University of Auckland

Department Member, Anthropology

About

I'm a social anthropologist affiliated to the Universities of Auckland (New Zealand) and Cambridge (UK), currently based in Brazil.

As co-director of the project Artefacts of Encounter: http://maa.cam.ac.uk/aofe/ I'm working with an international research team based in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge to study the legacy of early European and American voyages into Polynesia (1765-1840). Using artefacts collected and produced on the voyages (objects, images and texts) as primary evidence, we are looking at the nature of early exchanges, how they shifted over time, and how the relationships they established played out during subsequent imperial and colonial interventions in the Pacific.

An important aspect of our work is collaboration with present-day Maori and Pacific Island groups who have strong interests in surviving collections from this period. We are developing a 'digital research environment' to enable international collaboration and sharing of research findings, and are therefore also exploring issues surrounding the digitization of culture, particularly museum and archival collections.

My research interests connect to my background growing up in New Zealand, with close family connections to Maoritanga. I was always curious about the historical trajectories that led my ancestors to migrate from Scotland to the other end of the world, settling in a country already occupied by a sovereign people. This was the genesis of my doctoral research, published by Cambridge University Press as Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange (2005). The book worked through the artefacts gifted, sold, stolen and exchanged over more than 200 years of colonial and post-colonial relationships to reassess these complex histories and their importance for contemporary people. It also traced the emergence of the discipline of anthropology in the theatre of Empire, with particular attention to the central role played by museums and artefact-based methodologies and theory.

This work revealed what appeared to me as fundamental problems with the theoretical repertoire of anthropology in dealing with objects and materiality. In collaboration with other colleagues I established an interdisciplinary graduate seminar series called Artefacts in Theory to worked through some of these issues, culminating in the publication of an co-edited volume Thinking through things: theorising artefacts ethnographically (2007).

My current work on Artefacts of Encounter applies the methodological programme developed in "TTT" to encounters between early European voyagers to Polynesia and Pacific Islanders. The aim is to work through the artefacts of those exchanges, which are now in present-day museum collections, as primary evidence of what happens when people who disparate cultural backgrounds come together. Together with accounts of the transactions through which they were collected, such objects instantiate those early relationships and trace their transformations over time, illuminating processes of social and ontological accommodation.

Aside from Artefacts of Encounter, recent projects include Pasifika Styles (2004-08): <http://www.pasifikastyles.org.uk/&gt;, a project developed with artist and curator Rosanna Raymond. This included a two-year major exhibition in Cambridge of contemporary art from New Zealand, which demonstrated the interest of many contemporary artists in museum collections. Pasifika Styles also involved a two-year visiting artists programme which brought 28 artists from the Pacific to Cambridge.