museums, anthropology and imperial exchange by amiria henares
TRANSCRIPT
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 4055–4058. ISSN 1048–4876, eISSN 1556–486X. © 2008 by the American Anthropological Association.
Reprint information can be found at https://caesar.sheridan.com/reprints/redir.php?pub=10089&acro=AMET.
Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange. Amiria Henare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xix + 323 pp., map, photographs, references, index.
ANTHONY SHELTONUniversity of British Columbia
Amiria Henare proffers an impressive interpretation of the mutual influences between
objects and ideas and their circulation between New Zealand and Scotland over the past 200
years. The author argues that material culture provides an important and still underappreciated
resource for anthropological research. Critiquing the view that too often sees material
expressions as simply semiotic or representational signs, she argues material culture actually
“constitutes and instantiates” social relations. “Materiality is integral to human existence, and to
sociality, not an inanimate substrate upon which meaning and culture are built” (p. 6). Objects
are intimately connected with ideas and persons, and work at diverse sensual levels, to create
bonds between peoples both spatially and historically.
Henare identifies five distinctive constitutive articulations of things and personages as
they pertain to specific periods in the encounter between Maori and Scottish peoples: (1) the late
18th century, when Maori and Europeans attempted to establish close links between their
respective elites based on reciprocal exchange; (2) The 18th–19thcenturies, when large numbers
of Scots settled in New Zealand as a result of the Highland clearances that replaced communal
and joint tenancies with large farms, worked by wage laborers, as well as small holdings. Scots
exported ideas of agricultural improvement learnt at home to New Zealand to transform Maori–
Scottish relations and systems of land tenure; (3) the late 19th century, when under colonialism,
New Zealand was reoriented away from the Polynesian world to be integrated into a European
market system; (4) the middle 20th century, when with independence, renewed interest in Maori
culture and tourism, stimulated an indigenous cultural renaissance; and (5) the late 20th century,
when, with the rehabilitation of the Treaty of Waitangi as the founding document of the modern
nation, traditional protocols become accepted as governing museum policies and practices.
Each period had distinct, usually complex modes of exchange that regulated the
reciprocal flows of artifacts and sometimes technologies whose uses and underlying ideas were
constituted by various distinctive ontological and epistemological presuppositions. In the earliest
period, Maori saw exchange in terms of gift giving, imposing obligations on Europeans through
the care of taonga, animate power objects, given them. Conversely, Maori accepted reciprocal
obligations from objects they saw as imbued with European taonga (as well as objects as diverse
as metal, combs, looking glasses, and kettles). In the second period, with the ascent of European
influence Maori became integrated into the Imperial trade network through European settlement.
Missionary influence extolled trade and Maori working on whaling vessels and in other areas of
the commoditized economy and encouraged the replacement of exchange by commoditization.
From the late 19th century, with even tighter economic integration, Maori traded for increasingly
more European goods and found employment as sailors and soldiers in different part of the
Empire. Despite such cosmopolitanism, exchange still took place in hybrid transactional
networks, characterized by barter, gift giving, and commodity relations.
Parallel to these movements in the nature of exchange, ran a similar change in the
significance of artifacts; Maori objects for Europeans, undergoing transformations to be regarded
first as curiosities, then as evidence of “primitive technology” (indexed to notions of inferior
mentality), followed by being regarded as “souvenirs,” until they were acclaimed and celebrated
as survivals and attestations of cultural resilience and vitality. Conversely, European objects,
viewed by European settlers during the same long period, changed their significance from
commodities to heirlooms, relics, and bygones, to heritage and evidence of Scottish ancestry,
ingenuity, and persistence.
This complex history of material agency and changing epistemological predicates is not
unsurprisingly without contemporary paradoxes. For Henare, “museums emerge from peoples
desire to mark out a place for themselves” (p. 290), and, by the late 20th century, the objects
brought by Scottish immigrants to New Zealand were nearly all housed in newly established
museums that gave a rarified and essentialist view of Scottish culture. Made sentimental as
relics, souvenirs and keepsakes, dioramas, and period rooms that drew parallels between the
Scottish of both countries, these objects ennobled rather than examined the global historical
processes that shaped the immigrants’ lives. In contrast the new national museum, Te Papa
Tongarewa, opened in 1998, exemplified an interesting paradox. The notion of a bicultural
nation is represented at Te Papa Tongarewa by separating the display of Maori culture using
essentialist indigenous terms and metaphors from the European collections that adopt
deconstructive approaches to aspects of settler society and history, creating questions about the
comparative value of critical history to ethnography.
This is an exciting and provocative work that demonstrates the importance of historical
ethnography for understanding symbolic exchanges. It also convincingly demonstrates why
European material culture should not be exhibited in separate museums or departments removed
from non-Western objects. Henare’s sophisticated analysis, part of a newly emerging school of
material culture studies, clearly shows that European and non-European artifacts shared in the
same exchange networks and cannot be understood in isolation. Furthermore, objects, persons,
and ideas are often fused together in variable dense and opaque articulations that are open to
alternative and multiple contested readings. This work is an exemplary and clear exposition of
the anything but clear internal complexities of meanings within the hybrid third spaces of
cultural contacts from which contemporary world cultures and markets have emerged.