Aoife O'Brien
PhD Candidate
Education
MA. 2005, Sainsbury Research Unit.
Research interests
Visual and historical anthropology, archaeology, anthropology of art, identity politics, woodcarving, warfare, and pacific material culture.
Phd Thesis
The Solomon Islands has a long history of contact with Westerners yet during the late 19th century the establishment of colonial rule dramatically and irreversibly changed the region’s inhabitants’ lives and material culture. Following the establishment of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate in 1893 the suppression of headhunting in the Western Solomons was a necessity for British colonial rule and European accepted moral values, and the maintenance of their economic interests. Notions of the ‘Other’ and the apparent savagery (such as headhunting) of Solomon Islanders, though reviled and misunderstood, still fascinated Europeans. Warfare and its implements, the treatment of the dead and ritual, as well as everyday objects of use all became sources of ‘scientific’ collection and study by European gentlemen and colonial officers. Objects were specifically sourced, traded for or purchased, given as gifts, taken during punitive raids, or commissioned. The diversity of how objects were obtained paints a complex picture of interaction and agency between pre-existing indigenous relationships and how Europeans colonisers entered into and affected them. Yet often within the collections now held today in museums the voices of native people are silent.
My PhD thesis examines collections of objects accumulated during the late 1890’s and early 1900’s in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands by Charles M Woodford (b.1852-d.1927), first Resident Commissioner to the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, and his Assistant Resident Commissioner, Arthur Mahaffy (b.1869-d.1919.). Using museum collections, archive material, and fieldwork I intend to examine this period of intensive interaction with a specific aim to understand the relations between people and objects, and their agency. Focusing on the realm of objects in play during this time frame, and why and how they were used, I hope to reveal the nexus of changing contexts and meanings that these objects participated in and helped create. In doing so, my project we help coax the otherwise silent indigenous histories that objects from this period participated in, thus enlivening these collections and contributing to the ways in which museum collections can be used to understand complex historic cross-cultural interaction.
Meanings aren’t inherent to objects or relations – I would argue they emerge out of them.
Aoife O'Brien