Kylie Message, New Museums and the Making of Culture

摘要

This wide-ranging and ambitious book will be essential reading for those interested in the historyof museums, material culture, anthropological thought, settler-indigenous relations and migration.It offers a series of rich and stimulating narratives through an original analysis of material cultureand anthropological exchange between two countries that are not usually brought intocomparison so directly. Henare demonstrates the way that Scotland and New Zealand share'histories of imperialism, colonization, migration and settlement' (p. 11) in a survey of why andhow people, artefacts and ideas travelled between them, from the time of the Pacific voyagesof Captain Cook to the present, ending up in museums across the length and breadth of bothcountries. She charts a fascinating path 'through an examination of the changing importanceof museums and their collections (with particular reference to anthropology), a critique ofhistorical representations of exchange in the context of Empire, and an assertion of the centralrole of artefacts in any understanding of society and culture'(p.11).Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange is both an historical and 'material'ethnography. The first chapter makes a strong case for a re-invigorated material cultureapproach in anthropology and laments the shift in this discipline from the museum to theacademy and its attendant linguistic-based methodologies. Henare wants to return to anappreciation of what is distinctive about the 'artefact qua artefact, that it might instantiatemeaning in a different way than language' (p. 5). The text is interspersed with Henare's ownobservations as she visits museums and examines exhibitions and collections. I found theseless enlightening than the surrounding discussion and they often interrupted the narrative flow.The second chapter, 'Objects of Exploration' opens with Henare's account of going tolook at Maori (indigenous New Zealand) cloaks in the National Museum of Scotland. Sheexamined one presented to Queen Elizabeth by the Maori people, which she takes with her towear every time she visits New Zealand, and two other much older cloaks collected in theeighteenth century, probably on one of Cook's voyages. One of the delights of this book is thecareful attention to each object and its provenance (or lack of it), demonstrating, for those whohave not worked in museums, how objects are catalogued and what may happen to theinformation over time. With older colonial objects that passed through many collectors' hands,new stories and information were often created around them that may or may not be true. Thisconsideration leads to a nuanced discussion of the centrality of artefacts to exploration and theforging of relationships with the indigenous and how both the potential colonizers and thecolonized viewed these processes. The changing view and value of these artefacts, particularlyfrom the point of Maori for whom they are 'taonga' or cultural treasures in the present is alsoemphasised