III Mapping the nation: Social relationships and digital relationships: Rethinking the database at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre

Abstract

In this paper, we seek to unravel and interrogate the aesthetics of the museum database, and the links between digital and social relationships within the museum and beyond, using as a case study the development of an integrated database system for the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, or Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta (VKS). The VKS database both draws relationships of knowledge, practice, and collection into view and generates connections in a newly national trilingual space. We ask: What are the implications of mapping the social onto the digital and vice versa? What is the efficacy of digital connectivity on museum practices, and other social networks? Does the digital domain create a new national aesthetic of connection and relationality, and how might we rethink the nation in this new aesthetic frame? How do digital relationships affect the production of new collections and new relations to the object world? How does this electronic infrastructure generate or perpetuate hierarchies of knowledge and the political economy of information?. © Royal Anthropological Institute 2011.