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Cultural Property, Museums, and the Pacific: Reframing the Debates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2008

Haidy Geismar
Haidy Geismar
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology and Museum Studies, New York University. Email: [email protected]
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Extract

The following short articles were presented at a special session of the Pacific Arts Association, held at the College Arts Association annual meeting in New York in February 2007. Entitled “Cultural Properties—Reconnecting Pacific Arts,” the panel brought together curators and anthropologists working in the Pacific, and with Pacific collections elsewhere, with the intention of presenting a series of case studies evoking the discourse around cultural property that has emerged within this institutional, social, and material framework. The panel was conceived in direct response to the ways that cultural property, specifically in relation to museum collections, has been discussed recently in major metropolitan art museums such as the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met). This prevailing cultural property discourse tends to use antiquities—that most ancient, valuable, and malleable of material culture, defined categorically by the very distancing of time that in turn becomes a primary justification for their circulation on the market or the covetous evocation of national identity—as a baseline for discussion of broader issues around national patrimony and ownership.

Type
Special Section: Museums and the Pacific
Information
International Journal of Cultural Property , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , May 2008 , pp. 109 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © International Cultural Property Society 2008

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