Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents, and Agency in Melanesia 1870s-1930s - Methodology & History in Anthropology

Marc Notes: Bibl. ref. & index; Announced in cloth @ $69.95. Publisher Marketing: ." . . a most welcome book . . . Reading this book should irrevocably change how one looks at an ethnographic exhibit . . . These wide-ranging articles . . . augment our understanding of museums and their objects . . . Overall, this is a rich collection of essays, brimming with data and, for the most part, cogently analysed." . JRAI Between the 1870s and the 1930s competing European powers carved out and consolidated colonies in Melanesia, the most culturally diverse region of the world. As part of this process, great assemblages of ethnographic artefacts were made by a range of collectors whose diversity is captured in this volume. The contributors to this tightly-integrated volume take these collectors, and the collecting institutions, as the departure point for accounts that look back at the artefact-producing societies and their interaction with the collectors, but also forward to the fate of the collections in metropolitan museums, as the artefacts have been variously exhibited, neglected, re-conceived as indigenous heritage, or repatriated. In doing this, the contributors raise issues of current interest in anthropology, Pacific history, art history, museology, and material culture. Michael O'Hanlon is Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Robert L. Welsch teaches at the Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth, New Hampshire. Review Citations:

Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2001 pg. 68 (EAN 9781571818119, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:  O'Hanlon, Michael E Michael E. O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in national security policy. His many books include "Bending History" and "The Wounded Giant."