‘Amui ‘i Mu‘a/Ancient Futures: Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Tongan Arts and Their Legacies

This essay introduces the two issues of Pacific Arts dedicated to the New Zealand-based, Marsden Fund (Royal Society of New Zealand)-financed research project ‘Amui ‘i Mu‘a/Ancient Futures: Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Tongan Arts and Their Legacies and its affiliated traveling exhibition. The project’s participants included Phyllis Herda (anthropologist and Pacific historian), Billie Lythberg (art historian, anthropologist, and now lecturer in organizational studies), Melenaite Taumoefolau (Pacific linguist and researcher in Pacific studies), Hilary Scothorn (art historian and Pacific textile specialist), and Tongan artists Sopolemalama Filipe Tohi and Dagmar Vaikalafi Dyck. These academics and artists worked collaboratively to locate, examine, and interpret late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Tongan artifacts in more than thirty collections throughout Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, and Australasia, as well as to investigate the legacies of Tongan–European encounters in this era.