The politics of authority: Anthropology and Curating as Correspondence
The central research question this thesis asks is: How is authority negotiated and shared in the museum? In the first decades of the 21st century, what politics are involved in the establishment of authority and to what end? I bring these questions to bear on an analysis of how the cultures of Pacific peoples in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa have been exhibited, collected and catalogued over the last 30 years.
For anthropologists inside and outside the academy, questions related to the authority in their work are often confronting. They relate to the credibility of the anthropologist, their experience, and the authenticity of that experience. Throughout my career I have been struck by the way that many of the techniques, challenges, and solutions involved in establishing authority in ethnographic writing by anthropologists are similar to those deployed in the performance of curatorial work in museums. Indeed authority is at the centre of processes of representation and curatorial contestations for power within and outside the museum; from developing exhibitions or organising public events, to collecting objects and creating catalogue entries.
This thesis sets out to determine how the practices of anthropology in museums are shaped, by ‘authoritative’ global discourse in the discipline but also the particularities of local conditions and cultural politics inside and outside the museum. It also seeks to understand how the practices of anthropology in museums are influenced by indigenous anthropological/curatorial positionalities and authority. In answering these questions, I am inspired by anthropologist Tim Ingold’s conceptualisation of anthropology as a form of correspondence. It is one that requires anthropologists/curators to be correspondents who are open and attentive to their collaborators/informants needs and concerns. It calls for a more engaged anthropology, a proposition that challenges curators to conceive of curating as correspondence, as not something we do but something we undergo or undertake with the world, “a form of experience”.
Ingold’s call for an open and engaged anthropology aligns with contemporary concepts of a collaborative, co-curated, co-developed museum. With these ideas in mind, my analysis is informed by an analytical auto-ethnographic methodology based upon my personal experiences as a member of the Pacific Cultures team at Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa for over three decades.
The over-arching structure of this thesis is organised around the core curatorial practices of exhibition making, collecting, and cataloguing. Within each activity, I analyse how curators and communities negotiate issues of representation, authority, agency, and power. The data presented throughout this study draws on my experiences working in the museum, supplemented by a range of archival, documentary and media sources, and an institutional archive which I in part have helped to create. I conclude with my reflections on the role of the indigenous curator/anthropologist and an assessment of the limits and opportunities of sharing authority and decolonising/indigenising the museum.
