Anthropology, Nation Building and the Papua New Guinea National Museum
Mark Busse, University of Auckland
In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argued that examinations of three ‘institutions of power’—the census, the map, and the museum—shed light on how colonial administrators and officials imagined their domain. In this paper, I extend Anderson’s point to the postcolonial state of Papua New Guinea by examining the changing position of the PNG National Museum since Independence. I do this by drawing on a combination of published accounts, historical documents, and my own experiences while working as an anthropologist at the National Museum from 1990 to 1998. While still ideologically significant and symbolically prominent in government statements about nationhood, the National Museum during the 1990s faced new and considerable practical challenges in trying to fulfil its moral, legal, and scientific responsibilities. These included difficulties in recruiting and keeping well-qualified staff, in carrying out research, in continuing to collect significant objects of cultural heritage, as well as representative collections of material culture, in documenting and caring for the objects in its collections, and in communicating anthropological and other knowledge to the general public. At the centre of these challenges lay reductions in funding in real terms which reflected changing political and economic priorities on the part of both the PNG government and international agencies.
