Modelos cognitivos de comprensión lectora en lengua

Changes within the discipline of anthropology took time to manifest themselves in a museum display context however. By 1972, the Ethnography Department and the anthropological collections had moved because of space issues in Bloomsbury to a

separate site in Piccadilly, named the ‘Museum of Mankind’. Here there was greater

79 permanent exhibitions, rather than a small sample of objects from each part of the world represented in the collections (Wilson, 2000)57. At no stage was there a dedicated exhibition of Marquesan material, although small exhibition labels found with a number of the personal ornaments would suggest a modest display of these was shown. The Ethnography section of the British Museum Guide of 1976 follows the format of earlier guides, but there is increased attention to the specific details of each society covered. While allusion is made to the contemporary culture of Papua New Guinea, where recent acquisitions (1960s) had been made by a British Museum expedition, the Polynesian section is written entirely in the past tense. Importantly, clear acknowledgement is made of the colonial impact on Polynesian societies, but this

point is highlighted in order to then emphasise the value of the Museum’s early (pre- colonial) Polynesian collections:

In contrast to Melanesia the people of Polynesia, although separated from one another by thousands of miles of ocean, all shared one basic culture and spoke variants of a single language. This culture has suffered heavily in

most places from European influences, and the Museum’s Polynesian

material is particularly important because it includes many pieces collected by the first explorers and early missionaries.

(British Museum, 1976, p.250)

Between 1975 and 1980, an exhibition titled ‘Captain Cook and the South Seas’ was

held at the Museum of Mankind, celebrating the earliest material and coinciding with

the bicentenary of Cook’s death in Hawaii. The scope of the exhibition was clearly to

cover the historical period of Cook’s Pacific voyages – as such the period of

colonisation which followed, and the present day situation of Pacific Island societies was not addressed. Loans were made from other museums, and the section on Easter Island and the Marquesas Islands included the sling and club from the British Museum, and a pearlshell, turtleshell and feather headdress from the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. The accompanying object labels consisted of quotes from Cook about

Marquesan weapons, slings and headdresses – all other exhibition labels followed this

57

80 format, with quotes from the journals of Cook, Forster, Banks and others (Starzecka, n.d.). Although the Marquesas were not considered one of the main cultures

‘discovered’ by Cook (the Society Islands, New Zealand, Hawaii and Northwest Coast of America were emphasised58), their inclusion in the exhibition functioned to

demonstrate the breadth and diversity of Cook’s contacts, and his personal

perspective on these. Cook as a historical figure, himself appeared in this context to represent the Pacific more powerfully than the objects themselves, which were significant through their association with him. As with even more recent shows, this exhibition was to prove the enduring appeal of Cook as heroic explorer.

Other exhibitions at the Museum of Mankind took a geographic rather than a strictly historical focus, enabling collection items from any time period to be included. These covered parts of the Pacific from which the Museum had large collections – Hawaii, Australia, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. The Marquesan collection was arguably too small in comparison to warrant a dedicated exhibition, however in the case of the islands of Micronesia, this was dealt with by having an exhibition which covered the whole region59. A similar exhibition covering French Polynesia would

surely have been marketable, by including the familiar and attractive ‘Tahiti’ in the

title. Marquesan material could also have been used to good effect in thematic exhibitions. In 1988 a British Museum publication titled ‘Ethnic Jewellery’ was written

by the Keeper of the Ethnographic collections, John Mack. The premise of the book is the universality of personal adornment as an indicator of social condition (Mack, 1988). A vast and diverse range of examples are drawn from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific and the Americas, each covered in dedicated chapters. The

Marquesas are briefly covered, with two pairs of ear ornaments and the pa’e kaha

being highlighted and shown in photographs. Marquesan artistic conventions and the quality of workmanship in their construction are noted, however, as with the

contemporaneous museum guidebook, the information is written in the past tense, with no reference to current practice. In the opening paragraphs of the Pacific chapter, the contents are described as such:

58 _{This is noted in one of the accompanying publications (Cobbe, 1979).} 59

81 All the objects illustrated in this chapter have been used to signify one

person’s social position in relation to others in their community, whether

to dominate, entice or entertain. The great majority date from the period soon after European contact was first established.

(emphasis mine; Pole, 1988, p.115)

While a themed exhibition on jewellery would no doubt have been a success, the Pacific section of this publication demonstrates the limitations of the collection to adequately represent the contemporary Pacific. Although the disciplinary parameters informing ethnographic museum display had in fact widened considerably by the 1980s and the interpretation was informed by a wider range of fieldwork accounts and scholarship, while the collection still lacked recent material, exhibitions continued to emphasise and indeed further idealise the past. Reified in this manner, past cultures acted as a measure against which later descendant cultures would perpetually be measured against. The collection itself was now the inhibiting force, rather than disciplinary strictures. As mentioned in the previous chapter, museum field collecting efforts directed towards remedying this situation did not reach as far as the eastern limits of Polynesia.