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 disp.
This book (vol. 1 of 2) 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.
Refocusing Ethnographic Museums through Oceanic Lenses offers a collaborative ethnographic investigation of Indigenous museum practices in three Pacific museums located at the corners of the so-called Polynesian triangle: Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Hawai‘i; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; and Museo Antropológico Padre Sebastián Englert, Rapa Nui. Since their inception, ethnographic museums have influenced academic and public imaginations of other cultural-geographic regions, and the often resulting Euro-Americentric projection of anthropological imaginations has come under intense pressure, as seen in recent debates and conflicts around the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, Germany. At the same time, (post)colonial renegotiations in former European and American colonies have initiated dramatic changes to anthropological approaches through Indigenous museum practices. This book shapes a dialogue between Euro-Americentric myopia and Oceanic perspectives by offering historically informed, ethnographic insights into Indigenous museum practices grounded in Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies. In doing so, it employs Oceanic lenses that help to reframe Pacific collections in, and the production of public understandings through, ethnographic museums in Europe and the Americas. By offering insights into Indigenous museologies across Oceania, the coauthors seek to recalibrate ethnographic museums, collections, and practices through Indigenous Oceanic approaches and perspectives. This, in turn, should assist any museum scholar and professional in rethinking and redoing their respective institutional settings, intellectual frameworks, and museum processes when dealing with Oceanic affairs; and, more broadly, in doing the “epistemic work” needed to confront “coloniality,” not only as a political problem or ethical obligation, but “as an epistemology, as a politics of knowledge.” A noteworthy feature is the book’s layered coauthorship and multi-vocality, drawing on a collaborative approach that has put the (widespread) philosophical commitment to dialogical inquiry into (seldom) practice by systematically co-constituting ethnographic knowledge. Further, the book shapes an “ethnographic kaleidoscope,” proposing the metaphor of the kaleidoscope as a way of encouraging fluid ethnographic engagements to avoid the impulse to solidify and enclose differences, and remain open to changing ethnographic meanings, positions, performances, and relationships. The coauthors collaboratively mobilize Oceanic eyes, bodies, and sovereignties, thus enacting an ethnographic kaleidoscopic process and effect aimed at refocusing ethnographic museums through Oceanic lenses.
"Encompassing thousands of islands from the remote shores of Rapa Nui to the dense rainforest of Papua New Guinea, Oceania is one of the world's most extraordinary and diverse regions. This book, accompanying the spectacular exhibition at the Royal Academy opening this September, showcases Oceanic art and the subsequent migrations of people, cultures and objects from the Pacific around the world, from the unrivalled navigational feats of the first settlers who traversed the open ocean in wooden canoes to the explorations of Captain Cook 250 years ago. Bringing together the most up-to-date scholarship by experts in the field, this book presents Oceania through the eyes of its own people - artists, poets and photographers - who explore the legacy of the past and the future of a world and way of life threatened by a changing climate. Featuring over 300 colour illustrations, and text from Peter Brunt, Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington; Nicholas Thomas, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge; Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu, Emmanuel Kasarhérou, Deputy Director of the Department of the Department of Heritage and Collections at Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris; Sean Mallon, Senior Curator of Pacific Cultures at the Museum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington; Michael Mel, Manager for Pacific and International Collections at the Australian Museum, Sydney; and Dame Anne Salmond DBE, Professor of Maori Studies at the University of Auckland."--Royal Academy of Arts website (accessed 26/10/2018).
"Lavishly illustrated analysis and guide discusses the significance of art for the people of the Pacific Islands. Examines the art forms and practices of particular regions, for example, Maori ancestral carvings, and rituals of exchange and warfare in the Solomon Islands. Discusses topics such as maternal symbolism and male cults, and also provides a chapter on narrative art and tourism. Includes a bibliography, references and an index." - product description.
Includes detailed chapters devoted to each of the five major cultural regions of the Pacific: Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, and the islands of Southeast Asia.
This Bulletin and the exhibition it accompanies, "The Nelson A. Rockefeller Vision: In Pursuit of the Best in Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas," reflect on an extraordinary act of philanthropy that was also a catalyst for momentous change in the art world. In establishing the Museum of Primitive Art (MPA) in 1956—the precursor to what is today the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (AAOA) at the Metropolitan Museum—Nelson Rockefeller was a true pioneer, assembling what remains the greatest collection of fine art from these disparate fields. Perhaps even more important than this singular achievement, however, was Rockefeller's long campaign to place his collection at the Metropolitan Museum as a gift to the city and to the world, which he finally achieved in 1969 after nearly forty years of effort. Rockefeller's gift carried the unequivocal message that artists from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas are equal in every respect to those of their peers across the globe and throughout history. Yet until that time there was, famously, skepticism in the Western art world on this point as well as resistance from earlier generations of Metropolitan directors in viewing non-Western art as part of the institution's mission. Relying on his formidable powers of persuasion, Rockefeller eventually brokered an agreement to transfer the collections, staff, and library of the of the MPA to the Metropolitan, an astounding triumph that fundamentally changed the character of the museum, making the collections truly encyclopedic.
"The imagery of Marquesan art is testament to the myriad beings and creatures who inhabited the Marquesan universe - gods, ancestors, humans, lizards, turtles, fish - and to the islands' complex social and political organization. These art forms are explored in the present volume, published in conjunction with the exhibition "Adorning the World: Art of the Marquesas Islands," held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art."--BOOK JACKET.
