ABSTRACT
Each of us increasingly belongs to multiple places, histories, and communities. So do museums. In this chapter, I explore underlying historical tensions framing encounters between museums, creator communities and their objects in my own work practices at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), in the Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples and behind the scenes working with the Pacific Ethnology Collection. Reflecting on my own labor, particularly with respect to professional activities between museums and communities, I consider how objects themselves may foster practical cultural heritage partnerships for the future, which go beyond their original collecting context. Climate change is global, but its effects are highly localized. Peoples of the Pacific have
already begun to move away from low-lying atolls where water supplies are compromised, and from situations following extreme storms, tsunamis and weather events, some of which have been aggravated by anthropogenic climate change. Some of these people are now the “local” (New York-based) museum audience for the AMNH Hall of Pacific Peoples. When Margaret Mead collected many of the objects the museum now holds in its Pacific Ethnology Collection, the Pacific was an exotic place far from New York. The scholarship of Margaret Mead’s day focused on “saving” cultures untouched by Western ways.1 So much has changed in anthropology and museum practice in the second half of the twentieth century, as has the Pacific community, now a worldwide diaspora. At the same time, there has been a Great Acceleration of anthropogenic changes to the atmosphere, the oceans and the lands of
the planet. Together, these changes suggest to earth scientists that the Earth has moved beyond the Holocene, and entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, a “no analogue world.”2 Anthropocene changes, including climate change, are already forcing the migrations of peoples. And in a world beyond the Holocene, the epoch in which most world civilizations have grown up and thrived, there is a demand for new cultural responses, and careful thinking about the collections and objects that will bring cultural heritage to enrich displaced and disrupted lives. The relationship between museums and diaspora communities is under particular exam-
ination in this chapter. In much of the social science literature about climate change and in the positioning of museums in climate changed futures, the space and time that a diaspora (or migrants or a community3) occupies are framed in an anticipatory context, implied to be designed to hold the populations who have not yet, but will be, displaced or dispossessed of their land, material heritage and intangible culture due to forces related to climate change.4
