Introduction: Museum histories in Aotearoa New Zealand: intersections of the local and the global

Abstract

This special issue is the result of a two-day conference, ‘Held in Trust: Curiosity in Things’, sponsored by the University of Otago’s Centre for Research on Colonial Culture (CRoCC), and held at the Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand, in January 2019. The gathering, which was prompted by the 150th year of the Otago Museum, focused on histories of institutional collections and collectors in Aotearoa New Zealand set within a global intellectual and commercial context. We would like to thank all the speakers and delegates for their individual and collective contribution to the success and stimulation of the outstanding event. The conference deliberately set out to enlarge museum history, which has largely been framed under the rubric of colonial domination or building cathedrals of science. Both notions are somewhat superficial and do not tell us much about the bigger stories that motivated the creation of the collections, particularly in the British colonial context of the colony that became New Zealand. While objects have the capacity to tell stories of lives and communities that are interconnected over space and time, this aspect is largely lost in the tendency to research specific object biographies and recount tales of eccentric collectors. In such approaches, the global context is often missing, especially the critical dimension of commercial trade and how exchange networks contributed to the patterns of knowledge discovery and creation. Objects are the tangible material world of scientific endeavour and during the nineteenth century trade in them boomed. Also overlooked are tales of the political context surrounding the discovery and translocation of objects. Acquisition histories dominate the field of the history of collecting and institutional histories run the risk of becoming bogged down in these empirical, albeit fascinating, approaches. The contributors to this special issue show how museums and collections are the result of a complex interrelationship between people, places and things and how these inform practices surrounding acquisition and knowledge generation. Through an interrogation of the formation of these social, economic and cultural assemblages, we can begin to understand how colonial museums were an integral part of these social and material connections. We also think that these articles about the history and development of museums in one colonial site have an application to colonial museums more broadly.