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.
At the same time, (post)colonial renegotiations in former European
and American colonies have initiated dramatic changes to
anthropological approaches through Indigenous museum practices.
This book shapes a dialogue between Euro-Americentric myopia and
Oceanic perspectives by offering historically informed,
ethnographic insights into Indigenous museum practices grounded in
Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies. In doing
so, it employs Oceanic lenses that help to reframe Pacific
collections in, and the production of public understandings
through, ethnographic museums in Europe and the Americas. By
offering insights into Indigenous museologies across Oceania, the
coauthors seek to recalibrate ethnographic museums, collections,
and practices through Indigenous Oceanic approaches and
perspectives. This, in turn, should assist any museum scholar and
professional in rethinking and redoing their respective
institutional settings, intellectual frameworks, and museum
processes when dealing with Oceanic affairs; and, more broadly, in
doing the ""epistemic work"" needed to confront ""coloniality,""
not only as a political problem or ethical obligation, but ""as an
epistemology, as a politics of knowledge."" A noteworthy feature is
the book's layered coauthorship and multi-vocality, drawing on a
collaborative approach that has put the (widespread) philosophical
commitment to dialogical inquiry into (seldom) practice by
systematically co-constituting ethnographic knowledge. Further, the
book shapes an ""ethnographic kaleidoscope,"" proposing the
metaphor of the kaleidoscope as a way of encouraging fluid
ethnographic engagements to avoid the impulse to solidify and
enclose differences, and remain open to changing ethnographic
meanings, positions, performances, and relationships. The coauthors
collaboratively mobilize Oceanic eyes, bodies, and sovereignties,
thus enacting an ethnographic kaleidoscopic process and effect
aimed at refocusing ethnographic museums through Oceanic lenses.
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