Abstract
It is commonplace today for museums to have collection development policies governing acquisitions and collecting, accompanied by statements concerning the need for ethical standards in acquisition, the latter referencing ICOM standards and appropriate legislation. This chapter turns from museum policy to focus on the events and issues met within the process of making a collection of pottery from Papua New Guinea, for a museum holding ethnographic objects. I delineate the preoccupations of the pot makers concerned and compare these with the aims and objectives of the museum as a collecting institution including the role of the collector as museum agent and fieldworker. In presenting this case study, I illustrate that the specific actions of ‘ethical’ collecting cannot necessarily be stipulated in advance, beyond the broadest/abstract statements of intention: but such statements of intention must be able to accommodate divergent local views, without being able to predict what these may be.
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Notes
- 1.
Henrietta Lidchi (2012) presents an interesting examination of the ethics of collecting contemporary Native American jewellery bought in pawnshops.
- 2.
This document was updated in 2008 (Australian Museum 2008), most recently in 2014 (Australian Museum 2014).
- 3.
I have selected those aspects of the document that are relevant to this paper. The document includes other attributes not discussed here.
- 4.
The 2008 document contains the essential points of the 1989 document (as these relate to the Pacific component) but introduces and clearly articulates a connection between the cultural and the natural environment; it continues to emphasise the continuity of collections over time, rephrased as a ‘time series’ (rather than ‘diachronic collections’); it adds the ‘unlocking’ of knowledge held in the collections and specifies the nature of social change (effects of urbanisation, industrialisation, tourism, environmental change, disasters). It introduces mention of the ‘origin and functions of social exchange’ (Australian Museum 2008:3) and emphasises the importance of the connection between collecting and research: the document sets out a specific listing of prioritised collection areas and object types and the cultural criteria These criteria foreshadow those listed by Russell and Winkworth (2010) against which new acquisitions should be assessed.
- 5.
Abbott collected around 100 objects which he sold to the museum in Edinburgh (now the National Museum of Scotland).
- 6.
Chignell served in Wanigela from 1907 to 1914 (Wetherall 1977:335). Chignell sold his collections to the British Museum (and to other museums as well).
- 7.
PNG has three national languages: Tok Pisin, Motu and English as well as hundreds of local languages. Tok ples is the Tok Pisin term for the local language of an area.
- 8.
Quinnell suggests that MacGregor clearly distinguished between ‘collecting’ through exchange and collecting via confiscation within his own collecting project. MacGregor did not, for example, incorporate the 1,563 items confiscated by him after a skirmish with locals on the Wassi Kussa River in 1896, rather he had these items destroyed (Quinnell 2000:87).
- 9.
However, despite this, I did take the collection to the PNG National Museum and obtained a permit for the museum’s records as a form of protection against future questions arising around the absence of such a document.
- 10.
Flower pots were also included in the earlier Tuckson collection of the 1960s.
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Bonshek, E. (2015). Ethics and Collecting in the ‘Postmodern’ Museum: A Papua New Guinea Example. In: Ireland, T., Schofield, J. (eds) The Ethics of Cultural Heritage. Ethical Archaeologies: The Politics of Social Justice, vol 4. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1649-8_9
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