Michael O'Hanlon and Robert L. Welsch, eds. Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents, and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000.

Extract

This volume of essays on the history of ethnographic collecting in Melanesia should open up debates about the agency of indigenous people in the process of collecting for European museums during the height of empire. It should also add more fire to the often spirited discussions about the repatriation of objects from these institutions. Although in his introduction O'Hanlon approaches the question of repatriation gingerly, the essays in this volume have provided him with the material to critique some of the assumptions behind contemporary arguments in its favor. As O'Hanlon stresses, and Nicholas Thomas revisits in his brief epilog, so much of the scholarship produced on colonialism during the last four decades has been focused on qualifying the ways in which colonial relations were relations of dominance. This focus has become almost tautological, so that scholars and others interested in ethnographic artifacts collected during the colonial era have tended to identify them a priori with dispossession. This, O'Hanlon argues, has left little room for considering the agency of non-Europeans in the world-wide networks of exchange that touched Melanesia (or other places) during the age of empire. It has also radically curtailed our appreciation of the kinds of ethnographic work that can be pursued in museums. This volume is meant to correct that imbalance by throwing into question the “unidimensional popular stereotype of dispossession and cultural obliteration” (3) associated with collecting. It encourages us to rethink some aspects of colonial encounters, the history of metropolitan museums, the history of anthropology and, by implication, the politics of repatriation.