Living Spirits with Fixed Abodes

Living Spirits with Fixed Abodes PDF Author: Barry Craig
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824831516
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
On the eve of Papua New Guinea’s attainment of independence from Australia, Chief Minister Michael Somare referred to the new nation’s cultural treasures as "living spirits with fixed abodes." He was referring to the prevailing belief of Papua New Guineans that everything is invested with spirit, not least the objects carved, modeled, or constructed for ceremonial, and often everyday, use. The Masterpieces Exhibition includes the most significant cultural treasures on display at the Papua New Guinea’s national museum. This book gives the reader a thorough account of each of the exhibition’s 209 pieces.An introduction aims to give the general reader an idea of the significance of the objects and how they are to be understood. Other chapters provide a brief history of the museum and its role in forging national identity. Editor Barry Craig sets the individual works in their local context with historical and field photographs. The objects are dealt with under various headings: Watercraft, Architecture, Household Items, Gardening and Fertility Figures, Hunting and Warfare, Musical Instruments, Masks and Mortuary Objects.

Living Spirits with Fixed Abodes

Living Spirits with Fixed Abodes PDF Author: Barry Craig
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824831516
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
On the eve of Papua New Guinea’s attainment of independence from Australia, Chief Minister Michael Somare referred to the new nation’s cultural treasures as "living spirits with fixed abodes." He was referring to the prevailing belief of Papua New Guineans that everything is invested with spirit, not least the objects carved, modeled, or constructed for ceremonial, and often everyday, use. The Masterpieces Exhibition includes the most significant cultural treasures on display at the Papua New Guinea’s national museum. This book gives the reader a thorough account of each of the exhibition’s 209 pieces.An introduction aims to give the general reader an idea of the significance of the objects and how they are to be understood. Other chapters provide a brief history of the museum and its role in forging national identity. Editor Barry Craig sets the individual works in their local context with historical and field photographs. The objects are dealt with under various headings: Watercraft, Architecture, Household Items, Gardening and Fertility Figures, Hunting and Warfare, Musical Instruments, Masks and Mortuary Objects.

Living Spirits with Fixed Abodes

Living Spirits with Fixed Abodes PDF Author: Barry Craig
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824860493
Category : ART
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
On the eve of Papua New Guinea's attainment of independence from Australia, Chief Minister Michael Somare referred to the new nation's cultural treasures as "living spirits with fixed abodes." He was referring to the prevailing belief of Papua New Guineans that everything is invested with spirit, not least the objects carved, modeled, or constructed for ceremonial, and often everyday, use. The Masterpieces Exhibition includes the most significant cultural treasures on display at the Papua New Guinea's national museum. This book gives the reader a thorough account of each of the exhibition's 209 pieces. An introduction aims to give the general reader an idea of the significance of the objects and how they are to be understood. Other chapters provide a brief history of the museum and its role in forging national identity. Editor Barry Craig sets the individual works in their local context with historical and field photographs. The objects are dealt with under various headings: Watercraft, Architecture, Household Items, Gardening and Fertility Figures, Hunting and Warfare, Musical Instruments, Masks and Mortuary Objects.

Living Spirits with Fixed Abodes

Living Spirits with Fixed Abodes PDF Author: Barry Craig
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781863332569
Category : Art, Papua New Guinean
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description


Hunting the Collectors

Hunting the Collectors PDF Author: Susan Cochrane
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443871001
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
This volume investigates Pacific collections held in Australian museums, art galleries and archives, and the diverse group of 19th and 20th century collectors responsible for their acquisition. The nineteen essays reveal varied personal and institutional motivations that eventually led to the conservation, preservation and exhibition in Australia of a remarkable archive of Pacific Island material objects, art and crafts, photographs and documents. Hunting the Collectors benchmarks the importance of Pacific Collections in Australia and is a timely contribution to the worldwide renaissance of interest in Oceanic arts and cultures. The essays suggest that the custodial role is not fixed and immutable but fluctuates with the perceived importance of the collection, which in turn fluctuates with the level of national interest in the Pacific neighbourhood. This cyclical rise and fall of Australian interest in the Pacific Islands means many of the valuable early collections in state and later national repositories and institutions have been rarely exhibited or published. But, as the authors note, enthusiastic museum anthropologists, curators, collection managers and university-based scholars across Australia, and worldwide, have persisted with research on material collected in the Pacific. This volume is a very important one for anyone studying the art and material culture of the Pacific. It focuses on collections now in Australia. Even those well versed in museum collections from the Pacific will learn about many important but little-known collectors as well as better-known figures like the anthropologists F. E. Williams and Thomas Farrell, the husband of Queen Emma. This will be a treat for students and specialist alike. —Professor Robert L. Welsch, University of Dartmouth

Bones of the Ancestors

Bones of the Ancestors PDF Author: Brian Egloff
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 9780759111608
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
The 3,500-year-old Ambum Stone from Papua New Guinea is the focus of several archaeological stories. The stone itself is an interesting artifact, an important piece of art history that tells us something about the ancient Papuans. The stone is also at the center of controversies over the provenance and ownership of ancient artifacts, as it was excavated on the island of New Guinea, transferred out of the country, and sold on the antiquities market. In telling the story of the Ambum Stone, Brian Egloff raises questions about what can be learned from ancient works of art, about cultural property and the ownership of the past, about the complex and at times shadowy world of art dealers and collectors, and about the role ancient artifacts can play in forming the identities of modern peoples. Book jacket.

The Magnificent Boat

The Magnificent Boat PDF Author: Götz Aly
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674293223
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
From an eminent and provocative historian, a wrenching parable of the ravages of colonialism in the South Pacific. Countless museums in the West have been criticized for their looted treasures, but few as trenchantly as the Humboldt Forum, which displays predominantly non-Western art and artifacts in a modern reconstruction of the former Royal Palace in Berlin. The Forum’s premier attraction, an ornately decorated fifteen-meter boat from the island of Luf in modern-day Papua New Guinea, was acquired under the most dubious circumstances by Max Thiel, a German trader, in 1902 after two decades of bloody German colonial expeditions in Oceania. Götz Aly tells the story of the German pillaging of Luf and surrounding islands, a campaign of violence in which Berlin ethnologists were brazenly complicit. In the aftermath, the majestic vessel was sold to the Ethnological Museum in the imperial capital, where it has remained ever since. In Aly’s vivid telling, the looted boat is a portal to a forgotten chapter in the history of empire—the conquest of the Bismarck Archipelago. One of these islands was even called Aly, in honor of the author’s great-granduncle, Gottlob Johannes Aly, a naval chaplain who served aboard ships that helped subjugate the South Sea islands Germany colonized. While acknowledging the complexity of cultural ownership debates, Götz Aly boldly questions the legitimacy of allowing so many treasures from faraway, conquered places to remain located in the West. Through the story of one emblematic object, The Magnificent Boat artfully illuminates a sphere of colonial brutality of which too few are aware today.

Songs of the Empty Place

Songs of the Empty Place PDF Author: James F. Weiner
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1925022234
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
For 31 months between 1979 and 1995, James F. Weiner conducted anthropological research amongst the Foi people in Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. This book contains the transcriptions, translations, and descriptions of the songs he recorded. The texts of women’s sago songs (obedobora), men’s ceremonial songs (sorohabora), and women’s sorohabora are included. Men turn the prosaic content of womenís sago songs into their ownsorohabora songs, which are performed the night following large-scale inter-community pig kills, called dawa. While women sing sago songs by themselves, men sing their ceremonial songs in groups of paired men. Women also have their own ceremonial versions of such songs. The songs are memorial in intent; they are designed to commemorate the lives of men who are no longer living. Most commonly they do so by naming the places the deceased inhabited during his lifetime. These song texts and translations are introduced by Weiner. Ethnomusicologist Don Niles then brings together information about each type of song and considers these Foi genres in relation to those of neighbouring groups, highlighting aspects of regional performance styles. Consideration is also given to the poetic devices used in Papua New Guinea songs. Eighteen recordings illustrating the Foi genres discussed in this book are available for download. It remains uncertain how such songs may be affected by the major oil extraction project that has been undertaken in the region for more than two decades. This book will interest students of anthropology, ethnomusicology, linguistics, verbal art, aesthetics, and cultural heritage.

Repatriation, Exchange, and Colonial Legacies in the Gulf of Papua

Repatriation, Exchange, and Colonial Legacies in the Gulf of Papua PDF Author: Lara Lamb
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031155793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This book explores the people of the Kikori River Delta, in the Gulf of Papua, as established historical agents of intercultural exchange. One hundred years after they were made, Frank Hurley’s colonial-era photographic reproductions are returned to the descendants of the Kerewo and Urama peoples, whom he photographed. The book illuminates how the movement, use, and exchange of objects can produce distinctive and unrecognised forms of value. To understand this exchange, a nuanced history of the conditions of the exchange is necessary, which also allows a reconsideration of the colonial legacies that continue to affect the social and political worlds of people in the twenty-first century.

Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value

Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value PDF Author: Howard Morphy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000515540
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value focuses on the ways in which museums and the use of their collections have contributed to, and continue to be engaged with, value creation processes. Including chapters from many of the leading figures in museum anthropology, as well as from outstanding early-career researchers, this volume presents a diverse range of international case studies that bridge the gap between theory and practice. It demonstrates that ethnographic collections and the museums that hold and curate them have played a central role in the value creation processes that have changed attitudes to cultural differences. The essays engage richly with many of the important issues of contemporary museum discourse and practice. They show how collections exist at the ever-changing point of articulation between the source communities and the people and cultures of the museum and challenge presentist critiques of museums that position them as locked into the time that they emerged. Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value provides examples of the productive outcomes of collaborative work and relationships, showing how they can be mutually beneficial. The book will be of great interest to researchers and students engaged in the study of museums and heritage, anthropology, culture, Indigenous peoples, postcolonialism, history and sociology. It will also be of interest to museum professionals.

The Melanesian World

The Melanesian World PDF Author: Eric Hirsch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131552967X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 676

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Book Description
This wide-ranging volume captures the diverse range of societies and experiences that form what has come to be known as Melanesia. It covers prehistoric, historic and contemporary issues, and includes work by art historians, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists. The chapters range from studies of subsistence, ritual and ceremonial exchange to accounts of state violence, new media and climate change. The ‘Melanesian world’ assembled here raises questions that cut to the heart of debates in the human sciences today, with profound implications for the ways in which scholars across disciplines can describe and understand human difference. This impressive collection of essays represents a valuable resource for scholars and students alike.