Refocusing Ethnographic Museums Through Oceanic Lenses

This book shapes a dialogue between Euro-Americentric myopia and Oceanic perspectives by offering historically informed, ethnographic insights into Indigenous museum practices grounded in Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies and cosmologies. In doing so, the book employs Oceanic lenses that help to reframe Pacific collections in, and the production of public understandings through, ethnographic museums in Europe and the Americas. Following this line of reasoning, Refocusing Ethnographic Museums sets out to offer insights into Indigenous museologies across Oceania to recalibrate ethnographic museums, collections and practices through Indigenous Oceanic approaches and perspectives. This, in turn, should assist any museum scholar and professional in rethinking and redoing their respective institutional settings, intellectual frameworks and museum processes when dealing with Oceanic affairs; and, more broadly, in doing the 'epistemic work;' needed to confront coloniality, not only as a political problem or ethical obligation but 'as an epistemology, as a politics of knowledge'.

Featured in the 20 April 2020 New Zealand newsletter.
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