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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.
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Part one: Materialities
1. Fibre Skirts: Continuity and Change
Erna Lilje
2. Tangible Diversity: Shell Money from the Bismarck Archipelago
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': Presences of 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. Two Germanies: Ethnographic Museums, (Post)colonial Exhibitions, and the 'Cold Odyssey' of Pacific Objects between East and West
Philipp Schorch
10. Museum Dreams: The Rise and Fall of a 'Port-Vila Museum
Peter Brunt
11. From Russia with Love: Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay's Pacific collections
Elena Govor
12. Collecting procedure unknown: contextualising the Max Biermann collection in the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich
Hilke Thode-Arora
13. Made to measure: Photographs from the Templeton Crocker expedition
Lucie Carreau
14. German women collectors in the Pacific: Elizabeth Krämer-Bannow and Antonie Brandeis
Amiria Salmond
15. Work on paper: The illustration of customary life in Oceanic art
Nicholas Thomas
Part three: Legacies of Empire
16. Kings, Rangatira and Relationships: the enduring meanings of 'treasure' exchanges between Maori and Europeans in 1830s Whangaroa
Deidre Brown
17. History and Cultural Identity: Commemorating the arrival of the British in Kiribati
Alison Clark
18. Willful 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 church at Titikaveka: a Rarotongan barkcloth from the 1840s
Nicholas Thomas
21. 'The woman who walks' Lucy Evelyn Cheesman and her collection from western New Guinea at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge
Katharina Haslwanter
22. An early ngatu tahina in Stockholm
Nicholas Thomas
23. Makereti and the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1921-1930, and Beyond
Ngahuia Te Awekotuku and Jeremy Coote
