With tourism becoming the largest single sector of the global economy it cannot but impact traditional societies in many ways, both detrimental and beneficial. Nowhere is the history of the tourist encounter between Native peoples and Euro-Americans as long and as intensive as in North America. From the 1870s transcontinental railroads and shipping routes along the Pacific coast opened up the North American West for travelers, wishing to get to know the spectacular country and its Native peop...

This book brings together artists, curators, researchers and conservators to consider the significance of coconut fibre armour from the islands of Kiribati. Taking as its focus the armour found in museum collections, it investigates the historical context that led to these unique artefacts leaving the Pacific and entering the orbit of British collectors and institutions, as well the legacies of those practices in the present.As well as exploring the historical milieux surrounding its collecti...

During funerals of nobles in the Kuba kingdom (Democratic Republic of Congo), visitors used to theatrically offer so-called bongotols to the deceased and the mourning family. These highly appreciated valuables were either positioned under the corpse to support it or displayed on top of it.

In addition to their religious meaning they displayed the status and wealth of both givers and takers. Visitors would receive similar items in return. Afterwards the bongotols were stashed until, on occasio...

The British Missionary movement, which began in earnest in the early 19th century, was one of the most extraordinary movements of the last two centuries, radically transforming the lives of people in large parts of the globe, including in Europe itself.By exploring a range of artefacts, photographs and archival documents that have survived, or emerged from, these transformations, this volume sheds an oblique light on the histories of British Missionaries in Africa and the Pacific, and the way...

How can we rethink anthropology beyond itself? In this book, twenty-one artists, anthropologists, and curators grapple with how anthropology has been formulated, thought, and practised ‘elsewhere’ and ‘otherwise’. They do so by unfolding ethnographic case studies from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland – and through conversations that expand these geographies and genealogies of contemporary exhibition making. This collection considers where and how anthropo...

Sharing Knowledge & Cultural Heritage (SK&CH), First Nations of the Americas, testifies to the growing commitment of museum professionals in the twenty-first century to share collections with the descendants of people and communities from whom the collections originated. Thanks to collection histories and the Documenting of relations with particular indigenous communities it is well known that until as recently as the 1970s museum doors - except for a handful of cases - were shut to indigenou...

Engendering objects explores social and cultural dynamics among Maisin people in Collingwood Bay (Papua New Guinea) through the lens of material culture. Focusing upon the visually stimulating decorated barkcloths that are used as male and female garments, gifts, and commodities, it explores the relationships between these cloths and Maisin people. The main question is how barkcloth, as an object made by women, engenders people's identities, such as gender, personhood, clan and tribe, through...

This book is a study of 'collecting' undertaken by Joseph Antoine Bruni d'Entrecasteaux and his shipmates in Tasmania, the western Pacific Islands, and Indonesia. In 1791-1794 Bruni d'Entrecasteaux led a French naval expedition in search of the lost vessels of La Pérouse which had last been seen by Europeans at Botany Bay in March 1788. After Bruni d'Entrecasteaux died near the end of the voyage and the expedition collapsed in political disarray in Java, its collections and records were subs...

This pioneering study charts the one-way traffic of cultural and historical objects during five centuries of European colonialism. It presents abundant examples of disappeared colonial objects and systematises these into war booty, confiscations by missionaries and contestable acquisitions by private persons and other categories. Former colonies consider this as a historical injustice that has not been undone.Former colonial powers have kept most of the objects in their custody. In the 1970s ...

The Pacific 'grass skirt' has provoked debates about the demeaning and sexualised depiction of Pacific bodies. While these stereotypical portrayals associated with 'nakedness' are challenged in this book, the complex uses and meanings of the garments themselves are examined, including their link to other body adornments and modifications. In nineteenth-century Fiji, beautiful fibre skirts (liku) in a great variety of shapes and colours were lifetime companions for women. First fitted around p...