Engaging aesthetically with tapa barkcloth in the museum

Abstract

Tapa barkcloth was a fabric replete with materialities of cultural and aesthetic values in 18th- and 19th-century Oceania. In the modern ethnographic museum, remote in time (and frequently space) from its origin, what remains to be appreciated cross-culturally? I think through a tripartite model here, in which certain aesthetic responses are taken as universal, others as shaped by cross-cultural materialities, and yet others as dependent upon the spatiotemporal contexts of creation and appreciation.