Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange

by Amiria Henare

• ISBN13: 9780521835916
• ISBN10: 0521835917
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-10-31
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Amiria Henare explores the study of material culture in the development of anthropology and shows that the collection of artefacts and their formal study, both in museums and in the field, have been central anthropological strategies over the past two centuries. Scotland and New Zealand provide the two principal ethnographic bases for Dr Henare's pioneering work, as she traces the movement across space and time of objects now held in contemporary collections. Using evidence from across the British Empire, Dr Henare demonstrates how and why things were bought, exchanged and stolen, and carried across the oceans to reach their final institutional settings, and how the material, social and intellectual 'worlds' often invoked by scholars of imperialism were mutually constructed, with artefacts themselves constituting and instantiating social relations. This book is a major contribution to historical anthropology and imperial history, and to our understanding of the material past and present.

Table of Contents

List of figures	xii
Acknowledgments	xvii
List of abbreviations	xix
String games	1	(17)
Thinking through things	1	(8)
In the presence of the past	9	(2)
Imperial baggage	11	(7)
Objects of exploration	18	(31)
The National Museums of Scotland	18	(3)
The Hunterian Museum	21	(3)
Following the thread	24	(13)
The Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook	26	(5)
Cook's collecting in New Zealand	31	(6)
Artificial curiosities: Maori artefacts in eighteenth-century Britain	37	(6)
Loose threads: Cook artefacts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries	43	(6)
Objects of knowledge	49	(25)
A Highland tour: Banks' voyage of discovery to Scotland	50	(10)
`Singularity, chance and the shuffle of things': eighteenth-century museums	60	(6)
Artefacts and the 'science of Man'	66	(4)
Artefacts and the passions	70	(4)
Improvement and imperial exchange	74	(33)
Museums, Improvement and Scottish migration	74	(7)
Exploitation and exchange: early collecting in New Zealand	81	(7)
European visits to New Zealand 1773--1800	82	(6)
`Gifts' of civilisation: early settlement and Maori travel	88	(7)
Improving people: the arrival of the missionaries	95	(12)
The first mission to New Zealand	97	(7)
`Heathen idols': artefacts and evangelism	104	(3)
Colonial baggage	107	(35)
Museums and early ethnology	109	(3)
Adam Smith, New Zealand and imperial exchange	112	(8)
Trading networks and the entanglement of exchange	115	(3)
Humanitarian movements and imperial paternalism	118	(2)
The Treaty and 'the gift'	120	(6)
Wakefield, Adam Smith and scientific colonisation	126	(1)
Systematic colonisation: Wakefield and the science of Man	127	(5)
The first Wakefield settlements in New Zealand	132	(5)
`A new Britain in the South Seas': the Scottish settlement of Otago	137	(5)
`Storehouses of science'	142	(37)
Early museums and ethnology in New Zealand	143	(5)
The Great Exhibition of 1851	148	(5)
Tangible knowledge: museums and object-based epistemologies	153	(11)
The Industrial Museum of Scotland	156	(3)
Geological origins of the National Museum of Antiquities	159	(5)
New Zealand museums and scientific exchanges with Europe	164	(15)
James Hector and scientific exchange between Britain and New Zealand	167	(5)
The Canterbury Museum and debates on Maori antiquity	172	(7)
Trophies and souvenirs	179	(31)
Highlanders and Maori: war, collecting and the imposition of colonial rule	179	(5)
The savage sublime: recreational travel and collecting	184	(19)
The beginnings of Highland tourism	185	(1)
Walter Scott and the 'invention' of Highland tradition	186	(3)
Early tourism in New Zealand	189	(9)
Ethnology and cultural revival: tourism and the Dominion Museum	198	(5)
Highland romance, Maori and the 'invention' of tradition	203	(7)
Things and words	210	(47)
The scheme of things: museums in the heyday of artefact-based research	213	(25)
The science of collecting: museums and anthropology in Britain	214	(6)
Anthropology, Arts and Crafts and the 1906--7 Christchurch Exhibition	220	(7)
The Dominion Museum expeditions 1919--22	227	(11)
Places of memory: folklife, history and ethnology in historical museums	238	(19)
Folklife to social history in Britain	241	(4)
The noble pioneer: settler histories and Maori segregation	245	(2)
From storehouses of science to places of memory	247	(10)
Words and things	257	(34)
Structuralism and beyond: the second 'linguistic turn'	258	(9)
After structuralism	264	(3)
`Material culture' as text: museums and the linguistic turn	267	(3)
`Te Papa -- Our Place': the Museum of New Zealand	270	(11)
The Museum of Scotland	281	(5)
Conclusion	286	(5)
Appendix: Provenance of Cloaks in the National Museums of Scotland and the Hunterian Museum	291	(4)
Bibliography	295	(26)
Index	321