Framing the Art of West Papua: An Introduction

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Notes

1. The project, Melanesian Art: Objects, Narratives and Indigenous Owners, was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in Great Britain. Nick Stanley and I thank Nicholas Thomas, and project members Julie Adams and Liz Bonshek for their assistance in organising the West Papua seminar. I thank Nick Stanley for his co-editorship of this issue.

2. For the definitive study of this vote, discussed against the background of the previous decades of conflict between Indonesia and the Netherlands over New Guinea, see Drooglever 2009.

3. For a brief overview of the social and political history of the territory see Timmer 2007.

4. Permission for such visits is often achieved through a separate system of internal passports called surat jalan (permission to walk) which have to indicate precisely where the researcher intends to visit and be presented to each police post on entry into each district.

5. The Museum of Primitive Art closed in 1976, and its collections were transferred to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

6. This exhibition has been much discussed and much criticised within anthropology, precisely because of the category ‘primitivism' and the way in which it was deployed in the exhibition and accompanying catalogue (see Clifford 1988, Myers 2006).

7. New Caledonia became a French territory in 1853. It was initially a penal colony, although free Europeans were also encouraged to settle and to ‘develop' the country. Settlers displaced the indigenous population who were forced onto reserves, where they remained until after World War II. Indigenous Kanaks now represent less than half the population of the territory (see for example Graille 2000 for a discussion of this in relation to art).

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Notes on contributors

Lissant Bolton

Lissant Bolton is Section Head in the Oceania Africa, Oceania and the Americas Department of the British Museum