Work-in-Progress Seminar - Maori, portraiture and the aesthetics of cross-cultural appropriation
Landscape and portrait painting and photography were popular in late 19th and early 20th century European settler visual culture. Yet of the two, Maori avidly appropriated portraiture, incorporating it into displays of ancestry and genealogy that form the interiors of descent group meetinghouses. My work explores how an aesthetic common to carved and painted Maori ancestral imagery may have resonated to a degree with colonial photography of Maori, which may go some way toward explaining its popularity amongst Maori patrons and collectors. I am developing my existing fieldwork in Rotorua, where Maori were heavily photographed as part of the region’s tourism industry, by developing a comparative frame of analysis. Looking at both the historical use of photography of Aboriginal people by their communities, and Aboriginal adoption of the landscape genre - in particular the work of Albert Namitjara and associated landscape artists - my work in progress considers whether Aboriginal appropriation of the landscape genre (which does not feature in Maori appropriations from the colonial visual repertoire) offered a parallel mode of visualising ancestrality more in keeping with Aboriginal beliefs and practices and their aesthetic mediation. My work thus considers whether cross-cultural appropriations of new media occur simply because new things become available, or whether appropriations are shaped by a more particular culturally perceived desirability and/or efficaciousness.
Elizabeth Cory-Pearce is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the University of East Anglia in Britain. She is currently writing up research on Maori ceremonial exchanges with British aristocracy in late nineteenth and early twentieth century New Zealand. Elizabeth has held lecturing posts at the University of Sussex, the University of Oxford and University College London where she lectured on Anthropology; Ethnographic Film; Anthropology of Art; Material Anthropology; and Museum Studies. Her publications include essays in the Association of Social Anthropology’s Monograph Creativity and Cultural Improvisation (Berg 2007); The Art of Clothing (UCL Press 2005); and the Journal of Museum Ethnography (2007).