The revaluation of historical collections by source communities

Abstract

From the later nineteenth century, anthropologists collected and studied indigenous string figures from around the world. The 192 mounted figures from Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land in the Australian Museum, Sydney, collected by Frederick McCarthy in 1948, is the largest museum collection of its kind (that is of mounted string figures collected from one place at one time). In this chapter, I track the changing fortunes of the collection within the museum, from its collection in the field to when it was found unregistered in the museum’s stores in 1988, to becoming one of the museum’s featured treasures today. Outside the museum, the focus is on the activation of the collection’s latent potential through reconnection with its source community as part of my doctoral research undertaken between 2008 and 2016. I explore the historically changing category distinctions and aesthetic understandings that allow the collection to be translated today through the discourse of art, and how that functions as a value creation process.