Museums, Anthropology and Colonial Exchange (review)

This rich book explores the colonial exchanges and interplays between Scotland and New Zealand as they were articulated through material objects of both Maori and European (especially Scottish) manufacture. It traces these entwined histories from the European "voyages of discovery" of the eighteenth century to the representation of colonial, settler, and crosscultural histories in the modern museum. Central to the argument is the Maori concept of taonga (cultural treasure) and its importance to the social relations between people and things and people and people. The ways in which the concept has been observed, applied, appropriated, ignored, abused, misunderstood, refigured, or exploited over time constitutes the history of the entanglement of Maori and settler histories and the attendant movement of objects.

This fascinating story reveals how the Maori experience of European settlement and the energetic Scottish settler experience of New Zealand brought traditional Maori values and those of, for instance, the Scottish Enlightenment, together in ways that continue to resonate through Maori/pakeha (white) relations and the dynamics of objects within this relation. Parallels are also drawn between the accounts and representations of Highlander experience in Scotland and those of the Maori. The cultural politics of both these contentious histories are woven together or resonate with each other, creating a critical space in which to discuss the construction of cultural identities and the telling of histories.

Methodologically, the work sits between anthropology, with its fieldwork and material-culture approaches, to the entangled histories of museum collections, and history itself. Although the subject matter is more conventionally historical, Henare is much stronger on the detailed "ethnography," whether in bringing together detailed accounts of Maori/settler relations in the early nineteenth century, or accounts of the social dynamics of museum collections encountered through her fieldtrips, which punctuate the book. However, sometimes the disciplines sit uncomfortably together because of the density of the material and its extension over several fields.

Henare explores a vast domain that encompasses almost every intellectual movement from Adam Smith's economic models through popular Darwinism to contemporary programs of cultural recuperation and commemoration. These broad sweeps demand not a superficial summary but a distillation and density to give clarity of meaning and insight. Too often the broad, "positioning" sections are reduced to bland summaries, of almost journalistic style, which leave too many questions unanswered. Much of the theoretical positioning on exchange, commodity, or social biography of objects from anthropology gets lost in the larger narrative.

Significantly, Henare does not cite some of the key practitioners of crosscultural anthropological history or historical anthropology, such as Dening or Douglas, even though their work is a model of how to handle the differences of scale in contact and crosscultural histories.¹ In many ways this volume should have been two books, not split along traditional disciplinary lines but according to theme. Despite the comprehensiveness, too many avenues are left undeveloped, and in some places, the slotting together of ideas is far from seamless, as if they need more time to mature and cohere.

Nonetheless, this fascinating volume pulls together a mass of diverse and often little-known material, telling a complex and revealing story in an unusual and convincing way. It offers multiple levels of interest within a wide range of historical fields and demonstrates, through its anthropological conceptualization, the incontrovertible interconnectedness of two apparently disparate histories throughout a long period.