Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association

In 1897, German anthropologist and collector Wilhelm Joest spent the last three months of his life on Nendö, Santa Cruz Islands, assembling an extensive ethnographic collection. It includes a piece of tevau, or “feather money,” originally used by the islands’ inhabitants to pay bride price or purchase female concubines, among other things. This paper explores this artefact’s various gendered layers of meaning. Used to transform women into the collective property of Nendö men’s associations, tevau was already gendered and charged with sexualised meaning before being collected. This made it attractive to Joest, who had always recorded non-European sexualities with an ethnopornographic voyeurism. The object, I argue, reveals a complexly gendered collecting situation and Joest’s tentative affinity with the men of Nendö based on an (assumed) shared patriarchal outlook. As such, the history of Joest’s collecting is relevant both to the presentation of tevau in Western museums and cultural revitalisation attempts on Nendö itself.