This chapter addresses the question of what the agency of non-animate objects might imply for the study. It begins by discussing early archaeological applications of the ideas of Giddens and Bourdieu. It then moves on to discuss anthropological ideas about the agency of non-humans, in particular Ingold’s dwelling perspective and the idea of the taskscape. It suggests that the agency of inanimate objects has been conceptualised in two different ways. Gell’s ‘secondary agency’ is compared with Latour’s ‘actor-network theory’. These approaches are situated more broadly within developing Post-humanist interpretations of object agency. Understandings of time and temporality are also discussed within the same framework. The chapter follows Gell in using the distinction between A and B-series time to construct an account of time experience based on the material world. B-series time is held to be a map of temporally ordered events. Material narratives of time and object biographies are shown to be central to this process; of particular importance is the way that changes to objects and places index the passage of time.

This volume argues that curatorship may be ‘recalled’and remade through collaborative relationships withcommunities leading to experiments in curatorialtheory and practice. What can museums of ethnographyin the Americas and Europe learn from the experienceof nations where distinctive forms of Indigenousmuseology are emerging and reshaping the conventionsof curatorial practice? In addressing this question,this chapter draws on research by the authors,including interviews with Māori curators, museumprofessionals, academics and community leadersthroughout Aotearoa New Zealand, exploringconnections with the wider Pacific and the world. Indoing so, it focuses on the ‘figure of thekaitiaki’, the Māori ‘guardian’, as a particularlocal development of the ‘figure of the curator’. Itconcludes that museums across the world can learnfrom Pacific experiments and become active agents inshaping cultural revival and future potentialitieson a global scale.

ćəsnaʔəm, the City before the City is aboundary-breaking exhibition that has successfullychallenged the museum world to revisit who is thecurator and who is the audience. This chapterprovides an Indigenous-framed insight into kinaccountability as (re)presented to the museum worldfrom the local tribal/aboriginal communityperspective of Musqueam. The exhibition wassimultaneously displayed in three venues of theVancouver city region, each providing multipleperspectives of the original inhabitants of avillage named c̓əsnaʔəm more than five thousandyears old. While the central city venue at theMuseum of Vancouver was high-tech and pitched to aninternational museum visitor, the Museum ofAnthropology exhibit was uniquely ephemeral,transient and aimed at shifting preconceivedperceptions of what it means to be a modernaboriginal raised in a city established on thousandsof years of unbroken occupation. The mostchallenging of the three exhibits was to be found inthe Musqueam village Culture Centre. In thisinstance the art and treasures were displayed in amanner that required elders to provideinterpretation and the audience is their own. Threeexhibits, three boundary-breaking contact zones, onepeople, Musqueam.

Many of the chapters in this book engage with issues oftime and temporality, either explicitly orindirectly. The linear or progressive time impliedby the neologism ‘curatopia’ can and should beproductively critiqued, not least in terms thatrecognise the infolded and paradoxical nature of thepresent – or ‘presence’ – in everyday life. What weunderstand phenomenologically, through immediateperception, may return later to haunt us and theobjects around us as a folding-over of time. Thecurator deciding what to collect for the future, howto interpret it in the present and what it meant inits originary past, is also curating time – anintractable but dynamic project.

At the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, thereare two positions dedicated to curating PacificCultures. Since 2002, the curators have been ofPacific Islands descent. One of our ongoingchallenges is how to represent Pacific societies andcultures, which are increasingly transnational andindeed global, in our exhibitions and collections.We are conscientiously developing co-curating andco-collecting strategies in our approach to thismilieu. However, there is actually a long history ofPacific communities in New Zealand engaging themuseum in curating, collecting and exhibitingprocesses. In this chapter, I share some examples,highlighting how Pacific communities have exercisedtheir agency and authority, influencing theirrepresentation in the National Museum. I describeour curatorial responses and examine what was atstake in these interactions, and what tensions andpolitics were and remain at play.

Throughout the Pacific, interpersonal encounters arecharacterised by a deep level of physical intimacyand engagement – from the honi/hongi, theface-to-face greeting, to the ha‘a/haka wero, actsof challenge that also serve as a celebratoryacknowledgement of ancestral presences. In thesephysical exchanges, relationships are built, tendedand tested through an embodied confirmation ofvalues, practices and ethics. For museums holdingPacific collections, the importance ofrelationships, and their physicality, persists. Theincreasing acknowledgement of, and interaction with,communities of origin, whose works reside in museumsthroughout the world, is thereby not a new practicebut the current stage of a continuum of relationsthat have ebbed and flowed over centuries. Thischapter involves the interdisciplinary work of threescholars whose research, interests andcollaborations coalesce around concepts ofindigenous curatorial practice. Kahanu focuses onBishop Museum’s E Kū ana ka paia exhibition (2010),which featured important Hawaiian temple imagesloaned from the British Museum and the Peabody EssexMuseum, as well as the Nā hulu ali‘i exhibitionwhich gathered Hawaiian featherwork from around theworld (2015/2016). She highlights how the Hawaiianpractice of he alo ā he alo in cross-culturalcontexts facilitated these exhibitions, therebyultimately enabling extensive community engagement.Nepia discusses two recent programmes at theUniversity of Hawai‘i, ARTspeak and the Binding andLooping: Transfer of Presence in ContemporaryPacific Art exhibition, as a means of examining howPacific Island artists articulate contemporarycreative practice, particularly as it relates tophysical and bodily encounters. Schorch concludesthe volume with a coda which historicises Curatopiaand its underpinning relations and engagements healo ā he alo / kanohi ki te kanohi / face toface.

This speculative comment considers the potential worthof raising questions that appear simple but may berewardingly complex. It asks whether routine aspectsof curatorial work, such as captioning objects andjuxtaposing them in displays, may not have moresuggestive dimensions than has been recognisedpreviously. It asks what the implications of aconception of ‘the museum as method’ might have forcurrent approaches to public exhibition.

This ambitious chapter draws on a range of voices toexamine what the ethnographic museum is and what itcan be for the benefit of diverse audiences aroundthe world. Taking their 2013 publication Museum andCommunities: Curators, Collections: Collaborationsas a starting point, the authors critically considertheir own work internationally, for example withICOM (The International Council of Museums) and ICOMNamibia, as well as at everyday level with localcommunities, such as youth groups in Europe. Againstincreasing fear of difference, and movements to theright in world politics, they foreground the valuesof human rights, artist collaborations and thedevelopment of feminist pedagogy in museum work.Theoretically, the chapter unpacks the notions ofthe ‘human’, the ‘cosmopolitan’ and the inextricablerelation between theory and practice that canunderpin collaborative activities in museums ofethnography and world culture today.

Current ontological critiques point to how discoursesof diversity like multiculturalism help domesticatedifference by making it fit into predeterminedcategories, such as those we are accustomed tothinking of as cultures. These ways of conceivingrelations within and between groups of people –common to anthropology and museums, as well as toliberal democratic regimes of governance – assertthat differences between peoples are relativelysuperficial in that our cultures overlay afundamental and universal sameness. Museumsshowcasing cultural artefacts have thus helpeddomesticate difference by promoting world-makingvisions of (natural) unity in (cultural) diversity.Yet some artefacts exceed the categories designed tocontain them; they oblige thought and handlingbeyond the usual requirements of curatorialpractice. This chapter considers the challenges of‘curating the uncommons’ in relation to work carriedout by and with the Māori tribal arts managementgroup Toi Hauiti and their ancestor figure, Paikea,at the American Museum of Natural History in NewYork.

Although I am a strong advocate for access tocollections in museums and although I see newtechnologies as a necessary part of this goal, I donot think that technology and its associated impactsand benefits should be the end goal. Rather, theyshould exist collaboratively with physical museumsthat mirror the robust developments in digitaltechnology. The physical museum needs to betransformed so that their material collections canstimulate cultural production by living artists andcultural practitioners. This juxtaposition of thepast and the present, the dead and the living,ensures that museums remain vibrant and vital spacesfor the multicultural communities around them.

A key – some might even say the key – curatorial roleis to decide what to collect. What, that is, shouldbe preserved for the future? In this chapter, wepresent ethnographic research with curators ofcontemporary everyday life. As we show, thesecurators struggle with a profusion of things,stories and information that could potentially becollected. Moreover, they widely report the struggleto be intensifying. Exploring their perceptions andwhat these mean in practice in their work, we arguethat while neo-liberal and especially austeritypolitics has an important role in intensifying theirsense of anxiety, their experience cannot be reducedto this. On the contrary, their intimation ofdystopia is as much a function of other – in someways utopian – aspirations and politics, as well asof a relativisation of value. These all contributeto transforming the nature of curatorship morewidely.