You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
"In May 2006 some fifteen artists from New Zealand took over the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge (UK) as part of Pasifika Styles, a groundbreaking experiment in the display of Pacific Art. Installing their works in cases next to taonga or treasures collected on the voyages of Cook and Vancouver, the artists flung open the stores of the museum to bring more of the museum's unparalleled Oceanic collections to light. At the opening of the exhibition, the song of ancient instruments played by contemporary musicians called historic artefacts to life, heralding a new era of collaborative curatorship in ethnographic museums. Over the next two years, visiting artists continued to...
This book offers a contextual understanding of the contemporary Pacific art movement in New Zealand. As well as examining key individual artists, the book also addresses issues that underlie this movement and the inspirations for creating this art.
Heritage and its economies are driven by affective politics and consolidated through emotions such as pride, awe, joy and pain. In the humanities and social sciences, there is a widespread acknowledgement of the limits not only of language and subjectivity, but also of visuality and representation. Social scientists, particularly within cultural geography and cultural studies, have recently attempted to define and understand that which is more-than-representational, through the development of theories of affect, assemblage, post-humanism and actor network theory, to name a few. While there have been some recent attempts to draw these lines of thinking more forcefully into the field of herita...
This book argues for an important shift in cultural heritage conservation, away from a focus on maintaining the physical fabric of material culture toward the impact that conservation work has on people’s lives. In doing so, it challenges the commodification of sacred objects and places by western conservation thought and attempts to decolonize conservation practice. To do so, the authors examine conservation activities at Maori marae—meeting houses—located in the US, Germany, and England and contrasts them with changes in marae conservation in New Zealand. A key case study is the Hinemihi meeting house, transported to England in the 1890s where it was treated as a curiosity by visitors to Clandon Park for over a century, and more recently as a focal point of cultural activity for UK Maori communities. Recent efforts to include various Maori stakeholder communities in the care of this sacred structure is a key example of community based conservation that can be replicated in heritage practice around the world.
Refocusing Ethnographic Museums through Oceanic Lenses offers a collaborative ethnographic investigation of Indigenous museum practices in three Pacific museums located at the corners of the so-called Polynesian triangle: Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Hawai‘i; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; and Museo Antropológico Padre Sebastián Englert, Rapa Nui. Since their inception, ethnographic museums have influenced academic and public imaginations of other cultural-geographic regions, and the often resulting Euro-Americentric projection of anthropological imaginations has come under intense pressure, as seen in recent debates and conflicts around the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, Germany. ...
In his introduction to this anthology, Witi Ihimaera describes Auckland, Tamaki makau rau, as the place desired by many. The variety in this absorbing collection of short stories, poetry and extracts from novels and memoirs shows that while Auckland may not always have been desirable, it has certainly fascinated generations of very different writers, who have explored almost every part of this far-flung city. C.K. Stead and Maurice Gee, for example, go west, Tina Shaw and Diane Brown visit the city centre, Paula Morris and Peter Wells haunt the suburbs, while Robert Sullivan and Albert Wendt head south. Witi Ihimaera has skilfully constructed a literary map of the City of Sails: whether you ...
This volume examines how Indigenous theatre and performance from Oceania has responded to the intensification of globalisation from the turn of the 20th to the 21st centuries. It foregrounds a relational approach to the study of Indigenous texts, thus echoing what scholars such as Tui Nicola Clery have described as the stance of a “Multi-Perspective Culturally Sensitive Researcher.” To this end, it proposes a fluid vision of Oceania characterized by heterogeneity and cultural diversity calling to mind Epeli Hau‘ofa’s notion of “a sea of islands.” Taking its cue from the theories of Deleuze and Guattari, the volume offers a rhizomatic, non-hierarchical approach to the study of the...
A pathbreaking exploration of the international and intercultural connections within Oceanian performance
This volume investigates performances as situated "machineries of knowing" (Karin Knorr Cetina), exploring them as relational processes for, in and with which performers as well as spectators actively (re)generate diverse practices of knowing, knowledges and epistemologies. Performance cultures are distinct but interconnected environments of knowledge practice. Their characteristic features depend not least on historical as well as contemporary practices and processes of interweaving performance cultures. The book presents case studies from diverse locations around the globe, including Argentina, Canada, China, Greece, India, Poland, Singapore, and the United States. Authored by leading scho...
From the earliest accounts of contact with Europeans, Polynesians have been perceived as sensual and sexual beings. By the late 1800s, publications, lectures and stage plays about the Pacific became popular across Europe, and often contained exotic and erotic components. This book details the fusion of truth and fiction in the representation of Pacific Islanders, focusing on the sexualization of Polynesians in American cinema and other forms of mass communications and commercial entertainment. With messaging almost subliminal to American audiences, the Hollywood media machine produced hundreds of tropical film titles with images of revealing grass skirts, scanty sarongs, female toplessness and glistening exposed male pectorals. This critical filmography demonstrates how the concept of "sex sells," especially when applied on a large scale, shaped American social views on Polynesian people and their culture. Chapters document this phenomenon and an annotated filmography of sexualized tropes and several appendices conclude the book, including a glossary of Polynesian terms and a film index.