Interpretation and Practice of “Oceania” Performance: A Comparative Study on Three Museums around the Pacific Rim

• Main Authors: Yang, Lin, 楊翎
• Other Authors: James Wilkerson
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/39526269620365656599

博士 === 國立清華大學 === 人類學研究所 === 98 === Cross-cultural performance is the core issue of the Museum Anthropology. This dissertation aims to investigate cross-cultural issues and image form of the Oceania exhibition via the field studies of three Pacific Rim Museums in Taiwan, Japan and New Zealand. Particular attention is paid to clarify how to interpret social histories and cultures by exhibitions using three viewpoints of museums and different imagined social communities, thus reconstructing localization meaning of the exhibitions. Hence, from the perspective of Museum Ethnography, this dissertation deals with four-level interregional relationships among Pacific Rim countries and the "Oceania" region. The first one is national policies, establishment and operation of museums, the second is the close relationship between national museums and the "Oceania" exhibition, the third is the museum practice of the "Oceania" Cultural Performance and collections, and the fourth is the local meaning and interpretation of “Vaka Moana” international traveling exhibition. In the dissertation, museums are not only considered as fields of reproduction of anthropology and cultural knowledge, but also though of as places of knowledge creation and cultural consumption of contemporary anthropology. On the one hand, national museums can serve as a national machine, taking the responsibility for showing contemporary national preferred culture policies; on the other hand, in the forming process, national museums have established themselves into mysterious palaces with inherently sophisticated and complicated structures of knowledge production and operational logics. Being three Pacific Rim countries, Taiwan, Japan, New Zealand have mixed and blended relationships, and organic links between themselves and many Pacific islands for a long time. Object collections and cultural performance about Oceania are interwoven among these three national museums in Taiwan, Japan, and New Zealand. From the development environments and the operation and management process of these three national museums, they clearly revealed that these museums and their sponsoring supporting governments have mutual supporting relationships. The Musealisation processes of “Oceania" have linked cross-time, cross-space, and cross-ethnic memory, power, space, art and reality, thereby giving different levels of imagination and formation. Besides, these processes have also been deeply influenced by local people’s identity and their historical memory, and they have objectively become bases of the contemporary nationalism or ethnic identities. The research significance of this dissertation is to advocate the dimension of "Museality", which can not be limited to the museum own field, but should also cover multiple dimensions of the "Musealisation". This includes several externally dynamic factors of local politics and economics, and closeness feeling and expression attitude from community to culture. Furthermore, this dissertation also intends to clarify the nature of alienation and drifting movement behind the museum phenomena, and then go further to re-think local continuity and flow of changes of Anthropological Ethnography.