Pacific Presences 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.

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 Māori and Europeans in 1830s Whangaroa
Deidre Brown