"This historically rigorous and theoretically nuanced collection of essays takes the reader on a global journey marked by successive phases of incomprehension, clash, desire, appropriation, and indigenous renewal. Through their meticulous chartings of the permutations of local differences, changing constructs of art, and shifting power relations the book produces critical new understandings of the process of cross-cultural translation--and its impossibility--indispensable to students of world systems of art and culture."--Ruth Phillips, Canada Research Chair in Modern Culture and Professor of Art History, Carleton University

Nicholas Thomas is Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His books include Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook and In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories, published by Duke University Press. In 2002, he co-curated "Skin Deep: The History of Tattooing" at the National Maritime Museum in London.

Anna Cole is the Research Coordinator of the "Tatau/Tattoo: Embodied Art and Cultural Exchange" project based at Goldsmiths College.

Bronwen Douglas is a Senior Fellow in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. She is the author of Across the Great Divide: Journeys in History and Anthropology.