Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac's Museum on the Quai Branly By

organized, according to the editors, as a ulations at the time of decolonization, yet fugue. It is a successful strategy, and the continued to urge school teachers to focus rich articles are even more provocative history courses on the positive role of when the book is read front to back. I French colonization. It then took a year hope that in future publications, each of for the president of France to request that the authors include even more of the fine- the Constitutional Council remove this grained ethnographic detail that clearly specific decree. Paris Primitive analyzes underpins the claims they make. This and contextualizes French cultural repre- book is a recommended read for anyone sentations of non-Western material cul- interested in Amazonian ethnography, ture in light of such current political history and historicities, temporality, debates related to colonialism, slavery, identity, social memory, processes of and immigration. change, or simply learning more about Price documents the MQB’s geneal- alternate worldviews that continue to ex- ogy on the basis of an array of sources that ist today. would have been inaccessible if not for her thirty-year involvement and friendships with Paris’ artistic and intellectual movers and shakers. The book unfolds as a mys- Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s tery story. The plot originates in 1990 at Museum on the Quai Branly. Sally Price. the Royal Palm, a palatial hotel in Mauri- Chicago: University of Chicago Press, tius, when Jacques Chirac, then mayor of 2007, 239 pp. Paris, and Jacques Kerchache, an art col- lector who styled himself a French ‘‘Indi- Catherine Benoıˆt ana Jones,’’ met for the first time. This Connecticut College began a remarkable friendship between the two men and shaped Chirac’s public Sally Price offers a masterful analysis of the reputation as an erudite connoisseur, museographic, academic, and political de- defender, and promoter of non-Western bates surrounding the creation of France’s arts. Their shared passion led to the Museé du quai Branly (MQB), the museum ground-breaking 1994 Taino art exhibit dedicated to the art and ethnography at the Petit Palais in Paris. It led also, when of non-Western cultures that opened its Chirac became the president of France in doors in 2006. Paris Primitive, however, 1995, to the tumultuous 2000 opening reveals much more than the project’s de- of the Museé du Louvre’s Pavillon des Ses- tails. Rather, and given the complex polit- sions, a new wing of the museum dedi- ical and financial interests at stake in this cated to non-Western art in spite of the museum, Price has produced a book museum’s curators’ vigorous opposition that illuminates key contradictions arising to the display of ‘‘primitive art’’ in such an from France’s colonial legacies. elite space. Yet the ‘‘two Jacques’’’ friend- In 2001, parliament passed a law ac- ship would continue to develop and cul- knowledging slavery and the slave trade as minate in the MQB’s construction. crimes against humanity. In 2005, it passed Paris Primitive follows three distinct a law acknowledging the suffering of pop- narrative paths to document the stakes Book Reviews 451 behind the MQB’s creation. First it exam- another of these museums. And some ines the material and scientific disassem- current curators are considering linking bly, relocation, and reorganization of the African and American sections of the several museums whose collections came MQB through representations of the to form the basis of the MQB. Next it de- transatlantic slave trade. Yet this book scribes in detail the existence of illegal art prompts the reader to wonder whether trafficking involving the state. This includes French academics, curators and publish- Kercharche’s own career trajectory and then ing companies as a whole are ready to ad- moves to questions of cultural property dress the country’s colonial past through rights and the ethics of acquisition. In its public history and cultural representation. final sections, the book addresses the ongo- In June 2007, I attended an international ing French debate about privileging either a conference on the relationship between art ‘‘Western’’ esthetic approach or a culturally history and anthropology organized by the and socially informed manner of displaying MQB. While Price was invited to speak, non-Western material culture. Here the par- the conference website neglected to men- adoxical nature of the state’s support for a tion her title ‘‘Cultures en dialogue: colonial museum in a postcolonial era comes options pour les museés du XXIe sie`cle’’ to the fore. In the MQB, historically and so- and listed her name only under her co- cially decontextualized artworks and objects panelist’s talk on an early 20th-century are displayed in a very dim light aimed at German folk museum. The panel, sched- arousing emotional and spiritual feelings. uled at lunchtime (a sacred moment in the Meanwhile, the colonial and French histo- French day), allowed the moderator to ries of the migrant descendants of their au- abruptly cancel the question and answer thors is narrated, across town, in La cite´ de period for Price’s talk by invoking the pub- l’histoire de l’immigration, a museum ded- lic’s need to lunch. When I expressed my icated to immigration inaugurated in 2007. stupefaction, he answered casually, ‘‘Do Both museums’ displays remain silent about not get me wrong, we do not silence Price, the massive deportations of undocumented on the contrary her talk will be remem- workers conducted by the French state dur- bered precisely because we cut off the ing the past five years and of the two month- questions.’’ long state of emergency triggered by riots in One of Price’s study’s strengths is the the fall of 2005. Price concentrates on wit and great evidentiary detail with which French denials of its population’s diversity it addresses the construction of cultural in the name of ‘‘universal republicanism.’’ and national identity in a former colonial All this took place as French delegates power. Paris Primitive is a remarkable fought a 3-year battle at UNESCO in the book of the utmost importance for read- name of the recognition of a ‘‘world ers in the field of museum studies. But, cultural diversity’’Fmeaning a French one most of all, it is a document that demands Fthat it counterposed to US cultural hege- serious study by all those interested in na- mony. tionalism, the borders of and techniques Recently, several scholars and curators for constructing European culture, and the resigned from boards, councils, commit- postcolonial condition as a space of polit- tees, and positions they held in one or ical engagement. 452 J OURNAL OF L ATIN A MERICAN AND C ARIBBEAN A NTHROPOLOGY.

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