This paper draws on a collaborative ethnographic investigation of Indigenous museum practices in three Pacific museums located at the corners of the so-called Polynesian triangle: Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Hawai‘i, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and Museo Antropológico Padre Sebastián Englert, Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Since their inception, ethnographic museums have influenced academic and public imaginations of other cultural-geographic regions. The often resulting Euro-Americentric projection of anthropological imaginations has come under intense pressure, as seen in recent debates and conflicts around the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, Germany, which attempts to reconfigure the rebuilt Berliner Schloss (Berlin Palace) as a museum forum for the world. This ambitious project has brought Germany’s difficult and long silenced colonial legacy back to the surface of a changing national commemorative environment and subjected it to international scrutiny, critique, and protest. At the same time, (post)colonial renegotiations in former European and American colonies, such as the cases under scrutiny here, have initiated dramatic changes to anthropological approaches through Indigenous museum practices. This paper shapes a dialogue between both situations—Euro-Americentric myopia and Oceanic perspectives—by offering historically informed ethnographic insights into Indigenous museum practices grounded in Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies. In doing so, the paper employs Oceanic lenses that help reframe Pacific collections in, and the production of public understandings through, ethnographic museums in Europe and the Americas.

Philipp Schorch is Professor of Museum Anthropology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, where he leads an ERC-funded research project entitled ‘Indigeneities in the 21st Century’. He is also an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, UK. Philipp’s research focuses on museums, material culture/history/theory, contemporary art and (post)colonial histories, the Pacific and Europe, collaborations with Indigenous artists/curators/scholars, and (post)socialist environments. He is lead co-author of Refocusing Ethnographic Museums through Oceanic Lenses (University of Hawai’i Press, 2020), and co-editor of Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond (UCL Press, 2020) and Curatopia: Museums and the Future of Curatorship (Manchester University Press, 2019).