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Tongan barkcloth, made from the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree, still features lavishly in Polynesian ceremonies all over the world. Yet despite the attention paid to this textile by anthropologists and art historians alike, little is known about its history. Providing a unique insight into Polynesian material culture, this book explores barkcloth's rich cultural history, and argues that its manufacture, decoration and use are vehicles of creativity and female agency. Based on twelve years of extensive ethnographic and archival research, the book uncovers stories of ceremony, gender, the senses, religion and nationhood, from the 17th century up to the present-day. Placing the material...
The discovery of New Zealand, the last place on earth to be peopled, is surrounded by myths."Maori Mana: the power of New Zealand's first inhabitants" takes you on a journey exploring the histories of the country's first Polynesian discoverers, its encounters with Europeans and the subsequent settling by Westerners. Particular attention will be paid to the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman and the Dutch immigration wave of the 1950s. Through a discussion of the meeting house and meeting grounds, the relationships Maori maintain to the land will be considered. The vital role of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) and its present-day repercussions will be looked at. Finally the role of taonga or cultural treasures embodying the ancestral identity of a Maori kin group in relation to particular lands and resources will be explained. In so doing attention will be paid to taonga made from different materials by men as well as by women.
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 subsequently scattered or lost. The book's core is a richly illustrated examination, analysis, and catalog of a large array of ethnographic objects collected during the voyage, later dispersed, and recently ...
Hundreds of thousands of works of art and artefacts from many parts of the Pacific are dispersed across European museums. They range from seemingly quotidian things such as fish-hooks and baskets to great sculptures of divinities, architectural forms and canoes. These collections constitute a remarkable resource for understanding history and society across Oceania, cross-cultural encounters since the voyages of Captain Cook, and the colonial transformations that have taken place since. They are also collections of profound importance for Islanders today, who have varied responses to their disp.
Tongan women living outside of their island homeland create and use hand-made, sometimes hybridized, textiles to maintain and rework their cultural traditions in diaspora. Central to these traditions is an ancient concept of homeland or nation— fonua—which Tongans retain as an anchor for modern nation-building. Utilizing the concept of the “multi-territorial nation,” the author questions the notion that living in diaspora is mutually exclusive with authentic cultural production and identity. The globalized nation the women build through gifting their barkcloth and fine mats, challenges the normative idea that nations are always geographically bounded or spatially contiguous. The work suggests that, contrary to prevalent understandings of globalization, global resource flows do not always primarily involve commodities. Focusing on first-generation Tongans in New Zealand and the relationships they forge across generations and throughout the diaspora, the book examines how these communities centralize the diaspora by innovating and adapting traditional cultural forms in unprecedented ways.
Since the nineties, Walter Van Beirendonck has been fascinated with masks. They change your identity, invoke a certain atmosphere and have an instant impact. Many artists, among whom are André Breton, Pablo Picasso and even Brueghel, have been influenced by them. Power Mask - The Power of Masks elaborates on the many different aspects of masks: the link between Western art and African masks, the supernatural aspect, rituals about masks, masks in fashion or as a fetish... This book accompanies an expo in the Wereldmuseum (World Museum) Rotterdam, from 1 September 2017 until 7 January 2018. AUTHOR: Walter Van Beirendonck has launched clothing lines of his own making since 1983. His creations ...
New edition of Greenfield's pioneering study about the legal, political and historical aspects of cultural restitution.
Peggy Guggenheim (1898 - 1979) challenged boundaries as a patron and collector. She is celebrated for her groundbreaking collection of European and American modern art. The volume will focus on a lesser-known but crucial episode in Guggenheim's own migratory path: her turn to the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the 1950s and '60s. In these years, Guggenheim acquired works created by artists from cultures worldwide, including early twentieth-century sculpture from Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, and New Guinea, and ancient examples from Mexico and Peru. 'Migrating Objects' emerges from an extended period of research and discussion on this largely ignored area of Guggenheim's collection by a curatorial advisory committee, which has led to exciting findings, including the reattribution of individual works, among them the Nigerian headdress (Ago Egungun) produced by the workshop of Oniyide Adugbologe (ca. 1875-1949), which is illustrated in the catalogue.
Some 40 years ago, Pacific anthropology was dominated by debates about ‘women’s wealth’. These exchanges were generated by Annette Weiner’s (1976) critical reappraisal of Bronis?aw Malinowski’s classic work on the Trobriand Islands, and her observations that women’s production of ‘wealth’ (banana leaf bundles and skirts) for elaborate transactions in mortuary rituals occupied a central role in Trobriand matrilineal cosmology and social organisation. This volume brings the debates about women’s wealth back to the fore by critically revisiting and engaging with ideas about gender and materiality, value, relationality and the social life and agency of things. The chapters, int...
Barkcloth or tapa, a cloth made from the inner bark of trees, was widely used in place of woven cloth in the Pacific islands until the 19th century. A ubiquitous material, it was integral to the lives of islanders and used for clothing, furnishings and ritual artefacts. Material Approaches to Polynesian Barkcloth takes a new approach to the study of the history of this region through its barkcloth heritage, focusing on the plants themselves and surviving objects in historic collections. This object-focused approach has filled gaps in our understanding of the production and use of this material through an investigation of this unique fabric's physical properties, transformation during manufac...