Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange

By Urry, James

AMIRIA HENARE, Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xix + 323. ISBN 0- 521-83591-7. Pounds 48.00, $80.00 (hardback). doi:10.1017/ S0007087407009545

Amiria Henare describes her book as a ‘historical ethnography’ (p. 2). The use of the term ‘ethnography’ is justified as it is based on personal research in museums in Scotland and New Zealand, focusing on collections of Maori and Scottish artefacts. Throughout the text this research is introduced with small vignettes, excerpted apparently from her personal field diaries and recording her impressions of events, people and places. The artefacts studied were collected and/or transported from the first sustained contacts between Britain and New Zealand, beginning in the late eighteenth century and culminating in the colonization of New Zealand in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by people mainly of British descent, including many Scots. Henare’s stated purpose is to ‘trace the changing fortunes of artefacts and ideas as they move through time, drawing attention to a long and fertile tension between language- and object-based epistemologies that has shaped imperial relationships and thinking from the late eighteenth century to the present’ (p. 286). She also makes an appeal for the renewed study of artefacts and museum collections in anthropology.

For readers of this journal the author’s interest in the shaping of anthropological thinking is of particular relevance. She argues that in Britain anthropology, Once a discipline centred on museums’ where the collecting and study of artefacts were ‘key techniques in the understanding of human existence’, lost its way once ‘social anthropology moved into universities’. Thereafter the study of artefacts was replaced by an emphasis on ‘the gathering of utterances and textual descriptions of social life’ (p. 4). Unfortunately this view of the history of British anthropology can at best be described as eccentric. While Henare maintains this argument throughout the book, she fails to sustain her point of view on the basis of primary sources. Instead she relies heavily on a limited range of secondary sources which she then reinterprets according to her needs. For instance, although she cites George W. Stocking’s Victorian Anthropology (New York, 1987), his book clearly contradicts her claim that nineteenth-century British anthropology was centred on museums. Stocking and others have argued that nineteenth-century anthropology developed more in learned societies and among gentleman scholars than as a ‘discipline’ centred on museums. And her later assertion that anthropology after the First World War involved a ‘first “linguistic-turn”‘ (p. 287) away from the study of objects towards textual forms, to be followed later in the century by a second linguistic turn, associated with the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss, unfortunately is not sustained by any real evidence.

The problem in part lies in a failure to differentiate anthropology, ethnography and ethnology. Anthropology involved the study of humankind in general; ethnography involves the study of specific social and cultural groups usually associated with field research; and ethnology, although today rarely practised in British anthropology, is concerned with the reconstruction of historical connections between people in regional contexts. Artefacts play an important role in ethnological research. In ethnological terms Maori are seen as belonging to Polynesian (or larger Austronesian- speaking) cultures. In the past such ethnological considerations were seen as building on ethnographic research. H. D. Skinner, the long-time curator of the Otago University Museum, was deeply interested in such research. But Henare casually dismisses Skinner, claiming he was more interested in archaeology than in ‘contemporary ethnography’ (p. 236). In a similar way the work of the Hawaiian- based Maori ethnologist and museum researcher Sir Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) is barely discussed, as he too placed Maori in their Polynesian ethnological context. In America, following the revolution in anthropology led by Franz Boas, museum studies took on an ethnological rather than an evolutionary anthropological focus. Buck’s interests and links with American anthropology are but one example of the growing influence of American anthropology in New Zealand before the second World War-an influence that Henare fails to discuss in her concentration on the development of the ethnographic emphasis in imperialistic British anthropology.

Similar criticisms could be made of the larger historical contexts in which the author frames her arguments. The presentation of New Zealand history and Maori-non-Maori relations is also largely dependent on a particular reading of mostly secondary sources. In her consideration of Scottish history there is little understanding of the impact of the Act of Union, the invasion of lowland Scots into all aspects of English society and their important role in creating British domination overseas, so ably discussed by Linda Colley in Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1937 (New Haven, 1992). Henare’s failure to differentiate clearly between lowland and highland Scots results in claims that Maori and Scots share a common experience of’colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’. This association, informed in part by the author’s own ancestry and kin connections, can be justified because both peoples suffered dispossession, alienation and loss of culture at the hands of British imperialism.

The author’s lack of precision in detailing the historical contexts of terms such as ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’ may produce the desired rhetorical effect, but does little to further our understanding. It also results in some strange claims. Consider for instance the assertion that ‘[s]ubjective, emotive and impassioned ways of responding to the world have always been instrumental elements in scientific thought’, but that the rational ‘Cartesian mindset ascribed to Enlightenment thinkers and their nineteenth-century philosophical progeny’ is Often placed in opposition’ to ‘[r]omantic epistemologies of sentiment’. The latter apparently were ‘crucial in the development of disciplines including anthropology’ (p. 179). The point is that this is a book long on rhetoric but short on the kind of detail required to sustain scholarly arguments through research. If the ultimate purpose of the book is a plea to reinstate the study of objects and museum research in anthropology and to recognize their importance, then it is a pity that this has to be argued through such idiosyncratic interpretations of the history of intellectual ideas.

JAMES URRY

Victorian University of Welli

Copyright Cambridge University Press, Publishing Division Jun 2007

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