Haidy Geismar

Cultural Property, Museums, and the Pacific: Reframing the Debates

The following short articles were presented at a special session of the Pacific Arts Association, held at the College Arts Association annual meeting in New York in February 2007. Entitled “Cultural Properties—Reconnecting Pacific Arts,” the panel brought together curators and anthropologists working in the Pacific, and with Pacific collections elsewhere, with the intention of presenting a series of case studies evoking the discourse around cultural property that has emerged within this institutional, social, and material framework. The panel was conceived in direct response to the ways that cultural property, specifically in relation to museum collections, has been discussed recently in major metropolitan art museums such as the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met). This prevailing cultural property discourse tends to use antiquities—that most ancient, valuable, and malleable of material culture, defined categorically by the very distancing of time that in turn becomes a primary justification for their circulation on the market or the covetous evocation of national identity—as a baseline for discussion of broader issues around national patrimony and ownership.

Malakula: A Photographic Collection

During the year, the Museum has received from Dr. Haddon a gift of the first importance in the shape of his collection of several thousands of anthropological photographs, accumulated by him over a very long period and from every part of the world. In honour of Dr. Haddons eightieth birthday these photographs had been put in order, prints made from the negatives, and the whole collection catalogued, uniformly mounted, and arranged in a cabinet specially made for them... The large number of photographs already in the Museum have now been incorporated in the collection, many hundreds have been added, chiefly by friends of Dr. Haddon, and it is hoped that the collection, which will be called the Haddon Photographic Collection, will steadily increase. It is already one of the most comprehensive in existence.

Stone Men of Malekula on Malakula: An Ethnography of an Ethnography

This article examines the resonances of the voluminous ethnography, ‘Stone Men of Malekula’ (SMM) in contemporary Vanuatu. Anthropological research is politically charged in Vanuatu, in part because of how the weighty materiality of archival forms exercise significant local authority. However, alongside respect for this ‘evidential’ material is a healthy scepticism of anthropological authority. SMM, written by the maverick anthropologist John Layard in 1942 (based on fieldwork in 1914–15), has returned to Vanuatu in many guises over the years. It is used as formal evidence in land disputes and as a bone of contention within competing claims. Tracing the ways in which culture is written, read and materialized, exposes the paradoxes of knowledge and politics not only within anthropological critique but in Vanuatu villages.