Paper short abstract

The history of the relationship between anthropology and museums is well-rehearsed: over time museum-based anthropology has moved in and out of fashion in the wider discipline of anthropology. In the last several decades, a significant further element has been added to the mix: the increasing involvement of what are known as source communities in museum research and practice. Museums have become a site for the renegotiation of relationships between such indigenous groups and settler/colonial societies. These interactions intersect with both theory and ethnography in anthropology and invoke many kinds of moralities. They need themselves to be analysed anthropologically. I discuss these issues with some reference to the work of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre (in the south west Pacific).