Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and Colonial Change (review)

Objects connected with ritual and trade—including blowpipes, head-binding bark cloth, pig-tusk ornaments, shields, and shell money—which were collected in Papua New Guinea between 1910 to 1939 and are currently maintained in four museums in four industrialized countries provide insights into the continuities of the region at a time of imposed change. Collecting Colonialism argues that the colonial experience under both German and Australian authorities must be seen as only one of the many cultural shifts on a thirty-five-thousand-year continuum that featured frequent change. New Guinean societies and colonists mutually influenced one another. Material culture and the movement of goods linked all participants.

For their book, Chris Gosden and Chantal Knowles inventoried objects preserved in museum collections and then used these databases as a means to link the history of colonialism, the discipline of anthropology, and the study of material culture. In examining a total of 901 artifacts they sought not only to understand technical details and provenance but also to gain insights into the gendered use of each object and its role in exchange and change in the social fabric of New Britain, especially in the south coastal Arawe region. They examine community and change through four case studies that highlight exchange relationships and provide an opportunity to connect the microdata to the large issues.

European administrators, missionaries, and plantation owners collected objects from the indigenous people as souvenirs of their travels or out of a desire to salvage evidence of vanishing cultures. Competing with them were anthropologists doing fieldwork. Collecting Colonialism examines the collecting methods of four of these scholars in Arawe: Lewis Albert Buell in 1910 for the Field Museum, Chicago; Felix Speiser in 1930 for the Basel Museum für Völkerkunde (now the Museum der Kulturen, Basel); John Alexander Todd in 1933 for his graduate studies at Sydney University (collection now at the Australian Museum, Sydney); and Beatrice Blackwood in 1937 for the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. In addition to studying the collecting practices and the objects collected, Gosden and Knowles examined each field-worker's interests, purposes, and relationships both at home and in Arawe. They identify collecting as a process of negotiation, and this theme is central to their assessment of what difference objects made in people's lives—whether local or colonist, whether producing, exchanging, or using those objects.

The changes documented during this colonial era include the movement of people, especially from hamlets to villages as men went to work on plantations; the intermixing of people and new exchanges; an enforced cessation of warfare; and a shift away from the rigid separation of men from women by means of male-only rituals and ceremonies. Crucial to interpreting the agency of the local population is an understanding of how and why they formed relationships with Westerners. Cargo cults represented the belief that Westerners had privileged access to material goods and to their divine sources. Locals devised new relationships with Westerners not only in an attempt to access the sources of these objects but also to create better relationships with their own ancestors. They desired Western goods as a means to track down the sources of spiritual power that they thought whites possessed. Throughout their exchanges local men and women refused to trade away their symbols of family wealth or prized heirlooms.

This book is neither a study of colonial power relations nor a nuanced analysis of gender roles in relation to artifacts. It is, however, a good read if you regularly ask such questions as these: Do artifacts have politics? What is worth saving? How can I contextualize objects? Gosden and Knowles demonstrate that artifacts in storage can do more than gather dust, and that databases can do more than track microdata. This comparative study of the holdings of four museums and the work of four collectors effectively illustrates...