James Clifford: "On Collecting Art and Culture" and Tze Ming Mok: "Race You There"

Both of the articles listed above look at the ways and methods people establish and practice when trying to understand cultures, societies and communities. Both writers explore how these ideas can become skewed or distorted in different environments and by different personal opinions.

James Clifford’s anthropological essay “On Collecting Art and Culture” focuses on a broad and general sense of culture. Without highlighting a specific community in the world he shows how collecting (in museums etc.) has been established to help primarily western communities understand and gain power over other culutres.

Tze Ming Mok’s article “Race You There” gives an interesting account of the author’s personal experiences concerning cultural value and the racial climate in New Zealand.

When comparing both readings and reflecting the key ideas discussed, questions come to mind that give me a different perspective on the current social environment in New Zealand and the way our culture is preserved and then perceived.

Clifford ascertains that the anthropological and western collecting of artifacts is a power driven activity and this can greatly impact the value and nature of a culture when artifacts are displayed at institutions like museums, “In the West … collecting has long been a strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture and authenticity.” (Clifford: 218)

Clifford also highlights the idea of promotion when talking about collecting cultures and I wonder when displaying cultural artifacts that are labelled as ‘native’ we are promoting the culture or degrading it. Collectors that take objects out of their cultural context and label them as an ‘artifact’ don’t always take into consideration their context or purpose in their original situation. Clifford shows an example of a Zuni war god that was prevented to be shown at the Museum of Modern Art as the tribe believed their war gods were “sacred and dangerous” (Clifford: 247). The fact that a western society viewed a tribal object in completely different terms than its own shows how a preoccupation with possession can completely disregard cultural ideologies and traditions. A western institution can see only the aesthetics and ignores the ownership of the native culture to that object.

When looking at collecting in New Zealand it is interesting to think about what other cultures would think of New Zealand culture through our collections and how they would perceive us from our museums, art galleries and similar institutions. When comparing our historical collections to those in other countries it is apparent that we live in a young society and our ties to British powers are still strong. Maori collections were only fully introduced into Auckland Museum 150 years after the museum was established. The preservation of taonga is still not a fully elementary part of museum research and this is apparent when looking at the corporate principles of Te Papa. Four of the six principles mention Maori collections and highlight the importance of them. “’That Te Papa Acknowledges Mana Taonga’ is one of the six corporate principles informing the philosophy of Te Papa. Mana Taonga is a recognition of the power of taonga to communicate deep truths about our people.” (Te Papa Website). It seems to me that the inclusion of these principles would not have been such an important aspect if it were a fully established practice.

New Zealand’s collections seem to signify that we have moved into a more ‘one-nation’ thinking of collecting and preservation. Racial issues aren’t as readily explored in a contemporary context and exhibitions at places like Auckland Museum seem to view our current society in a unified way and Maori traditions are displayed in a very historical context. This may be a reflection of modern Maori and New Zealand culture or a product of an idea that Clifford has articulated: “The value of exotic objects was their ability to testify to the concrete reality of an earlier stage of human culture, a common past confirming Europe’s triumphant present.” (Clifford: 228)

Clifford James. “On Collecting Art and Culture.” The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1988: 215-251.

Mok, Tze Ming. “Race You There.” Landfall 208. Dunedin: Otago University Press. 2004: 18-26.

Author unknown. Te Papa Website. Collections: Maori. 2003. http://www.tepapa.govt.nz/TePapa/English/CollectionsAndResearch/CollectionAreas/TaongaMaori/

Theatre Country: Treatment of the Land in New Zealand

Geoff Park’s essay ‘Theatre Country’ proposes interesting ideas on the way the view of landscape has changed historically and how these ideas have been performed in New Zealand. Park sees New Zealand landscape treated as a tradable commodity and this is shown in both a positive and negative light. The historical treatment by the British of New Zealand Maori is not shown as diplomatically and Park obviously finds many of the tools used by the imperial power demoralizing.


New Zealand Maori have a physical and reciprocal relationship with the land and the introduction of the opposing British values of the ‘picturesque’ or ‘nature as scenery’ is historically discussed in the article and Park attributes it to the obvious – colonalisation and an overwhelming British desire of ownership – “spiritual possession followed and reinforced material possession.”


The Claude Glass was used by the English as a means to visually capture a scene, was one of the first inventions to that allows an individual to possess scenery. This desire for ownership is developed in Park’s exploration of the concept of conservation. Conservation ideas are shown differently than the common traditional views of this practice. He shows how conservation of the land can create a different logic in our interaction with the land and this logic is not entirely favourable. One of the foundation concepts of conservation is the treatment of landscape as something to look at rather than having a deeper more physical relationship. This is alienating and can have us become a viewing audience rather than an active part of the land. While the idea to preserve and protect the landscape is extremely valid and honourable, (especially in our current global environment) it raises the questions as to who has the right to section off a part of the earth and who has the right to experience the landscape once it has been deemed a conservation state.


A contemporary example of a conservationalist idea that magnifies this problem is shown in Metro Park, Los Angeles. In the early 1990s city authorities created a new kind of public space, a “picturesque oasis of landscaped flower beds and shade providing trees”(Rugoff 12) but because of the threat of drug users and homeless people the park remained closed at all hours behind a locked security gate. Visitors could only experience the park from the outside, forced to enjoy it as a virtual display rather than a physical space. This idea of a desire for an idealised image over a problematic reality is echoed in the history of New Zealand where parts of the country were “emptied of rival human presences and ‘returned … to their primaeval grandeur’.”(Park 127)

“the turn-of-the-century scenic urge that cut Maori out of nature and cast them as pillagers.”(Park 126)


The idea of the landscape as a theatre and us as its audience is alluded to frequently throughout the essay and obviously in the title and this metaphor is useful when thinking of the way in which British artists manipulated New Zealand landscapes like a director, and how this influenced both Maori and the public of homeland Britain.


English immigrants arriving in New Zealand had a mental image of the beauty that awaited them because of such literary and artistic figures who presented idolised images of New Zealand to prospective travellers.
“[William] Wordsworth’s forging of the nineteenth century English passion for natural scenery, which crossed the world with colonisation schemes, lead New Zealanders ‘preserving’ theirs in a process that forced human life and indigenous nature apart.”(Park 119)
The inherently British way of presenting the New Zealand landscape in paintings can be seen as a tool used by the imperial power to gain more control over the Maori, “asserting authority over the symbolic as well as the literal.”(Park 126)


Although the historical political climate of New Zealand is woven through the essay Park asserts responsibility to the artist for some of the corruption of the treatment of the landscape. While this may not seem justified, he makes valid points concerning the way artists displaced ideas of British scenery to New Zealand and how colonial painters showed New Zealand in an essentially British way. This made New Zealand landscape be seen as a tradable commodity and contributed to the depressive treatment of Maori.



Park, Geoff. “Theatre Country.” Theatre Country: Essays on landscape and whenua. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006. 113-127.

Rugoff, Ralph. “Bubble Worlds.” Small World. Ed. Toby Kamps. San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000. 12-16.