From Curio to Taonga: a Genealogy of Display at New Zealand’s National Museum, 1865-2001

Abstract

This thesis accounts for changes in the museum display of Māori culture through a historical analysis of exhibitions at New Zealand's national museum from the mid nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Recovering evidence of exhibitions from the Colonial Museum in 1865 to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in 2001, it traces a Foucauldian genealogy of display - an inventory of the visual categories through which Māori objects were made visible to people - and shows how the same things were presented at different times as curio, specimen, artifact, art and taonga or treasure. Using a wide range of sources, theories and methods, this study shows how and why exhibitions were shaped and reshaped by a variety of social forces at different periods. When museums exhibit the material culture of indigenous people, these exhibition installations tell us more about the western representation of the 'Other' than they do about the objects themselves and what they meant to their original owners. The focus of enquiry in this thesis is therefore not Māori art and culture per se, but the way in which perceptions of Māori were constructed within the discourses of colonisation, recolonisation and decolonisation, and the types of display, from ethnographic to fine art exhibitions, within which the meaning of Māori objects were constituted. This thesis reveals a little-known history of active Māori engagement with a European culture of display, a series of accommodations of nation and native, which shifted from colonial conquest to assimilation to integration and biculturalism. By reconstructing Māori exhibitions in their cultural and historical context the ongoing relationship of Māori and Pākehā in New Zealand society is also illuminated. A key focus of the study is the research into the nature and response of successive exhibition audiences. As well as demonstrating the importance of audience reception to understanding museum display, this thesis provides a much more active and more complex picture of Māori responses to the museum display of their culture. Historic exhibition installations at New Zealand's national museum reflect the on-going tension between difference and democracy. While this thesis makes use of an extensive overseas literature, it concludes that the distinctive features of the history of New Zealand's national museum require an approach that combines both local and international perspectives.