A Place Containing Many Places: Museums and the Use of Objects to Represent Place in Melanesia

Abstract

In this paper I discuss a number of incompatible ways of comprehending object meanings, contrasting western ethnographic museum practice with indigenous, specifically ni‐Vanuatu, understandings. I discuss these differences as a way of looking analytically at some of the practices of museum ethnography and material culture studies. There are several aspects to this contrast: here I concentrate on ideas about place. Place is a centrally important concept in Vanuatu, but is not privileged in relation to objects. Western museums, however, use provenance as any ethnographic object's defining characteristic, and have developed a sophisticated, though largely unexamined, set of principles and practices for the attribution of provenance on stylistic grounds. On the basis of provenance identification, museums attribute meaning to objects. When enshrined as professional museum practice, such approaches pose dilemmas for Melanesian museums, and are the subject of debate among Pacific region museum professionals. For ni‐Vanuatu, the significance of objects on display may represent not places, but the performance of the skills that reveal the maker's place‐based identity.