Objects and Others Essays on Museums and Material Culture

Obj~cts and Others HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 1 Observers Observed Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork Volume 2 Functionalism Historicized Essays on British Social Anthropology Volume 3 Objects and Others Essays on Museums and Material Culture Volume 4 Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others Essays on Culture and Personality Objects and Others ESSAYS ON MUSEUMS AND MATERIAL CULTURE Edited by George W. Stocking, Jr. HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 3 THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS The University of Wisconsin Press 114 North Murray Street Madison, Wisconsin 53715 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England Copyright © 1985 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Objects and others. (History of anthropology; v. 3) Includes bibliographies and index. 1. Anthropological museums and collections-History Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Anthropology-History Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Material culture-Ad dresses, essays, lectures. 1. Stocking, George W., 1928- . II. Series. GN35.025 1985 306 85-40379 ISBN 0-299-10320-X ISBN 0-299-10324-2 (paper) HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY EDITOR George W. Stocking, Jr. Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago EDITORIAL BOARD Talal Asad Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, University of Hull James Boon Department of Anthropology, Cornell University James Clifford Board of Studies in the History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz Donna Haraway Board of Studies in the History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz Curtis Hinsley Department of History, Colgate University Dell Hymes Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania Henrika Kuklick Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania Bruce Trigger Department of Anthropology, McGill University Contents ESSAYS ON MUSEUMS AND MATERIAL CULTURE 3 ARRANGING ETHNOLOGY: A. H. L. F. PITT RIVERS AND THE TYPOLOGICAL TRADITION William Ryan Chapman 15 FROM SHELL-HEAPS TO STELAE: EARLY ANTHROPOLOGY AT THE PEABODY MUSEUM Curtis M. Hinsley 49 FRANZ BOAS AND EXHIBITS: ON THE LIMITATIONS OF THE MUSEUM METHOD OF ANTHROPOLOGY Ira Jacknis 75 PHILANTHROPOIDS AND VANISHING CULTURES: ROCKEFELLER FUNDING AND THE END OF THE MUSEUM ERA IN ANGLO-AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY George W. Stocking, Jr. 112 ART AND ARTIFACT AT THE TROCADERO: ARS AMERICANA AND THE PRIMITIVIST REVOLUTION Elizabeth A. Williams 146 THE ETHNIC ART MARKET IN THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST, 1880-1980 Edwin L. Wade 167 ON HAVING A CULTURE: NATIONALISM AND THE PRESERVATION OF QUEBEC'S PATRIMOINE Richard Handler 192 viii CONTENTS WRITING THE HISTORY OF ARCHEOLOGY: A SURVEY OF TRENDS Bruce G. Trigger 218 OBJECTS AND SELVES-AN AFTERWORD James Clifford 236 INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS 247 INDEX 249 Objects and Others ESSAYS ON MUSEUMS AND MATERIAL CULTURE The two halves of our volume title-"Objects and Others" and "Essays on Museums and Material Culture"-imply overlapping but somewhat different enterprises. The latter suggests, and did in fact elicit, a series of institution ally oriented studies, focusing on what has been called the "Museum Period" in the history of anthropology (Sturtevant 1969:622). The former-which suggested itself only later in our volume planning-implies a more general ized metahistorical, philosophical, or theoretical consideration of two defm ing categories (or category relationships) of human existence, and therefore of anthropological inquiry in the broadest sense. Given the announced bias of History of Anthropology toward studies grounded in primary historical materials, it is not surprising that the essays in this volume are, for the most part, more obviously related to its subtitle than to its title. Particularly in the early stages of the historiography of any field, institutional (and/or biographically oriented) topics provide a conve nient focus for research grounded in documents, which tend to collect around individuals and institutions. But despite the embeddedness of the present essays in documentary historical material, they do in fact raise im portant broader issues: the problematic interaction of museum arrangement and anthropological theory; the tension between anthropological research and popular education; the contribution of museum ethnography to aesthetic practice; the relationship of humanist culture and anthropological culture, and of ethnic artifact and fine art; and most generally, the representation of culture in material objects-to mention only some of the more obvious fo cusing themes. Nevertheless, they are far from exhausting, even by glancing allusion, the range of issues implicated in our title-in either of its parts. In order to suggest something of this still-unrealized context of significance, this volume is framed by two brief essays, each taking one-half of the title as its point of departure. Etymologically, a museum is a place dedicated to the muses. Although as tronomy and history were perhaps more at home there than dance and erotic poetry, the force of that etymology was clearly manifest two thousand years 3 4 MUSEUMS AND MATERIAL CULTURE ago in the Mouseion of Alexandria (Alexander 1979:6-7). Modern mu seums, too, have been called secular temples, and the spirits of certain of the muses still inhabit and sometimes inspire them; but the common denomina tor of modern definitions of "the museum" is distinctly material. Museums are institutions devoted to the collection, preservation, exhibition, study, and interpretation of material objects. Insofar as they are "anthropological" museums, in the broader Anglo-American sense of the term, they are the archives of what anthropologists have called "material culture." Characteris tically, these objects of material culture are the objects of "others"-of hu man beings whose similarity or difference is experienced by alien observers as in some profound way problematic. As objects-things thrown in the way of the observer or actor-the pieces preserved in museums exist in a three-dimensional space encompassing both object and viewer. It is this complex three-dimensionality that distinguishes the museum archive from essentially two-dimensional repositories of linear texts-although linear thinking long characterized much museum practice. But as the word "archive" suggests, there is a fourth dimension that bears a peculiarly problematic relation to the museum. In general, the objects pre served in museums come from out of the past, so that the observer experi encing them in three-dimensional space must somehow also cross a barrier of change in time. Paradoxically, however, those objects are at the same time timeless-removed from history in the very process of embodying it, by cu rators seeking (among other goals) to preserve objects in their original form. Removed, however, from their original contexts in space and time, and re contextualized in others that mayor may not seek to recreate them, the meaning of the material forms preserved in museums must always be acutely problematic. This is even more the case inasmuch as the objects viewed by museum observers are "survivals" not only of the past from which collection wrenched them, but from those later pasts into which any given act of exhi bition has placed them. Museums, in short, are institutions in which the forces of historical inertia (or "cultural lag") are profoundly, perhaps inescap ably, implicated. Whatever the contingencies of their specific histories, the three dimensional objects thrown in the way of museum observers from out of the past are not placed there by historical accident. Their placement in mu seums, their problematic character, and indeed, their "otherness," are the outcome of large-scale historical processes. In the case of some "anthropolog ical" objects-e.g., a paleolithic stone ax-these processes may be the very long-term ones of geological, climatic, and human evolutionary change. But the historical processes that led to the collection of archeological objects in museums are much more recent: they have to do on the one hand with the forces of economic development and nationalism that transformed Europe in MUSEUMS AND MATERIAL CULTURE 5 the nineteenth century (cf. Trigger, in this volume), and on the other with those of imperial domination (Silberman 1982). As far as ethnographic ob jects are concerned, there is a large subcategory of anthropological objects (those of "folklore" or Volkskunde) generated by processes of industrial devel opment and social change internal to particular national states. Such pro cesses, however, have in some instances been appropriately characterized as processes of "internal colonialism," and certainly in the case of the bulk of traditional ethnographic objects, the most important historical processes have been those of colonial domination. This brief historical excursus confirms what is in fact implicit in the ety mology of the word "object": that there is inherent in the museum as an archive of material objects a fifth dimension beyond the three of materiality and the fourth of time or history. Since the objects thrown in the way of observers in museums were once those of others, there are relations implicit in the constitution of a museum which may be defined as relations of "power": the expropriation (not only in an abstract etymological sense, but sometimes in the dirty sense of theft or pillage) of objects from actors

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