The life of objects starts long before they enter the museum and continues throughout their institutional journey. Once in the museum space, artefacts drift from crates to boxes, go out for an exhibition, and finally slip back to a comfy location until being extracted again from this period of rest. Days, months, and sometimes years may pass before Collection Researchers become the witnesses of their awakening. From the back-of-house, where objects arise and slowly unfold, we not only get to watch, both respectfully silent and impatient at the prospect of discovering their stories. We also assist and guide this new chapter of their social lives. Like the term curating – from curare, “to care” in Latin – indicates, this is how the first steps of the curatorial and research process begin: with care.

Decorated paddles. Geographical provenances given are those recorded in the Museum’s acquisition records. Left: Deni, Santa Cruz Islands. Donated by Bishop J.R. Selwyn (E 1900.185); Middle: Isabel Island. Bought from Stevens Auction rooms, originally from the Hyams Collection (E 1907.592). Right: San Cristoval [Makira]. Originally from the Brown collection(E 1895.148).

A couple of months ago, Research Associate Lucie Carreau and I started exploring the collection of dance clubs from the Solomon Islands held at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) in Cambridge. Mostly collected between the late 19^th and the mid 20^th century, these clubs showcase the Solomons’ extraordinary diversity of forms and styles. Some are small, some are large, some are heavy, some light, some are colourful and others are monochrome. Despite their great variety, both in terms of forms and of provenance, all dance clubs were stored together on vertical racks when the MAA’s storage was redeveloped in the 1980s.

After several weeks of background research, caring for these clubs and researching their trajectories begins, in this context, by detaching them from their racks. It is a rather physical task. Hands washed, gloves on and hair tied up, one of us gets on a ladder to undo their attachments. The other stretches her arms up to secure the piece and takes them down gently, one by one. While physically encountering the artefacts – feeling their weight, looking at their patterns, etc. – we make our way to the Bevan/working area, where we lay the clubs on tables covered with tissue paper. Aligned next to each other, they form a heterogeneous ensemble and remind us the very definition of a collection. And, precisely, their history as parts of various collections becomes a focus at this stage of the encounter.

We first measure the dance clubs and look for their one or many museum numbers, which are inscribed directly on them or on attached labels. Matching these numbers with catalogue records, Lucie Carreau is able to get a sense of where they came from and/or of who donated or collected them. Observing the pieces we hunt for any detail or mark that would allow us to piece together their trajectory. Getting increasingly acquainted with them Lucie writes a thorough description that she adds onto the database. This description provides as many leads as possible. As such it is an open door to further research and future encounters. In the meantime, I take the clubs to a provisional photo studio to pursue their examination through the camera lens. Although the photographs are taken in a systemic manner, to a certain extent they adapt to the artefacts’ multiple agencies and the stories they may convey. Mindful of their long journey in and from Oceania to the museum, I shift the clubs gently and let them guide the photographic process.

Vertical rack storage, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge.

Back in the Bevan, Lucie and I get ready to complete this first caring phase. Having identified the clubs’ most fragile points, we craft new packagings and attachment systems for them when required. Finally, with their new wrappings and labels, we take them back to the storage and re-attach them onto their allocated racks. Nicely ordered and more comfortably stored, the dance clubs from the Solomon Islands can now rest again. Meanwhile, we won’t. The research has only begun.

Alice Christophe, February 2016.

The public conference ‘Museum as Method‘ which is taking place at CRASSH next week is the culmination of a longer investigation into what it means today to work with collections and to be a museum in a range of research contexts across the UK and the EU as well as in North America.

Generously hosted by the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and conceptually underpinned by its Director, Nick Thomas, a ‘Museum as Method’ working group has forged new collaborations and articulated emergent understandings of the complex evolving relations between research, material culture and museums in the current climate. That climate is intellectual, institutional, financial and political; and as we have seen over the past year, temperatures vary across both disciplines and nation-states.

Anyone who has worked with collections of material culture will know that the framework of the collection itself and the procedures and policies that envelop and instate it are as significant as its constituent parts. The intersections between the techno-logistical processes engendered by museum management and the disciplinary methodologies that enable the interrogation of material culture are as deeply entwined as is electron microscopy preparation with physics – method and subject are almost one.

Extend that to considerations of how a museum (or other) collection even came to be assembled – through which historically-bound acts of selection and acquisition, and with what relational intentions – and the waters get much deeper. The Museum – often even assembled through research activities – is not only a continuing locus for research, but also a subject of research itself. In the ‘material turn’ of the past 20 years, the invisible ‘container’ that is the museum or the collection structure, has come more sharply into focus, and with it, the very origins of collecting practice and the evolution of collections research.

These meta-issues have occasioned Thomas’s observation that collections and museums have a structure akin to archaeological sites, with inherent relational assemblages that require skill and training to understand and interrogate without inadvertently destroying evidence and crucial context. This is not curatorial navel-gazing: this is a proposition that methodologies of museum practice are as structurally and critically sound and significant as, say, textual analysis or actor network theory. Further, the museum/collections construction, and the methods that it requires, is also a kind of ‘gravitational lens’ that can prismatically shed light on cultural, social, technological and environmental issues far beyond its confines – in part because the collection itself comes from beyond those confines.

What then of those of us whose training and research interests enable us to work in these interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, international contexts? Where do we come from, what formations have we undergone, what skills and methods have we acquired and do we deploy? Where do we practice and what understanding of that practice exists in the cognate and even primary disciplines in which our work is rooted? In what institutional structures are we embedded and how is our research enabled, referenced, evaluated and incorporated into other knowledge-producing structures? What is the case to be made for better integrating our ‘museum as method’ into these wider research cultures – cultures from which a goodly proportion of our training has emerged?

For the museum as a structure has been produced by recognised disciplines, many of which continue to be connected with its collection-based practices – natural history, archaeology, anthropology, art history and more. To look at the museum as an instrument and a laboratory is to identify a set of methodologies: what exactly are they and how do they function, what – when well supported – are they now producing as new forms of knowledge?

These are the questions that were addressed over the three meetings in Cambridge held in 2014-2015. Over the period of a year, those meetings involved research colleagues from UK national and university museums and collections, as well as invited researchers from Museum Fünf Kontinente (Munich), Bard Graduate Centre (New York), Musée du Quai Branly (Paris), Volkerkunde Museum (Zurich), Research Centre for Material Culture (Leiden), Zentrale Kustodie of Universität Göttingen (Göttingen), Museum Gustavianum (Uppsala), Moesgaard Museum (Aarhus), and more.

One of the most significant outcomes of our meetings to date has been the realisation that may of us are involved in the creation of ‘object laboratories’ for research and teaching, whether that takes the form of the design of research-focused processes (the ‘museum as method’) or involves the construction of built infrastructures to enable a maximum of both access and security. In Berlin, the Humboldt University collections are re-purposing a disused veterinary anatomical theatre as an object laboratory, and in Göttingen, the University has created a high-functioning Zentrale Kustodie office that is revolutionising the way that collections interact across the disciplines. This vertical integration of teaching, research, and collections is a major shared focus. Clearly it is time for all university museums to have developed research strategies – something forged in close collaboration with academic colleagues, and designed to enable collaboration beyond a service paradigm.

Another outcome has been the realisation that different institutions, nations and cultures understand museum research very differently.

For German colleagues, where museums never ceased to be fully fledged research institutions, the idea that the UK state research councils have only recently accorded a handful of state museums and collections the status of Independent Research Organisations is perplexing. The vagaries of a dual funding system that separates, in the UK, support for university infrastructures such as museums from support for the research projects taking place within those same collections, does not make much sense to Europe – rather like dividing the train operating companies from the management of the rails on which they run. Equally, the idea that a state research assessment exercise such as the UK REF might not consider museum research as a major contribution to knowledge, nor include cataloguing – with all the primary research that it entails – as a research outcome, seems anathema to the French: a waste of value. That a museum might have to pay for the privilege of supporting three years of a doctoral student research project, yet see no income from the student tuition, as has been the case with the past decade of AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Awards, was met with disbelief.

Being able to share the local specificities of the conditions in which we work, and to begin to imagine ways in which our research and our strategies for bettering both it and its profile, was not only a valuable exercise but also a springboard for developing highly effective future collaborations based on deeper understandings.

Along the way, a number of case studies were presented in relation to operationalising ‘the museum as method’ and ventilating its attendant issues. Of the number that stood out for me in terms of demonstrating the methodological value of museum research, I will mention two. The first was Fitzwilliam Museum’s ‘Treasured Possessions’; a hit exhibition that originated as a student project and fully integrated teaching, learning, research and impact. Another was the highly successful reinterpretation of the University of Zurich Ethnographic Museum, which realigned both collections and staff in relation to the concept of ‘skill’ – producing among others an exhibition about international drinking cultures from milk to palmwine. It is significant that they are both University museums – embedded in and contributing to research cultures in their wider institutional and disciplinary contexts.

Extraordinarily, several other international meetings took place in the same period, popping up without direct links to the Cambridge meetings, and originating in a similar desire to articulate the extended value of museum and collections based research, and to explore its relationship to wider disciplines and to teaching cultures. At the Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow, Director David Gaimster held an international meeting of University museum researchers in May 2015, and Giovanna Vitelli of the Ashmolean Museum’s University Engagement Programme led ‘Thinking With Objects: University Museum Collections in Teaching and Research’ in June of the same year.

Clearly, the ‘museum as method’ is a concept that holds significance internationally and across disciplines. Indeed, perhaps the strength of the museum and its method is that it is often the arena most able to embrace interdisciplinary practices. The case is now being made, through these meetings and others all across Europe, for the interdisciplinary research potential of museums, and university museums in particular. It will only be fully realised when the leadership of museum researchers working within them is met with adequate infrastructure and resource.

Dr Martha Fleming

Programme Director, Centre for Collections Based Research, University of Reading

In the lead up to the March conference The Museum as Method: Collections, Research, Universities, jointly hosted by UCM and CRASSH, Neil Curtis, Head of Museum at the University of Aberdeen and part of the Pacific Ethnography Project,  provides a summative blog post on the first workshop which led to the conference and was hosted by Pacific Presences at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA):

Following an initial meeting in November as part of the Pacific Presences project, the first of a series of workshops on ‘The Museum as Method’ was held on 8 and 9 June 2015. With a specific focus on university museums, these workshops were considering issues including methodologies of material culture; the collection as laboratory; and the exhibition as experiment, with the intention of re-conceptualising how we approach research in museums.

We now all know that museum collections are not just assemblages of individual things, but are instead the physical manifestations of relationships among people and objects. Likewise, as well as being records of many aspects of the world, the histories of the collections are themselves revealing of particular and influential ways of understanding the world. However (as the workshop publicity said), despite the growth of material culture studies over the past generation, museum methodologies continue to be those of the disciplines that created the collections. I was particularly interested by the focus on whether university museums can make a specific contribution to this endeavour.

The first meeting was structured to consider four work main issues: ‘Methodologies of Material Culture’; ‘Collections as research resources’; ‘What University Museums Do In and For Universities’; and ‘What Research Does in and For National Museums’, with a final discussion. Unlike many so-called workshops, each session had two or three short presentations followed by a genuine, thoughtful and wider-ranging discussion chaired by Nick Thomas whose insights ensured that discussion stayed relevant but was also able to drift into fruitful areas that had not been pre-determined.

The first session was held in the midst of the first floor of MAA, giving a useful reminder of things as we considered the links between disciplines and collections and how assemblages of things and the connections with people. John Robb (Archaeology, University of Cambridge) highlighted the biography of data, showing how previous research affects later research, so arguing that researchers needed to leave traces of their work; also noting that the creation of assemblages for curation reflected the ways that they were conceptualised at the time and so how they affected subsequent research. Josh Nall (Whipple Museum for the History of Science) showed how irrelevant collections had been to much research in the history of science, but how a focus on objects offered more scope for studies that focused on histories of practice. He also described how the Whipple have been developing specific collection-led research projects for postgraduates and how this teaching/research-led work was now leading collecting was leading the museum’s collecting. The final contribution before discussion, from Paul Basu (SOAS), emphasised the ability of material objects to offer ways of studying the non-material, using as a personal example a cup that had survived the 1943 Hamburg firestorm. He argued that objects could be seen as assemblages of relational affordances, recognising how the ability to understand this was affected by the survival or not of associated stories. One of the issues to emerge in the discussion was the tension between the importance of research focusing on the material thing-ness, and emphasising the intangible relationships and meanings. How can a combination of both be made possible?

The second day included three similar sessions and a concluding discussion, held in the McDonald Institute, overseen by a portrait of Colin Renfrew. The first session developed that of the previous day, thinking about how collections could act as research resources. Wayne Modest (National Museum of World Cultures, Netherlands) and Martha Fleming (University of Reading) spoke from their perspectives of running research centres that train PhD students to use collections. The difference between academic studies of material culture and museum practice was highlighted by Wayne, which led to discussion about the effects of digitisation and whether this was changing the nature of collections research. How was the encounter with objects changed by digital resources – both digital surrogates of objects and the availability of associated documentation and links with other online sources? Martha drew attention to the Research Information network report that showed the importance of making as much information as possible available, even if not filtered and corrected, and also the opportunities of new interdisciplinary research. How could museums provide the most appropriate support and training to enable such research?

Following some issues that had been touched upon in the previous session, the following two sessions considered, with great honesty, the institutional structures (and strictures) of university and national museums. There were presentations by Lucilla Burn (Fitzwilliam Museum), Mungo Campbell (Hunterian Museum), Lissant Bolton (British Museum) and Julian Clement (Musee du Quai Branly), which combined to give rich insights into the workings of such institutions. While contrasts between national and university museums could be obvious, at the same time practice (particularly for those, such as the British Museum, that are recognised as Independent Research Organisations), meant that there were many more similarities. Alongside a discussion about the role and declining number of academic curators, with their specific commitment to research focusing on material objects, Lucilla, Mungo and Lissant drew attention to the status of such staff who were not fully considered to be academic staff. Such research provided the foundation for exhibitions and publication, as well as to basic knowledge of the collections and so to documentation. While this was sometimes on topics led by the nature of the collections and that had its focus in material objects, it could also be on topics that were not considered fashionable in academia. This meant that the status of museum-based research – and so of academic curators – had sometimes been diminished. In some cases, such as at the Musee du Quai Branly, specific historic circumstances had enabled particular institutions to have a specific research profile that belied wider institutional expectations, while in other cases, such as the Hunterian, recent opportunities were offering new opportunities for museums to demonstrate their wider institutional importance.

The primary question addressed in the final discussion was to consider the scope for strengthening university museum-based research and how it could engage effectively with both universities and public museums. However, Ivan Gaskell (Bard Graduate Center) and Nick Thomas raised more fundamental challenges that drew from the discussions that had considered the nature of material, specific institutional cultures, and the tension between theoretical and tangible research culture. Had we already failed to show the specific value of collections-based research to the wider community and were our methodologies derivative of other disciplines rather than speaking to the specific opportunities that collections offered?

Neil Curtis

This year, project intern Alice Bernadac spent three months conducting preliminary research on the photographic collections made during the Templeton Crocker Expedition and now housed in Paris and Cambridge alongside Senior Research Associate Lucie Carreau. Here Lucie and Alice write about the collection and the research process:

Led and partly funded by wealthy sailing enthusiast Charles Templeton Crocker, the 1933-1934 Templeton Crocker Expedition visited the Solomon Islands between the 2^nd of March and the 15^th of September, 1933. Accompanied by a small team of scientists, the expedition’s main goal was to conduct research in the field of natural history and healthcare. Concomitantly, however, expedition members formed large collections of ethnographic objects, and produced thousands of photographs of the places they visited, the people they encountered and the events they witness.

The bulk of the material collected was divided between the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu and the Field Museum In Chicago. Smaller collections of objects and/or photographs were sent to the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge. While the expedition’s scientific research has received some attention in the past, the ethnographic and photographic collections remain largely unexplored. The collections in Europe in particular have never been researched, probably due to the lack of access to information relating to the expedition.

Photograph:
Boy from Anuta, Temotu Province, Solomon Islands
Photographed by Toshio Asaeda, c.1933
© University of Cambridge, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Alice: ‘My contribution to the project consisted in researching and comparing the sets of photographs and archival material held at the two institutions to try to establish the uniqueness of each set, identify overlaps across the collection, and get a wider view of the expedition’s photographic activities. At MAA, the collection was formed of 562 photographic prints, 1 negative and 170 lantern slides. In Paris, the collection numbered 231 photographs and 6 negatives. The collection overlapped and I was able to identify 206 duplications. Only 25 photographic prints and the 6 negatives from the Paris collection are not present in MAA’s collection. Both collections offer rich photographic records of almost all of the islands of the Solomon archipelago that were visited by the expedition. Some islands, however, are better represented than others, in particular Rennell and Bellona.

Confronting these two collections has brought to light interesting aspects of the expedition photographic collections. For example, documents held in MAA’s archives suggest that the rich visual documentation of relating to canoes was gathered by Charles Templeton Crocker and other expedition members to contribute to A.C. Haddon’s research, which culminated in the publication of Haddon and Hornell’s Canoes of Oceania between 1936 and 1938. The vast majority of photographs are associated with the expedition’s artist, photographer and film-maker, Toshio Asaeda, an employee of the California Academy of Sciences. While a large proportion presents anthropometric characteristics and testify of the scientific purpose of the expedition, many others show a more artistic approach, capturing individuals or groups of individuals posing for the camera, smiling, or engaging in daily activities, rather than ‘types’ of people. His most personal photographic approach emphasizes Asaeda’s great skills as a portraitist’.

Alice Bernadac’s research has also brought to light nine audio-discs recorded in Rennell and donated by Charles Templeton Crocker to the Musée de l’Homme un 1934, as well as a second set, originally in the collections of the Musée de la Parole in Paris. Both sets are now housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.

Additional information on the expedition will be gathered in the following months as team member Lucie Carreau was recently awarded a Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grant by The Art Fund to travel to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco to further her research on Templeton Crocker.

Lucie Carreau and Alice Bernadac

For the last few years, team member Julie Adams has been researching the collections made by Paul Denys Montague in New Caledonia in 1914. Here she describes a recent visit to Greece and Macedonia to learn more about his life, and untimely death, in World War One.

In May, I joined a tour to the World War One battlefields of northern Greece and Macedonia, organised by the Salonika Campaign Society. 2015 marks the one hundred year anniversary of the beginning of this often-overlooked campaign. The Society seeks to remember those involved and draw attention to those who lost their lives.

2015 also marks one hundred years since Paul Montague left Cambridge to go and fight in the war. He had returned from fieldwork in New Caledonia in 1914, and based himself at the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology where he began to rapidly write up his notes in preparation for publication. Having completed a rough draft of a book he planned to call ‘Ethnographical Notes from the Houailou Valley, New Caledonia’, he left them in the care of his mentor, Alfred Cort Haddon, and went off to war. He joined the Royal Flying Corps and learnt to fly in Egypt. In 1917, he was posted to Salonika where his plane was shot down on 29 October. His grave has never been found.

Driving out from the city of Thessaloniki on the tour minibus, the first thing that struck me about the region was its beauty, something I’m sure Montague would have enjoyed. One of his former flying colleagues recalled that Montague managed to find time between flying to pursue his love of the natural world: ‘he could usually be found embedded in the thatched roof of some old cottage … A tug on his boots and he would emerge, grimy but grasping a clutch of eggs’.

The landscape around Thessaloniki

Not far from the present day border between Greece and Macedonia is the military cemetery of Doiran, above which is the Memorial to the Missing. Situated on top of a hill, this monument consists of four plinths that flank a column topped with two stone lions. One lion is depicted with a snarling expression and looks out over towards the hills where the Bulgarian troops were based, while the second lion has a mournful expression and faces the hills and ravines where the British and French troops fought and died. Engraved into one of the plinths is Montague’s name. He is one of only two men of the Royal Flying Corps to be remembered here.

Montague’s name on the Memorial to the Missing

The following day we climbed up a steep hill to the top of a ridge known as the Devil’s Eye where heavy fighting took place. Our guide, and Imperial War Museum curator, Alan Wakefield, shed light on the various battles and conveyed something of the experiences of those who took part. The conditions were unbelievably harsh with extreme heat and malaria to contend with in the summer and freezing winds, frostbite and snow to endure in the winters. The hilly terrain also made moving men and equipment and building defences a constant struggle. I began to gain something of an understanding of the conditions Montague must have faced.

On 7 May we visited the site where his plane was shot down. Careful research by members of the Salonika Campaign Society and local guides has identified the likely place from photographs taken at the time. After his plane came down, Bulgarian troops visited the site and photographs of Montague’s body lying on a stretcher were taken in order that he might be subsequently identified and given a marked grave. At the site, Alan Wakefield gave a talk about Montague’s role in the war. Afterwards, I talked about Montague’s anthropological work in New Caledonia and the collection of artefacts and documents that survive today in Cambridge and that featured in the exhibition Magic & Memory: Paul Montague in New Caledonia which was on display at MAA in 2014. Afterward we placed a memorial cross at the foot of a tree near to where his plane came down.

Talking about Montague’s work in New Caledonia

 The visit was a memorable one and one that has inspired me in my research and writing up of Montague’s work and life. It also reinforced the scale of the loss in World War One, of which so much as been written in the last year or so. More than just the loss of life, however, what this trip summed up for me was the loss of potential. With Montague’s collection living on, the loss of what he might have gone on to achieve is tangible.

Remembering

Julie Adams

Project intern Ulrike Folie worked for 3 months in the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin, researching and documenting the Hermann Schoede. Here she describes the collection and her findings:

I have been working in the stores of the Oceania Department of the Ethnological Museum, Berlin for three months, examining objects and photographs from New Guinea, more precisely from the region between the border of Papua, Indonesia up to Wewak, Papua New Guinea. The work was centered on 600 objects that were acquired and photographs that were taken by the Berlin explorer Hermann Schoede on the northern coasts of Papua New Guinea, the former German colony Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land. The objects were given to the Ethnological Museum, Berlin in 1907 and 1910.

I searched for the objects collected by Schoede, photographed them and noted down data, referring to the objects and their labeling as well as to the inventory book. Some objects have not only travelled from New Guinea to Germany but were taken as loot to the Soviet Union and eventually came back to Berlin from Leipzig where they had been stored since the 1970s.

The collector Hermann Schoede, himself a studied field surveyor, was a private scholar who travelled and collected driven by his own interests and financed by himself. He was trained in collecting practices by Felix von Luschan, who was the head of the Oceania and Africa department of the Ethnological Museum, Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century and who encouraged Schode to collect ethnographic objects. Schoede travelled New Guinea on a leased schooner. We might assume that he didn’t stay very long in one place, often sleeping on his ship, except for the area of Aitape where he might have stayed inland for some weeks, as pictures show the formation of a camp.

Schoede’s focus was on collecting objects and not on scientifically studying the people he met. It seems that his motivation came from a personal interest in travelling rather then a deep scientific interest. He collected everything that seemed relevant to him, which includes many objects of ritual use and objects of daily use, including two house parts and some stairs and also a few skulls.

Despite studying the collection there are still many unanswered questions: How did Schoede come into possession of the objects? How much did he pay? How did he barter? How were things valued?

But from picture descriptions we can assume that he was accompanied by local people when exploring areas in searching for objects. He didn’t seem to build intense relationships to the people he met, as he never notes people’s names, instead physical descriptions such as old man, man in his best years, young girl or the term Kanake, originally derivating from the hawai’ian word kanaka, meaning human and at that time being commonly used without the racist connection it has in nowadays German language use.

Schoede’s  photography was meant to add specific aspects to the collected objects. Its purpose is documentation and illustration. The pictures focus on objects, either being produced or presented by the salesperson. Some of these pictures are staged in front of white cloth. Schoede also photographed villages while wandering around. Schoede’s notes attached to these pictures are particularly important as they put the entire collecting and travel setting on a specific time line.

To conclude I have found documenting this collection very interesting but challenging. When documenting the collection I was supposed to touch every object without knowing what it was. All of the objects should be treated the same way as they are stored in a scientific understanding, regardless to their original meaning. Knowing that I dealt with objects, some of which had to do with ancestory cults and/or things that were supposed to be treated exclusively in men’s or initiated hands, I sometimes felt a bit uncomfortable. Thus whilst on the one hand we try to understand the real and original meaning of an object as a materialisation of culture and on the other hand we ignore its former reality for scientific reasons where all objects are the same: objects.

Ulrike Folie

Installation at Barcelona

In January Pacific Presences team member Julie couriered a number of loan objects from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to Barcelona for an exciting new collaborative project described by project lead Nicholas Thomas:

Nicholas Thomas at the opening

The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology holds extraordinarily rich collections from around the world, and especially from the Pacific. We have many outstanding works of art and artefacts that the relatively small galleries in the historic museum buildings don’t permit us to display.

The MAA objects on display

So the Museum regularly lends to major exhibitions in various parts of the world. Our collaboration with the dynamic new Museu de Cultures del Món in Barcelona is still more important – while they have remarkable collections from New Guinea and Australia, they hold little from Polynesia. Through a medium-term loan we are enabling the Museum to present a wider range of art from the Pacific, and giving the hundreds of thousands of visitors the Museum is likely to have in the next few years a chance to see great works that would otherwise be in store in Cambridge.

The Museum

In November 2013 team member Ali Clark gave a talk on Pacific Art and Anthropology to the Oundle School Archaeology and Anthropology Society. This talk established an informal relationship between the project and the school and last week we hosted lower sixth form student Annabelle Barker for a day’s work experience. Annabelle is considering studying Anthropology at university and the day was designed to give her a taste of museum project work. Annabelle writes of the day:

Being the slightly nerdy budding anthropologist that I am, my day with Dr Clark was as enjoyable as it was eye opening. Starting off the day with several items from the collection of Edward Henry Meggs Davis, we began by measuring and photographing them. Amongst the treasures from the far flung islands of Micronesia, Polynesia and the Solomon Islands were intricately carved shell wrist bands, three beautifully woven belts and a large wooden fish hook to name but a few. Dr Clark and I with the help of curator Polly Bence, measured, described and photographed each item before updating the British Museum database. The work was highly useful in providing me with insight into the meticulous and fascinating preparation required to curate large collections of artefacts.

After lunch, we made our way to the British museum where we identified more objects from the same collection that were already on display including an ornate grave stand and a shark coffin. To finish, a visit to the anthropological library also showed me a fantastic resource for research for the future. All in all it was a thoroughly interesting day and I am grateful to Dr Clark for letting me participate.

Annabelle Barker

Oundle School Sixth Form

Alana and curator Wonu Veys in the Museum Volkenkunde stores. Copyright Ali Clark.

In this blog post Alana Jelinek discusses her work on the Pacific Presence Project to date:

I have argued that art practice can be knowledge-forming, just as anthropology or the sciences are knowledge-forming. Art can be knowledge-forming even when it doesn’t set out to create knowledge. Often, though, it isn’t. Often contemporary art practice is about design, the illustration of other ideas or simply building a career and making money, but sometimes art does something more, something in addition. In my case, having proposed this idea, I start out with that ambition. Of course, it is possible that I will fail just as anyone who attempts to create (new) knowledge will sometimes fail. Artists in general don’t have ‘methods’ in the same sense as anthropologists have methods but I am aware of this concept since working with visual anthropologist Ulrike Folie on this project and so I will describe my method. (Artists like me, whose work has its roots in conceptual art, instead, have rules through which a particular artwork is made.)

Choosing objects. Copyright Ulrike Folie.

The project’s working title is ‘Knowing’ and I have invited a range of people from various backgrounds to talk about objects in the collection of Volkenkunde, Leiden, Netherlands, one of our partners in ‘Pacific Presences’. My aim originally was to explore the politics of occupation and colonialism through the objects from Papua, inviting people from Papua, from Java and of Dutch origin to talk about the objects in the collection, including objects from their own cultures. Stories about objects, some familiar, some chosen by other people, and some chosen by the participants themselves, are recorded on an audio recorder. The interaction with the objects is also filmed with only the hands and the objects in the frame. I believe that people become self-conscious when their face is filmed and so, because I wanted to keep people feeling safe and open, filming was of hands and objects only. The other main reason for the choice centres on the final film. I believe we make assumptions about a person and therefore what they’re saying based on their face. In order to increase parity of reception about the different stories, knowledge, across my ‘informants’, my participants, no faces are shown.

Participants and a fish trap. Copyright Ulrike Folie.

Originally, I wanted to invite people from both Java and Sulawesi in addition to Papuan people because the majority of ‘transmigrants’ to Papua are from those two Indonesian islands. The term transmigration describes the movement of people from the Western islands of Indonesia to Papua. This is understood, by some, to be a political move in anticipation of a referendum on Papuan independence promised by the Indonesian government, which is based in Java, far to the west of the island group. In the early 1960s, Papua was promised independence from its then colonial rulers, the Dutch, who had also colonised the rest of what is now known as Indonesia. Dutch colonial rule came to an end after World War 2 with a bloody war against Indonesian independence that the Indonesians won. The Dutch retained Papua, to which some of the colonial Dutch fled after independence. Just as with so much of global geopolitics in the 1960s, the fate of Papua was written through the trope of Cold War. Fearing Indonesia would go the way of Korea, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, the US government pressured the Dutch into leaving early and handing over Papua (an extraordinarily rich part of the world in material and mining terms) to capitalist Indonesia. There was a ceremony at the time to create the fiction that Papuans wanted to be part of Indonesia which is to be redressed with a new democratic referendum in the future. Some believe transmigration is a policy to alter the population demographics of Papua in favour of those who are likely to vote to stay as part of Indonesia. In the end, I only found people from Java to participate, which is lucky because Sulawesi has a very different culture from Java and all these differences might have been difficult to navigate in the film. That said, I now understand how culturally diverse is Java in the first place and this is before I get to the famously diverse (in terms of language, ethnicity, culture, etc) of Papua.

Participants and a kris knife. Copyright Ulrike Folie.

Originally I also mistakenly assumed that the ‘colonised’ would be able to talk knowledgeably of their own culture and also that of the coloniser and that this would contrast with the ‘coloniser’, who would know little or nothing about the colonised. Having filmed a variety of participants, it is clear that, to some extent, the anticipated disparity of knowledge was manifested but it is far more complex than that. For example, some Dutch people knew almost nothing of the ‘clog’ but could speak knowledgeably about objects from both Java and Papua and some Papuan people knew little of both Dutch and Javanese cultures except for those technologies they had also adopted or for which they had equivalents. In the end it is likely that this idea, or theme, will be buried under many other, much more interesting ones that have emerged since recording.

Participants and an object. Copyright Ulrike Folie.

Now the real work begins, in the editing suite, bringing out the stories through juxtaposition while doing justice to all the participants’ points of view and weaving together an artwork that makes sense as an artwork.

Alana Jelinek