AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 4055–4058. ISSN 1048–4876, eISSN 1556–486X. © 2008 by the American Anthropological Association.

Reprint information can be found at https://caesar.sheridan.com/reprints/redir.php?pub=10089&acro=AMET.

Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange. Amiria Henare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xix + 323 pp., map, photographs, references, index.

ANTHONY SHELTONUniversity of British Columbia

Amiria Henare proffers an impressive interpretation of the mutual influences between

objects and ideas and their circulation between New Zealand and Scotland over the past 200

years. The author argues that material culture provides an important and still underappreciated

resource for anthropological research. Critiquing the view that too often sees material

expressions as simply semiotic or representational signs, she argues material culture actually

“constitutes and instantiates” social relations. “Materiality is integral to human existence, and to

sociality, not an inanimate substrate upon which meaning and culture are built” (p. 6). Objects

are intimately connected with ideas and persons, and work at diverse sensual levels, to create

bonds between peoples both spatially and historically.

Henare identifies five distinctive constitutive articulations of things and personages as

they pertain to specific periods in the encounter between Maori and Scottish peoples: (1) the late

18th century, when Maori and Europeans attempted to establish close links between their

respective elites based on reciprocal exchange; (2) The 18th–19thcenturies, when large numbers

of Scots settled in New Zealand as a result of the Highland clearances that replaced communal

and joint tenancies with large farms, worked by wage laborers, as well as small holdings. Scots

exported ideas of agricultural improvement learnt at home to New Zealand to transform Maori–

Scottish relations and systems of land tenure; (3) the late 19th century, when under colonialism,

New Zealand was reoriented away from the Polynesian world to be integrated into a European

market system; (4) the middle 20th century, when with independence, renewed interest in Maori

culture and tourism, stimulated an indigenous cultural renaissance; and (5) the late 20th century,

when, with the rehabilitation of the Treaty of Waitangi as the founding document of the modern

nation, traditional protocols become accepted as governing museum policies and practices.

Each period had distinct, usually complex modes of exchange that regulated the

reciprocal flows of artifacts and sometimes technologies whose uses and underlying ideas were

constituted by various distinctive ontological and epistemological presuppositions. In the earliest

period, Maori saw exchange in terms of gift giving, imposing obligations on Europeans through

the care of taonga, animate power objects, given them. Conversely, Maori accepted reciprocal

obligations from objects they saw as imbued with European taonga (as well as objects as diverse

as metal, combs, looking glasses, and kettles). In the second period, with the ascent of European

influence Maori became integrated into the Imperial trade network through European settlement.

Missionary influence extolled trade and Maori working on whaling vessels and in other areas of

the commoditized economy and encouraged the replacement of exchange by commoditization.

From the late 19th century, with even tighter economic integration, Maori traded for increasingly

more European goods and found employment as sailors and soldiers in different part of the

Empire. Despite such cosmopolitanism, exchange still took place in hybrid transactional

networks, characterized by barter, gift giving, and commodity relations.

Parallel to these movements in the nature of exchange, ran a similar change in the

significance of artifacts; Maori objects for Europeans, undergoing transformations to be regarded

first as curiosities, then as evidence of “primitive technology” (indexed to notions of inferior

mentality), followed by being regarded as “souvenirs,” until they were acclaimed and celebrated

as survivals and attestations of cultural resilience and vitality. Conversely, European objects,

viewed by European settlers during the same long period, changed their significance from

commodities to heirlooms, relics, and bygones, to heritage and evidence of Scottish ancestry,

ingenuity, and persistence.

This complex history of material agency and changing epistemological predicates is not

unsurprisingly without contemporary paradoxes. For Henare, “museums emerge from peoples

desire to mark out a place for themselves” (p. 290), and, by the late 20th century, the objects

brought by Scottish immigrants to New Zealand were nearly all housed in newly established

museums that gave a rarified and essentialist view of Scottish culture. Made sentimental as

relics, souvenirs and keepsakes, dioramas, and period rooms that drew parallels between the

Scottish of both countries, these objects ennobled rather than examined the global historical

processes that shaped the immigrants’ lives. In contrast the new national museum, Te Papa

Tongarewa, opened in 1998, exemplified an interesting paradox. The notion of a bicultural

nation is represented at Te Papa Tongarewa by separating the display of Maori culture using

essentialist indigenous terms and metaphors from the European collections that adopt

deconstructive approaches to aspects of settler society and history, creating questions about the

comparative value of critical history to ethnography.

This is an exciting and provocative work that demonstrates the importance of historical

ethnography for understanding symbolic exchanges. It also convincingly demonstrates why

European material culture should not be exhibited in separate museums or departments removed

from non-Western objects. Henare’s sophisticated analysis, part of a newly emerging school of

material culture studies, clearly shows that European and non-European artifacts shared in the

same exchange networks and cannot be understood in isolation. Furthermore, objects, persons,

and ideas are often fused together in variable dense and opaque articulations that are open to

alternative and multiple contested readings. This work is an exemplary and clear exposition of

the anything but clear internal complexities of meanings within the hybrid third spaces of

cultural contacts from which contemporary world cultures and markets have emerged.