Pacific Presences: Oceanic Art and European Museums: Volume 2

The vast and extraordinary collections from the Pacific, collected from the late eighteenth century onwards, that are dispersed across ethnographic and other museums in Europe amount to hundreds of thousands of artefacts, ranging from seemingly quotidian and utilitarian baskets and fish-hooks to great sculptures of divinities, architectural forms and canoes. Alongside the works themselves are rich archives of documents, drawings by early travellers, and often vast photographic collections, as well as historic catalogues and object inventories. These collections constitute a rich and remarkable resource for understanding society and history across Indigenous Oceania, cross-cultural encounters since the voyages of Captain Cook and his contemporaries, and the colonial transformations of the nineteenth century onwards. These are also collections of profound importance for Islanders today, who have varied responses to their displaced heritage, and renewed interest in understanding ancestral forms and practices.

This book, in two volumes, not only enlarges understanding of Oceanic art history and Oceanic collections in important ways, but also enables new reflections upon museums and ways of undertaking work in and around them. It exemplifies a growing commitment on the part of curators and researchers, not merely to consult, but to initiate and undertake research, conservation, acquisition, exhibition, outreach and publication projects collaboratively and responsively.

Volume two presents the scope of research activities of the project, with chapters focused around the following themes: materialities, collection histories and exhibitions, legacies of empire, contemporary activations.

Table of 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