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Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object lessons contained in digital form and asks what they can tell us about both the past and the future. Drawing on the author's extensive experience working with collections across the world, Geismar argues for an understanding of digital media as material, rather than immaterial, and advocates for a more nuanced, ethnographic and historicised view of museum digitisation projects than those usually adopted in the celebratory accounts of new media in museums. By locating the digital as part of a longer history of material engagements, transformations and processes of translation, this book broadens our understanding of the reality effects that digital technologies create, and of how digital media can be mobilised in different parts of the world to very different effects.

Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object lessons contained in digital form and asks what they can tell us about both the past and the future. Drawing on the author's extensive experience working with collections across the world, Geismar argues for an understanding of digital media as material, rather than immaterial, and advocates for a more nuanced, ethnographic and historicised view of museum digitisation projects than those usually adopted in the celebratory accounts of new media in museums. By locating the digital as part of a longer history of material engagements, transformations and processes of translation, this book broadens our understanding of the reality effects that digital technologies create, and of how digital media can be mobilised in different parts of the world to very different effects.

This review unpacks some of the assumptions that underpin contemporary national heritage regimes. The genealogy of modern heritage exposes the entanglement of heritage, entitlement, resources, and property and underpins the frame of the modern nation-state. The article also highlights the implications of this genealogy for the processes of objectification, recognition, and new, expanded, ethical subject positions.

This article discusses the auction market for certain kinds of taonga Māori (Māori treasures or cultural property). The social, political, and economic tensions that emerge from the national regulation of the auction market for Māori artifacts are framed by the complex political dynamic in Aotearoa / New Zealand of biculturalism: a Treaty-based political contract between Māori (indigenous people of Aotearoa) and Pākehā (settlers in colonial New Zealand, primarily of European descent), subject to continual negotiation. The antiquities market, which includes Māori artifacts, is carefully regulated by the government in keeping with (ever-shifting) understandings of Crown sovereignty over national cultural heritage. Interventions by Māori activists and curators complicate this notion of sovereignty and assert a primacy of indigenous title. I argue that these idiosyncratic interventions, within the political context of biculturalism, alter the very form of the market, undermining perceived dichotomies between taonga and commodity, indigenous and market values. Eventual auction results reflect a synthesis of complex intercultural negotiation and opposition between activists, dealers, auctioneers, and collectors. The case studies here raise important issues around the relationship among value, social and political relations, and the form and substance of the marketplace.

The following short articles were presented at a special session of the Pacific Arts Association, held at the College Arts Association annual meeting in New York in February 2007. Entitled "Cultural Properties—Reconnecting Pacific Arts," the panel brought together curators and anthropologists working in the Pacific, and with Pacific collections elsewhere, with the intention of presenting a series of case studies evoking the discourse around cultural property that has emerged within this institutional, social, and material framework. The panel was conceived in direct response to the ways thatcultural property, specifically in relation to museum collections, has been discussed recently in major metropolitan art museums such as the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met). This prevailing cultural property discourse tends to useantiquities—that most ancient, valuable, and malleable of material culture, defined categorically by the very distancing of time that in turn becomes a primary justification for their circulation on the market or the covetous evocation of national identity—as a baseline for discussion of broader issues around national patrimony and ownership.