Can Museums Help Sustain Indigenous Identity?—Reflections from Melanesia Nick Stanley Can indigenous museums serve any useful purpose outside the traditional Western imperial setting? The southwest Pacific is used to test the case. A number of ap- proaches are considered: indigenous curation; indigenous motivation; indigenous audiences; and indigenous concepts relating to methods and character of collecting and display. Cultural centers seem particularly appropriate institutions to display art and ceremonial objects and to insert new cultural and political dimensions into the venues. However, there are also a number of problems associated with such display in terms of copyright and the right to see. Curators throughout the Pacific have to negotiate these issues in the displays that they mount. But, it is argued, the results can sustain new forms of sociation and cultural exchange. THE CONCEPT OF AN INDIGENOUS MUSEUM In 1908, Richard Thurnwald settled in Buin, an island to the north of Bougainville, and here, as Marion Melk-Koch documents, ‘‘after considerable effort, he started his own open-air museum consisting of models of houses from different parts of the colony, furnished with true indigenous items. People from the remote areas of Buin flocked to see them and according to a caption of a photograph, they paid an entrance fee in natural products’’ [2000: 59–60]. Through this device Thurnwald was exporting the newly emergent European concept of an open-air museum devoted to local and often threatened indigenous culture. This model thrives today in most of the cultural centers across the Pacific. This vignette in the history of European incursion into the Western Pacific raises a host of questions about the status of museums in the region, which I will seek to explore in this article. First, one might ask, what was going on? Whose interests were being served and on what terms? Second, does this example suggest a model for museums and museum visiting? Third, are there specific circumstances that either enhance or threaten the transfer of the concept of museum to this region and NICK STANLEY is Director of Research and Chair of Postgraduate Studies at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, University of Central England. He first studied at Birmingham University, and then received a Ph.D. (in 1981) from the Council for National Academic Awards (U.K.). He has worked on collections and display within museums of Oceanic materials in Melanesia as well as Eur- ope and North America. His current work is on the artistic production of the Asmat people in West Papua, and he is editing a book, The Future of Indigenous Museums, which deals with Melanesia and Northern Australia. E-mail: nick.stanley@uce.ac.uk 369 Visual Anthropology , 17: 369–385, 2004 Copyright # Taylor & Francis, Inc. ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949460490468199