Alina Berg

Towards a natural-cultural approach to decolonial museum scholarship

This PhD project explores and activates the entanglements of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ in museum spaces and beyond by studying Pounamu – jade/greenstone from Aotearoa New Zealand – a material that has been deeply engrained in Māori cosmo-ontology, subject to geological inquiry and (colonial) collecting and trade for centuries. The project sets out by tracing Pounamu material at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), Cambridge, and the Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich. It seeks to unravel the stories Pounamu formations and objects stored at these European museum institutions can tell us today by reading them as archives of combined natural-cultural knowledge throughout a form of provenance research that integrates geological and indigenous methodologies, thus recentring historically overlooked actors in the context of museum scholarship and reconnecting ‘exiled’ pounamu material with its ecologies of origin.

Pounamu comes alive in Māori myths and cosmological narratives that transcend and unite notions of temporality and environment whereas geologists study Pounamu formations and sediments to uncover the Earth’s tectonic history and long-term environmental changes – what interdisciplinary scholars are referring to as ‘deep time’. This project aims to ethnographically capture this comprehensive notion of time and space through fieldwork of storytelling and integrated practice as reflected in in situ observation, collection and conservation practices in Aotearoa New Zealand. These insights will feed back into collecting institutions, such as those in Cambridge and Munich, informing the development of curatorial practices bridging the realms of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. At the same time, they will be made digitally accessible as part of a collaborative digital archive of combined geological-anthropological-Indigenous knowledge using Linked Open Data principles, thus (re)activating dispersed old Pounamu material for new engagements among multi-disciplinary Pounamu actors.

For more information, visit the project page of Beyond the nature/culture divide and Alina's profile.