Postcolonialism and Museum Knowledge: Revisiting the Museums of the Pacific

Abstract

Museums are the medium of our age. As such, the museum world cannot be isolated from political realities. On the contrary, far from their idealized image as institutional constants, innocently engaged in the "collection, conservation, classification, and display of objects," most important museums whether of art, history, anthropology, or natural history-are in a state of change, in management, in motivation, and in their capacities to attract visitors, engage attention, and mediate between what objects "say" and what visitors expect to hear. What is evident in Europe and North America is equally apparent in Australasia and the Pacific-with certain important differences. Today, Pacific museums are exploring a rich mix of postcolonial alternatives. Amongst many institutions seeking to speak to indigenous peoples and to hear their voices, they are focusing attention upon the rituals of cultural affirmation and the local character of knowledge production, as distinct from its global reception and legitimation. As such, they offer the historian of science an object lesson in the entangled relationship between Western and indigenous modes of thought. This paper outlines some of the characteristics and ambivalences currently accompanying the passage from colonial to postcolonial ways of thinking in the museum world of the Pacific.