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Session Detail (plenary)

Plenary Panel 1: Archival and Museum Collections in the Redoing: Unlocking Pacific perspectives, Recreating Pacific futures



Session presentation

Chaired by Philipp Schorch and Rainer F. Buschmann.
Comments by Noelle Kahanu, Maia Nuku, and Haidy Geismar.

In a talk given at LMU Munich, Germany, in late 2016, Bruno Latour laid out the trajectory ‘from the anthropocene to the new climatic regime’. While doing so, he took issue with the concepts of the globe and globalization, and argued that humanity needs to rethink the Earth as living system, or ‘Gaia’, assuming center stage rather than being relegated to the background as ‘Nature’. To achieve this, Latour further argued, knowledge needs to be harvested from across the disciplines. When probed about a concrete pathway, he referred to the cosmologies once collected and stored in archival and museum collections, in the name of anthropology, to salvage a past doomed to disappear. This treasure trove, Latour suggested, should be revisited to reimagine humanity’s multiple potential futures.

This panel responds to this plea by investigating archival and museum collections in the redoing to unlock Pacific perspectives and recreate Pacific futures. The salvage paradigm of the late 19th and early 20th centuries postulated that indigenous societies were static and would ultimately fade under the pressure of the colonial onslaught. Material culture served to chronicle lost features and cement racial and economic inequalities. The procuring of material culture, however, involved complex negotiations that in some cases undermined attempts at freezing societies. The panel addresses this issue by providing examples of such circumventions. Expanding on these historical insights, we pose the question: What happens when archival and museum collections are used in the present and mobilized towards the future? And what happens if we approach archives and museums, not only as mechanisms and structures of collecting, ordering and governing, but also as dynamic-contingent processes, heterotopian spaces, and living resources for creative interventions and utopian (re)imaginations?