Emma Gattey

Refocusing Ethnographic Museums Through Oceanic Lenses by Philipp Schorch, with Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu, Sean Mallon, Cristián Moreno Pakarati, Mara Mulrooney, Nina Tonga and Ty P. Kāwika Tengan (Otago University Press, 2020), 299pp, $49.95

A deep-dive into museum work across Te Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa, Refocusing Ethnographic Museums Through Oceanic Lenses presents ‘a collaborative ethnographic investigation of Indigenous museum practices in three Pacific museums’: Hawai`i’s Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, New Zealand’s Te Papa Tongarewa, and Rapa Nui’s (Easter Island) Museo Antropológico Padre Sebastián Englert. The text’s key contribution is, according to lead author Philipp Schorch, to provide ‘historically informed ethnographic insights’ into regional museology, ‘grounded in Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies’. Like Nicholas Thomas’ compelling work, The Return of Curiosity: What museums are good for in the twenty-first century, this multi-authored text reanimates its three museums for readers, revealing their histories as well as their recent attempts at recalibrating and decolonising their practices, and their creative potential in decades to come. [Read more…]

Shana Chandra

Kalimpong Kids by Jane McCabe (Otago University Press, 2020), 139pp, $35

I have been struck by the silence that was common to our family histories, and by the role that photographs played in keeping curiosity alive.—Jane McCabe

As a historical record and document, Kalimpong Kids is a visual testament to the past, a collection of familial photographs that have survived as relics. Photographs that have provided clues to hushed stories handed down, muted by shame. Photographs of a society that kept hidden what it couldn’t palate. Photographs that say tangible things that lips could not. [Read more…]