Indigenous and Transnational Values in Oceania: Heritage Reappropriation, From Museums to the World Wide Web

Abstract

International audienceWhat is the value of heritage? A source of explosive emotions which oppose the " value " of so-called Western expertise – history of social and human sciences and constant reevaluation of the heritage market – versus the values in " becoming " of the people who recognise themselves in this heritage and who claim it as a foundation for an alternative and better life? In this paper, we examine some of the ways in which different groups in the Pacific reinterpret their heritage in order to redefine their singular values as cultural subjectivities: individual, collective and national, diasporic or transnational in the case of some Indigenous networks (Festival of the Pacific Arts, Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, etc). ow can societies deal with different value systems in a way that does not lead to the total domination of one system by another? 1 The framework of our discussion builds on a trend of engaged French scholarship in the Pacific that is evidenced in a number of recent conferences and publications (Dousset, Glowczewski & Salaün eds. 2014). Our concern is to explore ways to " decolonize " the gaze we use in social sciences, to conceive of a paradigm that shifts the scientific values associated to the foundation and filiation of anthropology as a discipline in the light of the values promoted by the people whose practices and discourses we study in the field and, increasingly so, through a variety of new media such as the Internet