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Between the 1870s and the 1930s competing European powers carved out and consolidated colonies in Melanesia, the most culturally diverse region of the world. As part of this process, great assemblages of ethnographic artefacts were made by a range of collectors whose diversity is captured in this volume. The contributors to this tightly-integrated volume take these collectors, and the collecting institutions, as the departure point for accounts that look back at the artefact-producing societies and their interaction with the collectors, but also forward to the fate of the collections in metropolitan museums, as the artefacts have been variously exhibited, neglected, re-conceived as indigenous heritage, or repatriated. In doing this, the contributors raise issues of current interest in anthropology, Pacific history, art history, museology, and material culture.
“... a most welcome book ... Reading this book should irrevocably change how one looks at an ethnographic exhibit ... These wide-ranging articles ... augment our understanding of museums and their objects ... Overall, this is a rich collection of essays, brimming with data and, for the most part, cogently analysed.” · JRAI
Michael O'Hanlon is Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
Introduction
M. O'Hanlon
Chapter 1. Gathering for God: George Brown and the Christian Economy in the Collection of Artefacts
H. Gardner
Chapter 2. Exploring Tensions in Material Culture: Commercialising Ethnography in German New Guinea, 1870-1904
R. Buschmann
Chapter 3. 'Before it has Become too Late': The Making and Repatriation of Sir William MacGregor's Official Collection from British New Guinea
M. Quinnell
Chapter 4. Surveying Culture: Photography, Collecting and Material Culture in British New Guinea, 1898
E. Edwards
Chapter 5. Collecting Pygmies: the 'Tapiro' and the British Ornithologists' Union Expedition to Dutch New Guinea, 1910-1911
C. Ballard
Chapter 6. One Time, One Place, Three Collections: Colonial Processes and the Shaping of Some Museum Collections from German New Guinea
R.Welsch
Chapter 7. The Careless Collector: Malinowski and the Antiquarians
M. Young
Chapter 8. Felix Speiser's Fletched Arrow: A Paradigm Shift from Physical Anthropology to Art Styles
C. Kaufmann
Chapter 9. On His Todd: Material Culture and Colonialism
C. Gosden
Chapter 10. Reverse Trajectories: Beatrice Blackwood as Collector and Anthropologist
C. Knowles
Epilogue
N. Thomas
Notes on contributors
Bibliography
Index