Book Review: Wintle, C. (2013). Colonial Collecting and Display. Encounters With Material Culture From the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. ISBN: 978-0-85745-941-1 (hbk.) ISBN 978-0-85745- 942-8 (ebk.). i-xix + 244 pages.* Koczan-Voros, V. (2014). Book Review: Wintle, C. (2013). Colonial collecting and display. Encounters with material culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. ASEAS - Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies, 7(1), 133-136.Claire Wintle's first book Colonial Collecting and Display approaches (post-) colonial theory from a new perspective, based on a focus on material culture: It seeks to 'decolonize' the written colonial discourse and adds new contexts to postcolonial critique by examining museum objects instead of textual sources. These commodities and personal belongings once used by indigenous peoples are studied as material marks on the world left by people who are excluded from the written modes of representations such as colonial archives or published do- cuments (p. 3). The volume investigates the biography of a set of objects such as dishes, clothes, jewelry as well as zoomorphic and anthropomorphic figures made by the indigenous peoples of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the era of British colonization between 1858 and 1949. It follows their way through personal collections to their final place in the Brighton Museum, now called the Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove (RPMBH).As a senior lecturer in the History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton, the author's research focuses on museums, imperialism, and decoloni- zation, with special attention to the material culture of India and its neighboring islands, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. After several field studies in the area and having taken on the curator role of the exhibition Temple, Man and Tuson: Collecting the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Brighton Museum, the author gained sufficient first-hand experience and sources for her research. Yet, Claire Wintle emphasizes that her book is not an ethnographic study of the culture and peoples of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, but is an object-centered - that is, not text-focused - research of the colonial project (p. 11). Along with an emerging group of scholars - amongst others museologists and anthropologists such as Nicholas Thomas, Chris Gosden, and Chantal Knowles - the author em- phasizes the importance of material culture in exploring the cultural, social, and economic processes of empire formation. The author raises one major question: What do a certain set of objects and its changing meaning reveal about imperi- al histories? Throughout her analysis, Wintle seeks to answer this question by investigating the factors that played a role in the biography of the collection displayed in RPMBH.Using the example of a zoomorphic figure called hentakoi, the circumstances of production, use, and collection of the objects in the Andaman and Nicoba Islands are examined. The author emphasizes the two-way nature of trade, argu- ing that although the attacks of British colonizers and indigenous hostility made encounters and product exchange difficult, the conflict softened with time. Hence, cooperation between the two parties slowly developed, whereby the sale of Andama- nese objects to the colonizers can be considered as a creative and positive response to the new historical situation. A strong point the book makes is that even though it does not deny the negative elements of colonialism, it succeeds in highlighting the balance of colonial encounters.By questioning the existence of an average collector (p. 60), Wintle makes a key argument in Chapter 2, where three different sets of objects are examined, which later formed the whole collection of the Brighton Museum. By introducing the three collectors' different personalities, their degrees of professional responsibility, the lev- els of access to indigenous life, their personal status and individual tastes, Wintle points out how all these aspects influence the circumstances of collecting as well as the later career of the objects. …