Reflect on the fluid and adaptive natural life in the Pacific region. The panel discusses objects from the exhibition and traces the material progress of Oceania.

Postdoctoral fellow, Pacific Ethnology, Sergio Jarillo de la Torre’s, research interests revolve around cultural materialisations in island Papua New Guinea. He has carried out intensive fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands (Milne Bay Province), exploring the role of material and immaterial forms as mediators of cross-cultural encounters in the Pacific. His thesis is a study of Massim woodcarvings as instruments of indigenous analysis and native agency in the face of social change.

Dr. Jennifer Newell is curator of Pacific Ethnography. Her major research project explores climate change and cultural change in the Pacific.

Maia Nuku, Evelyn A. J. Hall and John A. Friede Associate Curator for Oceanic Art, Metrpolitan Museum of Art. Her doctoral research focused on early missionary collections of Polynesian gods and their extraordinary materiality, which sparked an interest in drawing out the often eclipsed cosmological aspects of Oceanic art.

Shawn Rowlands, curator, Frontier Shores: Collection, Entanglement, and the Manufacture of Identity in Oceania, BGC-AMNH Postdoctoral Fellow in Museum Anthropology, PhD Ethnographic History and Material Culture Studies, University of New England, BA Hons, Popular Protest and Japanese Folk Lore, University of Queensland, BA History, University of Queensland.