From Maker to Museum: Fibre skirts from Central Province, PNG

Abstract

This dissertation sees museum collections of cultural material as a source of evidence about the past and the lives of the indigenous people who made the artefacts in them. My study is centred on fibre skirts acquired in Central Province, Papua New Guinea 1871-1975. My methodology used a historical perspective to illuminate the experiences of Papuans. The combination of artefact-derived data with written historical sources produces an intimate view of the past which provides an insight into the rarely heard perspectives of local communities, that encompasses women, and helps us to perceive them as integrated and engaged in the world. I applied theoretical and analytical perspectives derived from archaeology to emphasise materiality as a source of information about social processes and to explore larger temporal and spatial scales than normally embraced within ethnographic studies. I have used practice theory to link historical skirt producers and users and the material properties of museum collections. To track social change, I used the idea of chaîne opératoire to explain how the making and using of artefacts is tied to networks of social relations. Data from mixed sources show how fibre skirt practices create and maintain social relations. The fieldwork study of skirt manufacture and work with skirt makers made it possible for me to grasp all of the processes involved in their production. This assisted the development of attributes in the museum collections to detect changes in key skirt properties such expertise, skill and effort invested. My results reveal that key historical events led to the loss of some expertise and skills and reduced the significance of skirts as a means of signally social status. Despite these impacts the breadth of knowledge about skirt making practices remained stable over the period studied. My results demonstrate that the active presence of people can be discerned by adopting an archaeological perspective. I have identified actions of Central Province Papuans concerning innovation, negotiation, and the creation and maintenance of identities. The study highlights the future potential of museum collections of ethnographic objects for opening up new perspectives on historical processes such as European colonialism.