Pacific Presences - Volume 2

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 täunga 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 M¿ori 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