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...

Created across the six islands of a remote archipelago in eastern Polynesia, the art of the Marquesas is one of the world's most distinctive and remarkable art traditions. Though exhibited in major museums around the world, Marquesan art is nevertheless poorly understood, and the formation of collections still largely unresearched.This book documents and explores the most extensive early collection from the archipelago. In May, 1804, participants in the first Russian voyage round the world, u...

Hidden healing practices exert fascination as well as stimulate extensive scientific and public interest. It is a contested topic for many indigenous peoples. Throughout the ages, numerous spiritual healing forms have been marginalized or severely persecuted. Nowadays, however, there is a growing interest in these traditions all over the world. Some are recovered and sometimes also mixed resulting in the blending of different indigenous and Western approaches.

After the loss of the original s...

Life for people on atolls is hard, affected by droughts, rough seas and other adverse climatic conditions, and now, rise in sea level threatens their very inhabitance. No wonder kinship is the foundation of atoll societies, traditional and modern! This book presents a multidisciplinary, retrospective analysis of a Pacific Atoll People living in several countries but held together as a diaspora through notions of kinship.

The People have ancestral, cultural, social and continuing residential c...

Anthropology's engagement with art has a complex and uneven history. While material culture, 'decorative art', and art styles were of major significance for founding figures such as Alfred Haddon and Franz Boas, art became marginal as the discipline turned towards social analysis in the 1920s. This book addresses a major moment of renewal in the anthropology of art in the 1960s and 1970s. British anthropologist Anthony Forge (1929-1991), trained in Cambridge, undertook fieldwork among the Abe...

In 2012, a chance encounter between a curator and a century-old expedition journal occurred in the archives of a Cambridge museum. The journal was written by a young anthropologist, Paul Denys Montague, and recorded his travels in the South Pacific Islands of New Caledonia in 1914, where he became fascinated with the culture of the local Kanak people. Returning to Cambridge at the outbreak of World War One, Montague deposited his journal and a collection of Kanak objects in the Museum of Arch...

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...

This book explores a complex relational assemblage, a collection of 1481 Pacific artefacts brought together by Captain Edward Henry Meggs Davis, during the three voyages of HMS Royalist between 1890-1893. The collection is indicative not just of a period of colonial collecting in the Pacific, but also the development of ethnographic collections in the UK and Europe. This period of history remains present in the social and cultural lives of many Pacific Islanders today.

Using the collections as...