Abstract
Cultural heritage and the different materials that it is made of, as well as the meanings that we give them, are not static: they change over time and, in their exchange, draw interesting trajectories on the map. Through the study of the construction, exchange, exhibition, reclamation and restitution of New Zealand’s heritage we will analyse the capricious but significant paths that cultural heritage has taken throughout history. The main interest of this chapter is to analyse how the recent demands for heritage repatriation represent a new chapter in the long history of meaning that we give to certain objects. We would like to emphasize how the repatriation of different materials has become an important tool in present-day diplomatic relations.
This text was originally published in the Dossier: Heritage and International Relations published in Locus—Revista de História—UFJF, Vol. 26, no. 2, 2020, organized by Rodrigo Christofoletti (UFJF) and Maria Leonor Botellho (FLUP-CITCEM).
M. Burón received his Ph.D. in Contemporary History from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) and has been a visiting scholar at several universities in the South Pacific and Latin America while researching topics related to the study of museums, heritage, nations and indigenous communities. His most recent publications include the book El patrimonio recobrado. Museos indígenas en México y Nueva Zelanda [Recovered heritage: Indigenous museums in Mexico and New Zealand] (Marcial Pons, 2019). The author dedicates this chapter to Professor Conal McCarthy and Annie Mercer, who kindly welcomed him at the Victoria University of Wellington (Te Herenga Waka).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Simpson (2001, 178–179) proposes a method of classifying the collection of human remains that serves the collectors’ interests: there would be archeological collections of bone materials, physical anthropology collections related to evolutionary theories and ethnographic artefacts, or ‘curiosities’, collections.
- 2.
Nicholas Thomas refers to entangled objects as objects capable of ‘breaking up us/them appositions’ seeking ‘a kind of symmetry between indigenous appropriations of European artefacts and the colonial collecting of indigenous goods’ (2009, 5). By contrast, Serge Gruzinski (2005) defines inert attractors as objects capable of broadening perspectives that break with the static view of cultures—understood as clearly defined totalities—and that emphasize the contact zones, the shared intermediary spaces that appear.
- 3.
‘The easiest way to access the much-needed muskets was to sell Toi moko. Whereas a ton of dressed flax, which was laborious to make, could be traded for one musket only, selling one Toi moko netted multiple muskets and ammunition’ (O’Hara 2012, 12).
- 4.
During the first period from 1770 to 1830, toi moko could be found in institutions such as the Royal College of Surgeons, the South Kensington Museum, the British Museum in London, the Auckland Museum and the Christchurch Museum in New Zealand, the Halifax Museum in York, the Cambridge Archaeology and Ethnology Museum in Plymouth, the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, the Gottingen Museum, or the Ethnology Museum in Florence according to the most well-known nineteenth-century study on the subject by Horatio Robley (1896, 183).
- 5.
One of the most well-known New Zealand ornithology treaties of the nineteenth century begins, ‘It has been remarked by a celebrated naturalist that “New Zealand is the most interesting ornithological province in the world” and in a qualified sense this is no doubt true. The last remnant of a former continent, and, geologically considered, probably the oldest country on the face of our globe, it contains at the present day the only living representatives of an extinct race of wonderful Struthious birds’ (Buller 1873, iii). Geology was also a great attraction for the first collectors on the islands, until they realized that other goods on the islands (anthropological and biological) were in danger of disappearing due to the changes that colonization introduced.
- 6.
‘I’m interested in living things, in customs and modes of life. I’m not collecting fossils. There are many Maori objects which my museum would like, and we ourselves have many things which do not appear in the museums of New Zealand, particularly mammoth remains’ (Auckland Star, 7-XII-1935, 7). To that, Dr. Pospisil added a critique of the Dominion Museum in which the former universalist conception of collecting appears—that is, the museum should contain the world: ‘I would not call the Dominion Museum a very strong one in an educative sense. There is practically nothing in mammals, nothing much of Africa or Asia, and very little of prehistoric man. Considering the small population of the four centres in New Zealand, the combined collection would be excellent if it could be grouped, and added to considerably in respects in which it is now lacking. New Zealand of course, has not the funds to send expeditions, or pay for expensive excavations, and has to depend for its exhibits on the work of other nations. It is a wise policy to concentrate on Maori and Polynesian exhibits, as the country cannot afford fairly complete exhibits from countries such as Africa and Asia’ (Auckland Star, 15-II-1936, p. 16).
- 7.
In reality, the powerful Austria of the nineteenth century and New Zealand had previously established relations based on collecting. In 1858, a scientific expedition sent by Emperor Franz Joseph I reached Auckland. One of the geologists of the expedition, Ferdinand von Hochstetter, remained on the islands at the request of the Kiwi government in order to study the carbon deposits surrounding Auckland, the most important city in the country and part of the South Pacific. In turn, two Maori embarked on the expedition's vessel, the Novara, bound for Austria. Hochstetter returned to Austria where he continued developing his interest in research in New Zealand; he also became the director of the State Museum in Vienna. While there, his colleague on the islands Sir Julius von Haast inquired about an assistant to work in the newly founded Canterbury Museum in the city of Christchurch. Hochstetter then sent a young taxidermist named Andreas Reischek (Te Ao Hou, X-1958, 38).
- 8.
The Māori Antiquities Act was introduced in 1901, but certain exports were allowed and even encouraged in order to exchange objects with overseas museums. At the conference of New Zealand museum authorities in 1926, it was concluded that ‘exports should be allowed under supervision, partly to facilitate exchange with foreign museums and partly to encourage Maoris in the pursuit of their old-time crafts’ (Auckland Starr, 3-XI-1926, 3). Some heritage objects had already been returned, always for diplomatic reasons, from London to Wellington. For example, in 1934, the British Museum exchanged (the word returned was not yet used) three important pieces with what was then known as the Auckland War Memorial Museum.
- 9.
Interview conducted by Conal McCarthy.
- 10.
Repatriation was especially concerned with the relocation of human remains; both the display and possession of such objects were considered to be inappropriate. In 1989, the Policy of Human Remains was adopted by the so-called New Zealand National Museum Committee (a year before the United States’ Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, which served as a model for many subsequent policies). Senator Daniel Inouye, one of the legislators responsible for this crucial law, explains: ‘When human remains are displayed in museums or historical societies, it is never the bones of white soldiers or the first European settlers that came to this continent that are lying in the glass cases. It is Indian remains. The message that this sends to the rest of the world is that Indians are culturally and physically different from and inferior to non-Indians. This is racism’ (as cited in Butts 2002, 58).
References
Anderson B (1983) Imagined communities. Reflection on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso, London
Appadurai A (1986) The social life of things. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Belich J (1996) Making peoples. A history of the New Zealanders. from polynesian settlement to the end of the nineteenth century. Allen Lane Penguin Press, Auckland
Belich J (2001) Paradise reforged. A history of the New Zealanders. From the 1880’s to the year 2000. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu
Bennett T (1988) The exhibitionary complex. New Form N 4:73–102
Buller WL (1873) A history of the birds of New Zealand. John Van Voorst, London
Burón Díaz M (2019) El Patrimonio recobrado. Museos indígenas en México y Nueva Zelanda. Marcial Pons, Madrid
Butts DJ (2002) Māori and museums. The politics of indigenous recognition. Doctoral thesis, Massey University, Palmerston North
Cook J (1842) The voyages of captain cook round the world, vol I. William Smith, London
Dias N (1989) ‘Séries de Crânes et armée de squelettes: les collections anthropologiques en France dans la seconde moitié du XIX siècle’, Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris. Nouv Ser 1(3–4):203–230
Gellner E (1983) Nation and nationalism. Basil Blackwell Publishers, Oxford
Gill B (2006) The Cheeseman-Giglioli correspondence, and museum exchanges between Auckland and Florence, 1877–1904. Arch Nat Hist 37(1):131–149
Graham BJ, y Howard P (2008) The ashgate research companion to heritage and identity. Ashgate, Aldershot
Gruzinski S (2005) Entre monos y centauros. Los indios pintores y la cultura del renacimiento. Nuevo Mundos, Mundos Nuevos. Bibliotèque des Auteurs du Centre. http://nuevomundo.revues.org/617
Hawkesworth et al (1778) New discoveries concerning the world and its inhabitants. Part I. J. Johnson, London
Hobsbawm EJ, Ranger TO (1983) The invention of tradition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Hobsbawm EJ (1991) Naciones y nacionalismo desde 1780. Crítica, Barcelona
Hole B (2006) Loose notions about heads: the repatriation of human remains in New Zealand. MA archaeology dissertation, Birkbeck College, London
Kolig E (1986) Andreas Reischek and the Maori: villainy or the nineteenth-century scientific ethos? Pac Stud 10(1):54–78
Latour B (2005) Reassembling the social. An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Legget J (2000) Restitution and repatriation: guidelines for a good practice. The Museum and Galleries Commission, London
McCarthy C (2004) From Curio to Taonga: a genealogy of display at New Zealand’s national museum, pp 1865–2001. Doctoral thesis, Victoria University, Wellington
McCarthy C (2007) Exhibiting māori: a history of colonial cultures of display. Te Papa Press, Wellington
Macmillan Brown J (1907) Maori and Polynesian. Their origin, history and culture. Hutchinson & Co, London
Martínez M A, Bustamante J, López J, Burón M (2014) Las controversias de los materiales culturales delicados, un debate aplazado pero necesario. Ph Investigación 2:1–30. http://www.iaph.es/revistaph/index.php/revistaph/article/view/4022
Neich R, Davidson J (2004) The oldman collection of Maori artefacts. The Polynesian Society, Auckland
O’Hara C (2012) Repatriation in practice: a critical analysis of the repatriation of human remains in New Zealand museums. Master’s thesis, Victoria University of Wellington
Reischek A (1930) Yesterdays in Maoriland: New Zealand in the eighties. Wilson and Horton, Auckland
Robley H (1896) Moko; or Maori tattooing. Chapman and Hall, London
Sarr F, Savoy B (2018) The restitution of African cultural heritage. Toward a new relational ethics. Report sent to the President of the French Republic, 23-XI-2018
Simpson MG (2001) Making representations: Museums in the post-colonial era. Routledge, New York
Smith L (2007) Cultural heritage: critical concepts in media studies and cultural studies. Routledge, London and New York
Taylor R (1855) Te Ika a Maui: Or New Zealand and its inhabitants. Wertheim and Macintosh, London
Tregear E (1904) The Maori race. A.D. Willis Printer and Publisher, Wanganui
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Burón, M. (2021). From Construction to Restitution: Some Trajectories of New Zealand’s Cultural Heritage. In: Christofoletti, R., Botelho, M.L. (eds) International Relations and Heritage. The Latin American Studies Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77991-7_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77991-7_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-77990-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-77991-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)