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Melanesia: Art and Encounter, edited by Lissant Bolton, Nicholas Thomas, Elizabeth Bonshek, Julie Adams, and Ben Burt. London: British Museum Press; Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2014. isbn 978-0-8248-3853-9; xix +362 pages, illustrations, bibliography, index. Cloth, us$120.00.
Melanesia: Art and Encounter includes fifty-seven essays by fifty-two authors, including the volume's five editors, highlighting some of the British Museum's twenty thousand objects from Melanesia. Organized geographically, sections are dedicated to New Guinea (including south and southeast Papua New Guinea, north and highlands Papua New Guinea), West Papua, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia. The richly illustrated volume is a result of the five-year project "Melanesian Art: Objects, Narratives and Indigenous Owners," also known as the Melanesia Project, led by Lissant Bolton and Nicholas Thomas and based at the British Museum. The project was a response to the "scandal-that such a cultural resource had remained largely unresearched for so long" (xiv). From 2005 through 2010, the project included research trips to Melanesia as well as visits to the British Museum by representatives from Melanesia, including several artists, to study and respond to the collections. As Bolton writes, "We were using the objects in the British Museum to engage in relationships with Melanesians themselves" (331).
Driven by a sense of responsibility to those represented by the museum collection and by a desire to change understandings of ethnographic collections, the book's editors sought to "approach the field in an entirely different way" (ix) by learning from indigenous collaborators, collaborating with Melanesian communities, and inviting indigenous practitioners to engage with the collection. Although their approach is not unprecedented- this is...