Digital Heritage, Knowledge Networks, and Source Communities: Understanding Digital Objects in a Melanesian Society

Abstract

This article investigates digital heritage technologies from a Melanesian perspective. It explores-in the context of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea-the types of values placed on digital surrogates as a means to engage critically with recent debates on "digital" or "virtual" repatriation. It raises the question as to whether digital knowledge resources such as 3D digital objects are really seen as secondary or "second best" to the original or whether digital technologies reproduce, in new form, an economy of objects that sustains knowledge and revival practices. As a way to address this, the Mobile Museum pilot project was launched in January 2012 to help support the Nalik people of New Ireland reconnecting with and researching their cultural heritage in Queensland museums. This article demonstrates, in contrast to recent calls for an ideological return to the status of the museum object as put forward by Conn (2010), how ethnographic objects should be understood in terms of their performativity, mobility, and virtuality, which render them operative far beyond the physical realms of museum institutions. [digital heritage, digital repatriation, ethnographic collections, cultural revitalization, Melanesia].