Technologies of conversion: cloth and Christianity in Polynesia

Abstract

Like anthropological discourses, museum collections and exhibitions have long been sites for the invention and display of essentialized identities. Nineteenthcentury ethnologists mapped out culture areas and painstakingly provenanced and described the repertories of ethnographic objects that belonged to particular peoples or tribes. This geographic and ethnic classification has remained the most widespread organizational principle in ethnographic museums: it is one that lends direct support to efforts of cultural typification, and marginalizes the historical formation of culture. Though many of these institutions’ collections include remarkable objects attesting to cross-cultural influence and exchange, such as indigenous carvings representing colonial officials and missionaries, such pieces have generally been marginalized or wholly excluded from displays and published discussions, which instead use material culture to evoke cultures ahistorically.

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