Jelinek

33. Backhand and full tusks: museology and the mused
Rosanna Raymond

Epilogue
Endnotes
Select bibliography
Contributors’ Biographies
Acknowledgements
Index