MUSÉE À LA UNE
FIG. 5 (above):
Head. Vanuatu. 19th century.
Earth, vegetal fi ber, pigment.
Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale,
inv. EO.1979.1.1428.
FIG. 6 (right): Flywhisk
handle. Cook Islands.
19th century.
Wood.
Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire,
inv. ET. 48.9.
64
made no use of the wheel. The outsiders developed
the misconception that the islanders were living at a
developmental stage that corresponded to what European
societies had known in prehistoric times. This
naïve belief was predicated upon the idea that all human
cultures throughout the world progress through
the same stages. By this logic, the peoples of Oceania
were seen as trapped in a sort of stagnation, since it
was believed that the mores and traditions observable
among them were just refl ections of what they had
always been, effectively meaning that the past and
present were equivalent. Unfortunately this erroneous
notion persisted for a very long time, and it led
to deeply skewed misinterpretations of ethnographic
data, since observers mistakenly inferred a great deal
about history based on what they could comprehend
of the present. They neglected to recognize that all societies
undergo change over the course of generations
and that the present is only a moment in this progression,
not a tangible refl ection of the past.
The depth of Oceania’s history was thus unconsciously
denied, and an ethnographic approach—
meaning descriptions of the groups of people that
were encountered—was deemed suffi cient to document
them. In this part of the world, true anthropological
analyses involving efforts to understand
cultural contents did not occur until much later. The
starting point of this was undoubtedly the work of
Bronislaw Malinowski, who spent time on the Trobriand
Islands of Papua New Guinea during World
War One. Archaeological excavations have been
even more recent and were not undertaken in any
signifi cant way until the second half of the twentieth
century. As such, the history of Oceania is in its infancy,
even though it has been several decades now
since more extensive research projects have been undertaken.
Beginning in the eighteenth century, explorers
brought Oceanic objects to Europe, and these were
seen as treasures and aroused great interest. Those
who had curiosity cabinets (what private collections
were called at the time) were eager to acquire these
pieces and a market for them rapidly developed. This
directly resulted in the manufacture of objects to satisfy
foreign demand. A signifi cant portion of our
knowledge of Oceanic art is based on such artifacts,
which tell as much about regional encounters with
the outside world as they do about true Pacifi c traditions.
This phenomenon also accounts for the relative
ubiquity of Oceanic collections in ethnographic