This research considers material culture, the politics of identity, and the role knowledge plays in a Maori community in relation to a nineteenth century historic collection held abroad. The Charles Smith collection came from the Nga Paerangi community in Whanganui, New Zealand. The importance of historic collections to Maori are described through the concept taonga, or treasured objects, which have been theorized in terms of kinship relationships to a certain class of social valuable. This research acknowledges that taonga uphold the continuity of historic relationships, but departs from other analyses in its focus on a previously unknown collection, introduced to the source community through photographs in an exploration of ways taonga interactions are historically and circumstantially informed. Visually focused research endeavors often present diverse responses in a meeting of the social life of objects and the politics of knowledge. Similarly, divergent responses to taonga arose that referenced the colonial contexts in which such taonga left Maori control, as well as losses to knowledge bases in the community. Endeavors to reclaim lands and cultural heritage through language and education initiatives operate at a local level of regeneration, but these goals become pertinent to larger issues of placing knowledge within a rights-based framework grounded in personal socializations of knowledge. The recognition that knowledge is taonga emerged as the framework for understanding ways Maori assert their authority over land, their language, and museum collections based in particular dispositions to knowledge. The control enacted over cultural representations in museums, land courts, and other political forums, asserts self-determinative positions, and also claims Maori knowledge as a scarce resource. Community speakers who have access to this powerful knowledge must therefore act on behalf of their communities as guardians of knowledge and taonga treasures, to redress historic losses, outsider appropriations of culture, and prevent further social disadvantages.

This essay uses different angles to analyze how authentic objects and copies are used in an exhibition context. The survey focuses on four research questions. The questions concern the significance of copies in exhibitions and focuses on the relationship between the information conveyed in exhibitions and the objects used to convey the information. The questions also aim to examine the relationship between authenticity and copies and the museum visitors view on copies. The purpose of the survey is to see if the answers to these questions mean that the authentic museum objects are the most significant or if the information is the most valuable and that the objects in that case could just as easily consist of copies.  The methods used for collecting the empirical material is analyzes of relevant literature and interviews. The empirical material is used to illuminate different perspectives on the use and view of copies in exhibition contexts. Previous research is used to analyze the concepts of authenticity and copies. Classic cases of exhibitions based on copies are used to get an insight into how copies can be used in exhibitions. Part of the empirical material consists of interviews with Swedish museums, the interviews are used to investigate how museums today use copies and to perceive the museums´ views on the use of copies. The analysis of the empirical material provides many interesting aspects on this topic, and it turns out that the researchers, the classical cases, and the interviewed museums are more or less in agreement when it comes to the use of copies in exhibition contexts. The copies are perceived to have many positive qualities that can be used in different ways in an exhibition. Overall, the reasoning leads to copies having a significant role in exhibition contexts and is a somewhat unused resource that could be used more than what it currently does.  This is a two-year master´s thesis in Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies.

La question du statut des objets issus des sociétés extra-occidentales conservés dans les musées occidentaux restait posée, jusqu’à récemment, dans les termes du paradigme construit au cours du vingtième siècle opposant le statut ethnographique au statut esthétique, et à partir d’une conception intrinsèque du statut des objets. La controverse suscitée par l’annonce du projet du musée du quai Branly au sein des communautés anthropologique et muséale en témoigne. Cette recherche propose de renouveler l’approche du statut des objets extra-occidentaux en adoptant une conception extrinsèque du statut des objets. Elle repose sur deux analyses sémiotiques successives de l’exposition permanente du musée du quai Branly. La première vise à analyser séparément et exhaustivement les registres médiatiques de l’espace, scriptovisuel et audiovisuel qui composent, avec le registre des objets, l’exposition ; la seconde à analyser, au sein d’un corpus restreint d’unités d’exposition, l’interaction des registres, dans le but final d’identifier les processus interprétatifs producteurs du sens des objets. L’objectif de cette double analyse consiste à vérifier que l’exposition permanente du musée du quai Branly assigne le statut d’objet de patrimoine aux objets issus des sociétés extra-occidentales qu’il conserve.La première partie de la thèse est consacrée à restituer la construction de la question de recherche, qui porte surle caractère patrimonial du statut des objets de musée extra-occidentaux, et à rendre compte des moyens méthodologiques mis en oeuvre pour y répondre. La deuxième partie, consacrée aux résultats de l’analyse séparée des registres, confirme que les marqueurs nécessaires à l’assignation du statut patrimonial des objets extra-occidentaux, les mondes d’origines ailleurs et muséaux, sont bien certifiés dans l’exposition. Elle montre également la mobilisation particulière du registre de l’espace. L’ensemble incite à formuler l’hypothèse que l’espace ne constitue pas un interprétant des objets, que les mondes d’origine ailleurs et muséaux occupent une place secondaire dans l’assignation du statut des objets et, finalement, que les objets sont les principaux interprétants des objets. Enfin, la troisième partie permet de vérifier que la certification de l’appartenance des objets à leur double monde d’origine est bien réalisée par le traitement muséal, l’exposition assigne donc bien le statut de patrimoine aux objets exposés, mais elle montre aussi que les éléments de la certification apparaissent comme secondaires, tandis que la production du sens des objets par la relation entre les objets favorise l’assignation d’un autre statut de l’objet : le statut de curiosité. En s’appuyant sur la production de la signification des objets par le dispositif d’exposition pour le visiteur, cette recherche permet de penser, plus largement, la capacité de l’exposition à proposer un discours neutre qui modifie son opérativité, et qui permet à l’institution muséale de se placer dans une posture de délégation du sens produit par l’exposition. / Until today, the question of the status of objects from non-Western societies preserved in Western museums wasraised, in terms of twentieth century paradigms which associated ethnographic and aesthetic status, and whichpresupposed objects to have an intrinsic status of their own. The controversy amongst anthropological andmuseum communities caused by the announcement of the Quai Branly museum project testifies to thesepresuppositions. This thesis aims to re-elaborate the approach to non-Western objects through an extrinsicapproach to their status. It rests on two subsequent semiotic analyses of the permanent exhibition of the QuaiBranly Museum. The first one analyzes separately and exhaustively the space, texts, pictures and audiovisualmaterial as media categories of the exhibition. The second one analyzes, in a restricted corpus of exhibitionunits, the interactions between different media categories with the goal of identifying the interpretative processeswhich produce the sense of the objects. The purpose of this double analysis is to verify whether the permanentexhibition of the Quai Branly Museum a heritage status to the objects from non-Western societies which itpreserves.The first part of the thesis presents the construction of the research question, focused on the heritage status ofnon-Western objects in museums, and explains the methods implemented to answer such a question. The secondpart, devoted to the results of the separate media categories’ analysis, confirms that the labels necessary to theassignment of heritage status to non-Western objects, the elsewhere world origin and museum world origin, areindeed present in the exhibition. It also shows the particular mobilization of space in the exhibition. Together,these two sections encourage us to theorize that space is not a mode of interpretation for objects, in that the“elsewhere” world origin and the museum world origin have but a secondary place in the assignment of objectstatus, while objects are themselves the main means for object interpretation. Finally, the third part verifies thatthe attestation of the objects’ double world of origin is effectively authenticated in the exhibition ; this sectionshows that, while the exhibition does assign a heritage status to the exhibits, the elements of authentification arenot necessary for the interpretation of the objects’ meaning, whereas the meaning produced by the relationshipbetween objects promotes the assignment of yet another object status : the status of curiosity. This thesis,focused on the production of object meaning for the visitor by means of the exhibition display, more broadlysuggests the exhibition’s ability to provide a neutral view which modifies its operativity, an ability which allowsthe museum to delegate the production of the object’s meaning to visitors.

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