Pacific Pathways: Multiplying Contexts for the Forster ('Cook-Voyage') Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum

Comprising 185+ artefacts obtained on James Cook’s second voyage of discovery from 1772 to 1775, the Forster Collection is one of the great collections of Pacific ethnography. Between 1995 and 2001, I gathered together in a database all the information held within the Museum about each object in the collection. This work culminated in the launch of a website devoted to the collection at . The present project was concerned with understanding the ways in which the Forster Collection is important today, especially for members of ‘source’ communities. To this end, the project team developed and implemented a facility allowing anyone with access to the web to develop their own commentaries on the collection through creating electronic paths through and beyond the existing website. Pathways were commissioned from a variety of individuals—artists, curators, and scholars—interested in the collection from different perspectives. They were free to research and develop their own paths in their own ways, but taken as a whole they present a variety of perspectives combining words, images, and sound to explore, directly and indirectly, such themes as ‘first contact’, colonialism and postcolonialism, globalization, repatriation, gender, etc. and thus to suggest and demonstrate the collection’s relevance to scholars (historians, anthropologists, museum curators), artists (sculptors, writers, dancers), and members of source communities. The research context is manifold and includes new thinking and developments in collections history and museology; in particular, it contributes to new ways of incorporating indigenous voices into anthropological, art-historical, and museum presentations.