Hoarding New Guinea: Writing Colonial Ethnographic Collection Histories for Postcolonial Futures By Rainer F. Buschmann Publisher: University of Nebraska Press Reviewed by Hélène B. Ducros

In Hoarding New Guinea, Rainer F. Buschmann relies on the link between the history of ethnographic and art museums and imperial histories to investigate how Europeans have engaged with Indigenous material culture in German New Guinea and how Indigenous populations have in turn reacted to the Europeans’ acquisition quest and appetite for artifacts—a practice of systematic accumulation he captures in the term “hoarding.” The author focuses on Oceanic culture to tease out the notion of valuation of cultural objects (in terms of barter, commercial, prestige, or propaganda value) and the factors that guided Europeans in their collecting (ir)rationales.