Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange

Amiria Henare explores the study of material culture in the development of anthropology and shows that the collection of artefacts and their formal study, both in museums and in the field, have been central anthropological strategies over the past two centuries. Scotland and New Zealand provide the two principal ethnographic bases for Dr Henare’s pioneering work, as she traces the movement across space and time of objects now held in contemporary collections. Using evidence from across the British Empire, Dr Henare demonstrates how and why things were bought, exchanged and stolen, and carried across the oceans to reach their final institutional settings, and how the material, social and intellectual ‘worlds’ often invoked by scholars of imperialism were mutually constructed, with artefacts themselves constituting and instantiating social relations. This book is a major contribution to historical anthropology and imperial history, and to our understanding of the material past and present.