Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. 2013. xix, 362 pp. (colour illus., colour maps.) US$120.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3853-9.
Few visitors pressing into the galleries of the British Museum to view the Rosetta Stone, Parthenon Marbles and other treasures of the ancient world have any awareness that the museum is also home to one of the greatest ethnological collections in the world. The earliest objects were collected during the famed voyages of Captain James Cook in the Pacific. In subsequent years, the Pacific collections continued to grow as explorers, government agents, missionaries and researchers made contributions. Today, the Melanesian collection alone totals more than twenty thousand objects along with hundreds of drawings, photographs and pages of documentation. Significant as the collection may be, as Nicholas Thomas states in the introduction to Melanesia: Art and Encounter, it has been “consigned to something of a no-man’s land at a tremendous distance from the communities that produced it, yet disdained as a focus of seriously (sic) scholarly attention by anthropologists and art historians in the West” (xiv). This extraordinary volume is a welcome and highly creative response to this “scandal.”
Melanesia is the culmination of a five-year project which also resulted in the creation of a revised and expanded online catalogue of the objects. Following a widespread trend in museum studies, the project not only funded enhanced academic research by professional curators, anthropologists and art experts based in Western institutions, but forged partnerships with Melanesians from whose communities the objects originated. This entailed consultations in various parts of the region to gather responses to photographs of the objects as well as sponsored visits of Melanesian elders, scholars and students to the British Museum stores themselves. Sixteen of the book’s 57 chapters are written by or reproduce interviews with Melanesians, several of them expert artists in their own right. A dedication to respectful consultation and collaboration, however, sets the tone for the volume as a whole, not least in the core recognition that objects are, in Lissant Bolton’s words, “situated in relationships—relationships within Melanesian communities, between people and spirits, between the collectors and people from whom they obtained the objects, sometimes between non-Melanesian,” reflecting “a Melanesian preoccupation with the relationships objects can enable” (331).
The book is divided into six regional sections: southern Papua New Guinea; northern and highlands Papua New Guinea; West Papua; Solomon Islands; Vanuatu; and New Caledonia. Fiji, which is often included in the Melanesia region, is left out, ostensibly because of strong Polynesian cultural influences but one imagines also to keep the project at a manageable scope. Each section gets an editorial introduction providing an overview of the history of collecting in the region as well as outlines of the essays. While the overall geographical coverage is broad, the distribution of the essays naturally reflects that of the objects and the historical circumstances of their collection. Thus nearly two-thirds of the book focuses upon the former British and Australian colonies of Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands with far less attention to Indonesian and French territories, including the former shared New Hebrides (Vanuatu). In addition, objects related to war and ritual are overrepresented, also reflecting patterns of collecting. To the credit of the editors, however, the collection includes several excellent essays on textiles and other forms of women’s art.
Melanesia is lavishly illustrated with beautiful reproductions of objects in the collection or inspired by it, archival prints and photographs of artists and ordinary people creating and performing their arts. The book is far from the ordinary coffee table catalogue of Pacific art, of which there have been many. There is no attempt at comprehensiveness—either in advancing a theory of Melanesian art or providing an overview of regional types and styles. Nor is the art simply allowed to “speak for itself.” The 57 essays from 52 contributors are very diverse in their topics and approaches. Those unfamiliar with the region and/or only interested in the art might well find the approach frustrating if not entirely incomprehensible. I think, however, that most people with even a small knowledge of Melanesia will find the essays a delight. Most are short and engagingly written. All draw upon original research and materials, lending insights into the objects and their relationships and, in several instances, carving out innovative approaches that could be profitably applied more broadly.
Given the number of essays and contributors, it is impossible to do more here than outline some of the key topics and themes addressed in the book. These include assessments of prehistoric objects; oral traditions connected to or inspired by carvings; background accounts of collectors and the situations under which collections were made; the motivations and uses of objects in missionary collections; archival sourcing of objects through old photographs and other records; ethnographic descriptions of contemporary performance and other uses of indigenous artistic forms; documentation of techniques used in the manufacture of objects, past and present; spiritual associations of objects such as masks and magical stones; the place of objects in indigenous conceptions of relational personhood; the deliberate creation of objects for the European market; the exchange networks along which artistic objects are created and passed on; attempts to resurrect abandoned art forms; and accounts of the experience of Melanesians visiting the collections.
The most poignant of the essays concern the shifting and conflicted attitudes of Melanesians concerning the objects stored at the British Museum, most long abandoned in their home communities. For most of the collaborators, encountering the objects evoked pride in their ancestral past and, for some, an inspiration to revive abandoned traditions. Yet for many Melanesians, masks, clubs and magic stones are reminders of a “time of darkness” their ancestors rejected. As I write this review, the speaker of the Papua New Guinean Parliament is orchestrating the destruction of the works of art adorning the Parliament building in a controversial attempt to purge “heathenism” from the nation. As modern-day Savonarolas emerge in the wake of the latest wave of Christian fundamentalism sweeping through the Pacific, the objects kept safe in the British Museum storerooms become ever more valuable for future generations. And ever more important to make visible, accessible and secure.
John Barker
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 917-919