Project members

Current research project:

Artefacts of Culture.
The representational artefacts of Oceania and processes of cultural identification

From early 19th century museums have built up collections of ethnographic objects base on notions about the 'typical' objects of places and peoples. Ideas about national characters and notions of supremacy linked to the building of nations and empires in Europe constitute one of the contexts for the understanding of the character and composition of collections of ethnographic objects which the research project aims to explore. The fact that in Norway the building up of a collection of ethnographic objects was undertaken by people actively engaged in establishing the cornerstones of a Norwegian national identity and co-occurred with the identification and collecting of the objects of a national heritage indicates that the categories of 'our typical objects' and the 'typical objects of the others' might profitably be regarded as mutually constitutive. At a general level this part of the research may be expected to illuminate the significance of notions of alterity in the establishment and reproduction of notions of cultural identity.

In the post-colonial era from the mid 20th century nation-building, fear of acculturation and resistance to Westernisation has combined to make national self-identification with an accompanying recruitment of objects as carriers of tradition important throughout Oceania itself. The research project aims to illuminate the establishment of national and cultural identity by comparing Western and Pacific peoples' own recruitment of objects as carriers of traditions and foci of identity. At a general level the research may be expected to illuminate the interaction between Western notions about peoples' of the Pacific and Pacific peoples' self-identification.

Specifically the research starts out from a historical documentation and comparison of the strategies and circumstances of the collecting of ethnographic objects at the Ethnographic museum of the University of Oslo and the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University. The second phase of research explorers the significance of objects in the establishment and reproduction of identity in Oceania itself through empirical material produced through two fieldwork in Tonga in 2003-2004 focussing on historical and contemporary cultural heritage issues, use and significance of 'tongan objects' in fields of everyday experience, and knowledge and techniques related to the production of such objects. A particularly attention is paid to the different significance as carriers of tradition of objects embedded in male and female domains of activities.

Recent Publications:

• 1997 Moving Things of Love. An Ethnography of Constitutive Motions on Kotu Island in Tonga. Dr.Polit. dissertation. Oslo: Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo.
• 2001 "Captain Cook and the Roots of Precedence in Tonga. "Leading" and "Following" as Naturalised Concepts". History and Anthropology, Vol. 12, No.3 pp. 289-314.
  2002 "Mythical motivation in the light of the moon of Tonga: An exploration of experiential spaces of Polynesian tales of attraction." In Ellen Høigård Hofseth (ed.) UKM - En mangfoldig forskningsinstitusjon. Oslo: University Museum of Cultural Heritage: Occasional Papers vol.1.
• 2003 " 'The Other Kind': Representing Otherness and Living with it on Kotu Island in Tonga." In I. Hoem and S. Roaldkvam (eds.) Oceanic Socialities and Cultural Forms: Ethnographies of Experience. Oxford: Berghahn.