ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 focuses upon the specific case study communities, introducing the collector, indigenous culture and community, and museum. Using assemblage theory, these three components – Charles Smith and his dispersed collection, Ngā Paerangi iwi (tribe) the source of much of this collection, and the Pitt Rivers Museum the current custodian of the collection – are disassembled, providing a brief history of indigene/settler-colonist relations in New Zealand during the nineteenth century at the time the collection was developed as well as the mutually beneficial relationship of assemblage components. This is framed within an anthropological lens of museum evolution in England and New Zealand during the same period. From the reassembling of these constituents in the present the guardianship responsibilities of tribal members re-emerge, while at the same time the social and material network that is a university museum in Oxford repositions itself today to re-engage with descendant communities.
