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Abstract
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.
Michael O'Hanlon is Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
Robert L. Welsch teaches at the Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth, New Hampshire.
“... 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
Table of Contents
Section Title | Page | Action | Price |
---|---|---|---|
Series Page | ii | ||
Title Page | iii | ||
Copyright Page | iv | ||
Dedication | v | ||
Table Of Contents | vii | ||
List of Illustrations | ix | ||
Notes on Contributors | xiii | ||
Preface | xvii | ||
Chapter 1. Introduction | 1 | ||
Chapter 2. Gathering For God | 35 | ||
Chapter 3. Exploring Tensions in Material Culture | 55 | ||
Chapter 4. 'Before It Has Become Too Late' | 81 | ||
Chapter 5. Surveying Culture | 103 | ||
Chapter 6. Collecting Pygmies | 127 | ||
Chapter 7. One Time, One Place, Three Collections | 155 | ||
Chapter 8. The Careless Collector | 181 | ||
Chapter 9. Felix Speiser's Fletched Arrow | 203 | ||
Chapter 10. On His Todd | 227 | ||
Chapter 11. Reverse Trajectories | 251 | ||
Chapter 12. Epilogue | 273 | ||
Index | 279 |