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.
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