IN DIALOGUE: THE COUPLE IN THE CAGE: A GuATINAUI ODYSSEY RUTH BEHAR AND BRUCE MANNHEIM
The Society for Visual Anthropology sponsored a credulity of the visitors with regard to the "authenticity" screening of the video The Couple in the Cage: A of the two Guatinaui. Guatinaui Odyssey, by Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, Anthropologists on the staff of the Smithsonian at the 1994 American Anthropological Association Institution and Field Museum concerned with raising (AAA) meetings in Atlanta. The video is based upon the viewer consciousness about issues of representation perfonnance piece Two Undiscovered Amerindians and the colonial legacy of displays in museums of Visit [Washington, Chicago, Syndey, etc.] created by natural history were instrumental in convincing mu the MacArthur award-winning performance artist, seum administrators that it was appropriate to sponsor Guillenno Gomez-Pena and cultural critic and artist the perfonnance-itself a parody of the former mu Coco Fusco. The two artists portray a man and a woman seum practice of putting non-Western peoples on dis from the remote (imaginary) Caribbean island of play as museum exhibits. But some viewers were Guatinaui. Conceived of as part of a larger counter outraged that museums allowed such an event to be cultural event entitled "The Year of the White Bear" performed inside the walls of institutions supposedly perfonned during the Quincentenary yearof Columbus's dedicated to "science" and "truth." "discovery" of the New World, the performance piece Anthropologists and others who came to viewThe was meant to be a critical commentary on the long Couple in the Cage at the AAA meetings had an standing Western practice of objectifying and distanc opportunity to discuss the question of what relationship ing the Other through spectatorship, in particular, cultural critiques such as the performance ofTwo Un through .museums· exhibitions of "primitive" peoples. discovered Amerindians... have to the contemporary As Gomez-Pena and Fusco explain in a program that pratice of anthropology and the representation of the describes "The Yearof the White Bear'': "Performance Other. Ruth Behar, the organjzer of the event, had art in the West did not begin with Dadaist ·events. Since arranged for the filmmaker/perfonnance artist, Coco the early days of the Spanish conquest, ·aboriginal Fusco, to be present at the screening. We publish here samples' of people from Africa, Asia, and the Americas Behar's introductory remarks along with comments were brought 10 Europe for aesthetic contemplation, made after the screening by one of the discussants, scientific analysis, and entertainment." anthropologist Bruce Mannheim. NL. Two Undiscovered Amerindians... was seen by
1 visitors to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington RUTH BEHAR S INTRODUCTION D.C., Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and the Whitney Museum in New York, as well as by I am pleased to be here tonight to introduce Coco audiences in London, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Fusco and the work she did with Chicano perfonnance Sydney.The Couple in the Cage records elements of the artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena on The Couple in the performance, such as visitors paying to have their Cage. It is especially significant that we are presenting photographs taken with the couple, feeding the Fusco or their work at the AAA. precisely this year when the Gomez-Pena bananas, asking the fem ale ''Guatinaui" to general theme of our conference is the issue of human dance or the male to recite a story in the Guatinaui rights. The Couple in the Cage is for me one of the most language, but its true subject is the audience and peoples' significant cultural works produced recently dealing reactions to the performance, in particular, the seeming with the most fundamental of human rights-the right
118 Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 Visual Anthropology Review never to be treated as an object, the right to full human a real perfomlance. a dramatic rendition of Marjorie i1y. the right to subjecthood. With irony. humor, wit. Shostak·s Nisa, in which thi~ canonical texr of an and pathos. The Couple in rlie Cage seeks to engage the intercultural, inter-women encounter was brought lO history of how the Wes! has constructed otherness by the stage. For me it wa:-. exciting and heartening to see putting a cage around "'difference." B\ engaging that how weJI Shostak s work could he translated into history so passionately. The Couple in the Cage offers cathartic theater as ano1her way of doing anthropolng~ an important vision of the history of what Michel Rolf And it made me realize: Hasn·t anthropolog~ alway-. Trouillot has called "the sa\·age slot"· that anthropology been about performance·? Not just the classically clumsy. inherited when it became an intellectual system, a Woody Allensque performance an of the anthropolo practice. and an angst-rid gi..,1 in rhe field. or the per den moral philosophy It formance" we ask the na also offers u~ a \ ision of ti \·e-. to put on for our hen the wan ne\\ efit, but the performances anrhropologies will need that we. in tum. render of robe made and performed nati \ c Ii \·e:-. on our inevi as we move into the nexl table return home·? century The Couple in rile Sahlins has noted thar Cage is a film that ought to one of the great paradoxes be shown to students in ofconfemporary anthropol Anthro I 0 I and to grad og~ is how we have escaped students beginning their from dealing with ··culture.. initiation in their core just at the moment when Anthrocourses: it isa work even one else is furiou-.J ~ that we ought to discuss. embroiled in discussions debare, and reflect upon as around its meaning. No broadly as possible within where has this discussion all the subfields of anrhro been more intense. excit EXPERTS SA pology. HE'SA ing, heart-rending. and pain This is a moment not POLITICAL ful than among minority cre so much of "crisis" for an LEADER I ative writers and artist-.. for thropology, it seems tome, whom ··discussion•· is too but of expanding THE COUPLE IN THE CAGE: tame a word for the experi anrhropology s boundaries A GUATINAUI ODYSSEY ence:-. of their own
so that we can take P'drt in. o video hy Coco Fusco ontl PoulaH~io "othering·· which the~ bring rather than hide from, the EotrrD er DAIS r -.c;,n. 'ftfOlfMANCf 1r GIJIUERMO GOMEZ 'fHA ANO coco FUSCO to the concept of culture. 1 dynamics of cultural inter think it is time for anthro- actions as they unfold in a pology lo engage in discus global context. One area in which these dynamics are sion with rhose "others .. here in our midst who ha' e unfolding is in performance art and various kinds of reclaimed rhe concept of culture not a~ a dead collection creative media projects involving \ ideo and film. of artifacts and customs. bur as a nccc:-.si1y of survi \'al. Lourdes Arizpe noted in Thursday s panel about "Re Tonight, I hope we can begin that dialogue with thinking the Cultural'. that just as the nineteenth-cen Coco Fusco. who graciously agreed to come to discus-. tury realist novel has been superseded by new forms of The Couple i11 the Cage with us anthropologists. documentary media and crearh·e nonfiction writing, so too has anthropology. and we must do more than just ABt>l T C1>Cfl Fl'SCO look on. unle:-s we want to go the way of the dinosaurs. That panel, curiously enough, was fuJI of performers. Coco Fusco i-. a L11' Angdes-ha!>ed an critic, film imposters, and spiril medium:- reading papers for the critk. curator. performance a11i-.1. and media ar1is1. She absent presences of Pierre Bourdieu and Marshall has been a visiling artist at the Uni\'L'rsil\' of California. Sahlins. But 1hen on Thursday night we were treated to at the Uni versify of lllinoi:-.. and al Colgate Universil)
Visual Anthropology Review Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 119 Her articles have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, a performance, where they enact the role of recently The Village Voice, Art in America, The Nation, and discovered "natives" or "noble savages" or "Guatinauis" many other national and international publications. She from a hitherto unknown island in the Gulf of Mexico, has written catalogue essays for the 1994 Fotofest, the appearing before audiences in a cage, as exhibits, as J 993 Biennial, and many other art exhibitions. Her museum-pieces on display, who speak an unknown book of essays, interviews, and scripts, titled English is language, and can only be apprehended through the Broken Here, will be published next spring by The New gaze and touristic Polaroids at a dollar a shot. Coco has Press in New York. She has curated numerous film and noted that as artists of color in the United States, she and art series, from Black American Short Films and Videos Gomez-Pena "carry [their] bodies as markers of differ to The Hybrid State Film Series ,and she also writes ence and reminders of the endlessly recycled colonial frequently on Cuban cultural and art movements. Her fantasies on which Western culture thrived." Indeed, wonderful essay, "El Diario de Miranda/Miranda's the performance carries a particular intellectual and Diary," about her return trips to Cuba is published in the emotional power because it's done by two artists of special double issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review color who've known what it is to be othered (Guillermo, on "Bridges to Cuba" (Behar 1994) that just came out for example, was not too long ago apprehended by this year. police because two concerned women in an LA restau In recent years, the rethinking of identity has led to rant thought he had kidnapped the blond boy who was both a fruitful engagement with diversity, plurality, and with him-his own son). But the performance of The multicultural dialogue, and an often frustrating need to Couple in the Cage also carries a particular Latino/ put people who are still "other" into neat ethnic boxes Latina history, for it brings together a Mexicano or cages, where their difference can be made palatable Chilango-Chicano for whom the cage is about the lived and statistically chartable. Coco, from the beginning, experience of the barbed wire that divides the U.S. and has resisted these boxes and has used her own self Mexico (and now with Proposition 187. California and positioning to stir up trouble. In the first, absolutely its "aliens"), and a daughter of a Cubana and the African brillliant, article I ever read by her, titled "Managing the diaspora who's known firsthand the meaning ofcoming Other" published in the Brazilian bilingual journal from an island isolated and caged by oceans of ideol Luistania. in 1992, Coco introduces herself in the ogy, nationalism, and Cold War. following way: "In the past five years, I have been asked The Latino/Latina history embedded in The Couple to speak as a Cuban, as a Latina, as a Black person, and in the Cage embeds a longer history that begins with as a person of color. I have been confused for being Christopher Columbus bringing an Arawak from the Arab, Puerto Rican, East Indian and West Indian. I have Caribbean back to Spain, where he was put on display been told that I speak English like a British person, or for two years until he died of sadness. The Couple in the 'like· an educated person. I've also disappointed many Cage began as a counter-Quincentennary event, an because I don't speak English with a Spanish accent. anti-1992 discovery of the New World mania and What category do Americans have for someone com industry.and it is rooted in the sad knowledge that, "The posed of Taino, Yoruba, Catalan, Sephardic, and only progress we have made in 500 years is that today Neopolitan blood?" the Others have the option either of an 'authenticity· In that same article she adds, "I don't speak constructed by the dominant, or living on as a parody of Spanglish, except with bilingual friends, because be their former selves" (a quote from Ashis Nandy and the fore it was a fashionable object of cultural studies, using co-authors of a recent manifesto on Western racism it was a good way of getting classified as mentally titled Barbaric Others). Guillermo and Coco play with retarded." this continuum between the authentic and the parody; in ABOUT THE COUPLE IN THE CAGE the cage, they enact the role of postmodern primitives, Guillermo in cowboy boots, Indian feathers, watching In "Managing the Other," Coco had posed a key Gilligan s Island on TV drinking Pepto Bismol as if it question: "Where does otherness begin when the very were a milkshake, and strengthening his biceps on an language of authenticity and cultural purity has already exerciser, and Coco in a grass skirt, baseball sneakers, been subverted?" green face paint, dancing to Rap music and reading a In The Couple in the Cage she and GuiIIenno children's book about Columbus's voyages; they enact Gomez-Pena pose this question again but in the form of a brilliant, twisted Adam and Eve in the Garden of the
120 Volurne 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 Visual Anthropology Review Reciprocal Gaze. The amazing thing, the tragic thing, is postcoloniality and multiculturalism. that the audience that greets them in Natural History As anthropologists working at the end of the cen museums in this country and in public pJazas in Spain, tury with new global agendas that we presume have far England, and Australia, tends to believe that they are in surpassed the popular uses of the primitive Other, our fact for real. The "savage slot," it turns out, is alive and first impulse may be to feel superior, to pat ourselves on well. I had the eerie pleasure of being there at the Field the back and say, this doesn't represent us; this is a Museum in Chicago when the sailor noted that the fiction of what true anthropology does. But who among female in the cage seemed to shave her Jegs, but of us can forget that Ishi was a man of our century, and that course, he quickly added, she probably rips out the hair anthropologists knew no better than to put him in the by the roots. cage of the Anthropology Musuem at Berkeley so he We talk about doing applied anthropology, about could play native, while putting him on the payroll as a bringing anthropological concerns to wider audiences, janitor? The destruction of the savage slot-that is a about bringing ourethnographies back to the people we project easier said than done, isn't it? We need to find work with, etc, etc. But we can be more creative about ways to acknowledge our complicity with the cages of all this, it seems to me. The Couple in the Cage is an otherness we've helped to create in our ethnographies example of a form of applied anthropology: it is a form and our museums, without, on the other hand, becom of interactive ethnography seen live by at least 200,000 ing so paralyzed that we give away the work of cultural people; it is a form of studying the Wesr s construction interpretation to advertising, tourism, the circus, and ofitself through its construction of the Other; it is a form literary criticism, realms with which we do share a of applied cultural critique; a reverse ethnography. It is common world of meaning. From Coco Fusco I've also a form of being accountable to the history embed learned that we can return dignity to those who've been ded in anthropology's origins and continued existence. humiliated into otherness and in that process of recu "The task," write Ashis Nandy and his co-authors, "is peration move forward into new forms of subjecthood to render the West's occulis mundi, this eye of the with spunk, laughter, grace, intelligence, and hope. world, visible in all its deformation so that people Thank you, Coco, for being here. everywhere can see themselves clearly once again." Or as Rolf-Trouillot has put it, "Anthropology needs to Ruth Behar is the author ofTransloJed Woman: Cross turn the apparatus elaborated in the observation of non ing the Border with Esperanza's Story and co-editor of Western societies on itself and on the history from Women Writing Culture, which is forthcoming with which it sprang ... We owe it to ourselves to ask what University of California Press, fall 1995. She teaches remains of anthropology ... when we remove [the sav anthropology at the University of Michigan. age] slot. The time is ripe for substantive propositions that aim explicitly at the destruction of the savage slot." ON THE MARGINS OF TH£ CouPI..E IN THE CAGE1 It seems to me that one way to destroy the savage BRUCE MANNHEIM slot is to embrace it, satirically and yet also-and this is essential-respectfully, as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez Pena have done. The range of responses they In Two undiscovered Amerindians visit ... 2 Coco elicited, from the most despicable forms of paternalism, Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena toured museums in to the chest-beating of the woman who says she's America and Europe as two Native Americans from an ashamed to live in America, to the response of the island off the coast of Mexico who had somehow Native American man who says he could see his own avoided contact with outsiders. Led on leashes to a cage grandchildren in that cage, point to the different ways in by confederates posing as museum docents, Fusco and which their performance touched a vital nerve. It is no Gomez-Pena paced around, stared at a television, worked longer possible to construe the West monolithically, at a laptop computer, read, and posed for the audience, because the smug white man who notes that the male in all the while maintaining silence with each other. The the cage seems to be interested in things he doesn't "docents" and descriptions on the cage explained to understand coexists with the Native American who can gathered crowds that these "specimens" were represen see his own grandchildren in that cage; both are located tatives of the "Guatinaui," from the undiscovered is in the debris of the history of the West, in that inherited land of Guetinau. Their audiences responded in unex web of Columbian political consciousness known as pected ways. Although the perfonnance was conceived
Visual Anthropology Review Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 121 as parody, many spectators responded with an earnest At another level, I was disturbed by the scope of the ness that ranged from reverence to horror. In Buenos broadside. Collapsed were anthropology, museums, Aires, G6mez-Peiia was attacked with acid. Surrounded world's fairs, circuses, and other cross-cultural "en as it was by a carefully sanitized commemoration of the counters" that were both more obviously coercive and 500th anniversary of the "encounter of two worlds," more clearly bound up with the interests of commerce Two undiscovered Amerindians visit ... reached the and empire. The only plausible response to an anthro poJiticaJly and emotiona11y charged interior of the pology so encompassed is the familiar, self-righteous Quincentenary. argument that anthropologists should stay home and The Couple in the Cage documents the Two undis concentrate on the ethnography of the every-day in the covered Amerindians visit ... , splicing performance and United States, or in another similar slogan, on the audience reaction with a depressing history of museum, history of the present. This argument threatens the sideshow, and world's fair exhibits of people from closure of one of the few venues in the North American Africa and America. The film moves seamlessly be academy in which it is respectable to talk about and tween the performance and newsreel, embedding Two listen to, study, and study with, people other than undiscovered Amerindians visit ... in a pre-configured European and Euroamerican elites. Even at a time in rhetorical field of human "specimens" exhibited in the which multiculturalism is a booming industry, it is a name of "science." The audiences are filmed in a range multiculturalism of hyphenated North Americans, not ofreactions, from concern forthe two exhibits to canny a demand that we listen to and learn about the rest of the awareness that they might in fact be marks in a put-on. world. In this context, the very power of parody fore Parodic moments in the film give way to deadly serious closes any possibility of arguing with the image of the ones; the distance from the subject that is a11owed by circus impresario trafficking in exotica. parody collapses in the segues from documenting Two In addition, to be lured into that particular rhetori undiscovered Amerindians to scenes of living World's cal configuration, is to deny the complexity of Fair exhibits. For anthropologists, The Couple in the anthropology's political engagement, particularly at Cage presents special challenges, especial1y after more earlier moments in its existence in the United States, than a decade· s critiques of objectifying moves that are when-in contrast to its counterparts in the colonial closely related to those documented in the film, both metropoles, such as the U.K. or the Netherlands-the through parody and historical footage. Because the discipline emerged partly in response to eugenics and anthropological critiques of these objectifying moves other racist political tendencies, and in which anthro have so often been constructed around issues of "repre pologists took an active role in organizing coherent sentation," it would be easy for an anthropologist to intel1ectual and political alternatives. Franz Boas both reduce the film to an allegory of the politics ofrepresen co11aborated and echoed W.E.B. DuBois at the pivotal tation, simplifying a complex and equivocal relation moment of founding of the NAACP (Baker 1994; cf. ship to its subject to a univocal, moralistic one. Stocking 1968; Hyatt I 990). To accept the tenns of the Here I propose to use The Couple in the Cage as the parody as boundaries of discussion of the location of starting point for some reflections that really belong on anthropology in the world today, it seems to me, is to the margins of both the performance and the film. respond to the film at the same level as the museum Speaking personally, The Couple in the Cage elicited goers who did not understand that the "temporary several mutually contradictory reactions: As someone exhibit" was parody. who has often found ethnographic museums painful Final1y, I was disturbed by the closeness of the the more so after several years of field research-I was museum-goers' experience and my own about ten years pleased to see Gomez-Pena and Fusco make a point that ago at seeing a peopled ethnographic exhibit on India at deeply needs making, and what is more doing so with the Smithsonian. The last part of the exhibit, Aditi: A brilliance. audacity, and humor-none of which are Celebration of Life~ included "forty folk artists found in oversupply in cultural criticism today. And craftspeople and perfonners-who worked in specially indeed, one response that I've seen from anthropologist designed spaces, illustrating their creative role in the colleagues is a delight at the deflation of the rhetoric life cycle" (Kurin 1991 :318). Although that part of the through which ethnographic work is translated for exhibit was conceived as a work space for the folk popular consumption in newspapers and on public artists, it was quite easy to reverse the figure and television. ground, and to understand the folk artists as part of a
122 Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 Visual Anthropology Review material exhibit. The film clips in The Couple in the rina I Malintzin/ La Malinche the translator for Cortes Cage show us excesses that can easily be dismissed as during his negotiations with Montezuma, now a key part of a past that we have now overcome.3 But the part of the Mexican national iconography. According to responses elicited by the performance undermine such Frances Karttunen ·s outstanding study ,Between worlds: smug assumptions, reminding us that making other Interpreters, guides, and survivors ( 1994), Malintzin human beings into spectacles is an ordinary enough part was bilingual in Nahuatl and Chontal Mayan, a lan of our experience that many museum-goers took the guage that she shared with a Spanish priest who had premises of Two undiscoveredAmerindiansfor granted, been shipwrecked and enslaved in a Mayan commu even when they found them horrifying. Indeed, as Fred nity. The priest translated Cortes's Spanish to Mayan, Myers (1994) has observed, performances set in mu which Malintzin then translated to Nahuatl. Through seum exhibits are increasingly being used to create new out the invasion of Central and South America the "interculture," with distinct cultural claims being ad Spaniards relied on lenguas, often working in chains. vanced by distinct participants. As the Spanish occupation hardened, the role of Native American translators shifted; in the late sixteenth cen FROM THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX TO THE WORLD tury. the Jesuits sent several speakers of Southern Peruvian Quechua to Spain to use as teachers for Moving from the museum (or better, from the missionary priests who were about to leave for the New "exhibitionary complex," as Tony Bennett [ 1988] calls World.~ it) to the world outside of it, sets "the couple in the cage" In 1574, the Peruvian priest Cristobal de Molina ··et in an even more horrific context, but one which I think Cuzqueiio" ( 1574: 79) reported that many Native wiH allow us as anthropologists to engage some of the Andeans believed that the Spanish invaders were "sent issues raised by the film. For ethnographers and our from Spain for Indian body fat, to cure a certain disease. critics, the issues raised by The Couple in the Cage for which no medicine could be found except for body primarily engage representation, and our place in main fat. Because of that, in those days the Indians went taining the exhibitionary complex. For our interlocu around very circumspectly, and they avoided the Span tors in the field, in contrast, these issues are frequently iards to such an extent that they didn't want to carry experienced (and represented) as corporeal. The "un firewood, herbs, and other things to the house of a discovered Amerindians" in the cages of Buenos Aires, Spaniard, so that they wouldn't be killed for their fat Chicago, London, and Seville represent mimetically a once they were inside. "5 history of bodies taken. My examples-of kidnappings In order to make this idea intelligible, it should be and other appropriations of the body-will come from pointed out that Native Andeans assume that fat is a America, mainly from colonial Mexico and colonial basic component of the person's life force, and circu and modern Peru. I mention them not to titilJate with lates through the body like blood. Similar accusations horror, but to introduce a non-representational, embod to those reported by Cristobal de Molina abound today, ied understanding that cannot be addressed by "creating directed especially at rural priests and school teachers, new terminology, a new cultural policy, or a multicultural but also at ethnographers and archeologists, particu festival" (Fusco 1990: 77). larly those who live separately from Native Andean Native Americans were taken by the invaders from households. There are dozens of such stories told anec virtually the first moment of the invasion. Although dotally by scholars foreign and Peruvian, often accom Columbus brought natives of the New World to the panied by the lament that "they didn't understand why court of Ferdinand and Isabella, they were taken from I was there." Or perhaps the Native Andeans under their native lands aot so much to be made spectacles of, stood all too well! but to be used for practical purposes, with the same Today "slaughterers" (iiak aq) are said to process brutal rationality with which slaves were brought from Native Andean fat into church candles, cosmetics, or Africa to the coast of Peru to replace the Native labor North American machinery (Morote 1952: Sola and lost to disease. Cusihuaman 1967: ch. 8; Vallee and Palomino 1973; Throughout the invasion, the Spaniards relied on Liffman 1977· Taussig 1987: 238-241; Ansion 1984: Native language interpreters called lenguas-tongues, 201-208; Ansion et al., 1989). The victim dies a terrible, who commonly were kidnapped and pressed into ser lingering death. Far from a transitory rumor, the vice. The most famous colonial example is Dona Ma- "slaughterer" (iiak aq) is both widespread and histori-
Visual Anthropology Review Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 123 cally durable as an explanation for the motives of demand in the industrialized countries, where it is outsiders being around Native Andeans. For example, used to make medicines, cosmetics, and even to during the late 1970s a high-school-educated woman lubricate the engines of airplanes. from a rural village noticed that I had a can of Nivea The bodies of the victims? They are never found._ Cream: Chopped into bits, in order not to lose an ounce of fat, they disappear. No trace, no proof. (Chappaz "Sir. Do you know what they make that from?" I 994)6 I saw it coming and could barely suppress a giggle. "No, seriously. This is true!!~" This is a genuine reverse optic, although its trace (How could I be so stupid as to buy Nivea cream .... ) through the anthropology and historiography of Andean South America has been uneven and usually anecdotal It was then that I realized that Nivea Cream, which (but see Taussig 1987: 238-241, and Ansion's 1989 was almost universally used at the time by the Spanish collection). Moreover, similar accounts are found else speaking elites and middle classes was understood by where in the so-called Third World. The historian Luise peasants to have been made from the bodies of other White (1993) has found that they are widespread in peasants. (And here we have a distillation of class and Africa, for example in the image of a fire engine that race in highland Peru; urban elites take the very fat of takes African blood; White argues that these accounts Native Andean peasants to keep their skin moist.) Well, mirror local level labor relations. 7 What is critical here I had to come up with an excuse, no matter how lame, is that even as a "reverse optic" neither the South and said, "Well, I bought it in Bolivia." American nor the African cases concern representa "Oh in that case, its not important." tion; the crisis here is wholesale bodily incorporation. In other words, ifl was applying the fat of Bolivian Three more examples, brief but horrifying, all from Quechuas to my skin rather than of Peruvians, it was recent news reports: International organizations have acceptable. condemned the enslavement of children as laborers in According to the sociologist Henri Favre ( 1987), in surface mining on the Amazonian side of the Andes. the mining areas of Huancavelica, the harvest of human The frontier areas in which surface mining occurs are body fat is even described as an organized extractive virtually unpoliced by the central government. Again in industry, in which the Peruvian government gives out Peru, the sale of children for foreign adoption is re concessions to harvest human fat, always within a well ported, and is significant enough as problem that the regulated harvesting season (Favre 1987). In the South government of Peru is negotiating international agree ern Peruvian zones that border on coca-producing and ments to prevent theft of babies, such as the one con processing areas, the slaughterers are said to take the fat cluded with the government ofltaly in November 1994 to clandestine processing points, sending them off in (International Press Service, 21 November 1994; Scot airplanes in the middle of the night. The fear of slaugh tish Daily Record, I 7 November J994). FinalJy, in mid ters tends to be strongest today in those places where November, Argentinean police closed two firms that there is strongly organized production for export: for employed 200 Peruvian and Bolivian undocumented example, in the Pampa of Anta in Cuzco, where white workers, kept in virtual slavery (El Comercio (Lima), maize is produced for export: in the mining areas of 18 November 1994). I have regaled you with these Ayacucho and Huancavelica; and adjacent to coca horrors not so much to numb you to the issues raised by producing regions. The Couple in the Cage as to suggest that alongside And in Fall 1994, a reporter for the French Press issues of representation--even intertwined with them Agency (Agence France Presse) reported from Pampa are matters of physical survival. Cangallo, the original epicenter of the Peruvian vio *** lence of the 1980s and 1990s, that fear of the Coco Fusco' s parody concentrates on a particular "slaughterer" was once again taking precedence over optic through which the North has imagined the South fear of the army and of guerrillas: at the same time as it systematically looted its resources and people; that the same imagery remains part of the At night he arrives and fattens himself by taking the tacit framework with which the North apprehends the fat of his victims. Human fat is much finer than South today can be seen in the failure of the parody. The animal fat, the peasants assure me, and greatly in audiences/participants/victims (whatever you
124 Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 Visual Anthropology Review want to calJ them-having been influenced by toon, a mass-circulation newspaper-in 1994--reported ethnomethodology, I prefer "victims") took the matter a South American tribe that hid their modem goods and very seriously. Indeed, when The Couple in the Cage trotted out their old stories when the anthropologist played the rotunda ofthe Smithsonian Institution, some arrived. I don't know how it is that the news reporter one called the Humane Society! But in a time in which that "broke" the story was able to get the goods on this issues of "representation and cultural appropriation of deceit, but it was convincing enough for an English the Other" get a disproportionate share of theoretical professor at a prairie state university to repeat it as a attention, it is extremely important to keep a clear pearl of wisdom of post-modem epistemology. this distinction between the aims of cultural appropriation time unwittingly reproducing the response of many of of other people and their physical appropriation. What the spectators to The Couple in the Cage. It is critical is at stake for us specifically is a clear-headed under that we not stumble blindly into the moment's conceit standing of the engagement of anthropology and an of mistaking mass produced imagery for life; images thropologists in both the material and representational are only a part ofthe simulacraand circulate more freely issues surrounding other peoples. in some environments than others. Similarly, at a con Anthropology and anthropologists have played ference that I attended in I 994 an anthropologist (with strongly ambivalent roles--
Visual Anthropology Review Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 125 you represent ethnographically without surrounding de los indios, para sanar cierta enfermedad, que no se your discussion with an invented context, which like haHaba para eJJa medicina sino el unto; a cu ya causa, en the museum exhibit magnifies the singularity of the aquellos tiempos, andaban los indios muy recatados, y contained object? How do you represent without fram se extraiiaban de los espaiioles en tanto grado, que Ia ing-or caging? Jena, yerba, y otras cosas no las querian llevar a casa de As parody, Two undiscovered Amerindians visit ... espaiiol; pordecirno las matasen, allf dentro, para sacar has the linguistic characteristics that ironic discourse el unto." has more generally. In order to make an instance of talk 6 La nuit ii rode et egorge pour recuperer la graisse de (or here, an entire rhetoric) the object of its discourse, ses victimes. De la graisse humaine, plus "fine" que la it uses the same talk (Sperber and Wilson I 98 I; I 986: graisse animale, et, assurent Jes paysans, tres demandee 237-43), thereby conflating use and mention. To put dans Jes pays industrialises: elle entrerait dans la com this in a different way, parody is "double-voiced," position de medicaments, produits cosmetiques, voire containing within it an instance of the very discourse servirait a lubrifier Jes moteurs d'avion. that it is imitating (Bakhtin 1984 [1929]: 193-196). In Les cadavres ? On ne Jes retrouve jamais: decoupes en order to succeed as parody, it must be cut from the same morceaux, pour ne pas perdre une once de graisse, ils cloth as that which it parodies, so that the viewer/ disparaissent. Pas de trace, pas de preuve. participant attends to the discourse being parodied in all 7 I am grateful to Corinne Kratz for referring me to this seriousness. That is also the source of its failure: It can work. Misty Bastien reports similar ideas about theft of always be interpreted monovocally as an instance of the body parts in Nigeria, but these are apparently world very stuff that it parodies. And that is exactly what wide in distribution; there are persistent stories in happened to Central and South America that North Americans kid The Couple in the Cage; many in the audience (or nap children to use their corneas and other body parts "among the victims") discovered the mention side of for transplants at clandestine human chop shops in the perfonnance after the fact-if at all. But that creates northern Mexico. In the early I 980s, there were rumors an immediate danger for those of us who would use it in Lima, Peru of an organ stealing ring that lured as a tool to reach a broader audience-if they don't get teenagers and young adults to parties where they would it, are we not simply reproducing and reinforcing the ingest drugged alcohol and wake up several days later practices that we sought to undennine? Are we simply with a kidney missing. The latter story recently turned preaching to the already converted? Are we reaching up in New York City, and a popular U.S. television out to and educating a broader audience, if they don't series, Law and order based an episode on it. get it?8 8 For a similar reaction, see Pamela Sommers's review NOTES of the perfonnance at the Smithsonian Institution (Wash ington Post, 20 September 1992, p. E3). 1 Thanks to Ruth Behar, Coco Fusco, Susan A. Gelman, Corinne Kratz and to the audience at the panel on Coco REFERENCES Fusco's The Couple In the Cage for valuable discus Ansi6n, Juan [Jean-Marie Ansion) sion. Mary Pratt (I 992) raised my consciousness as to 1984 Demons des Andes, Louvain: Universite what a little accent can do to America. Catholique de Louvain. 2 The title of the performance included the name of the Ansi6n, Juan. ed. place in which it was being performed, as Two Undis 1989. Pishtacos de verdugos a sacaojos~ Lima: Tarea. covered Amerindians Visit Chicago, Two Undiscov Baker, Lee D. eredAmerindians Visit Washington, and so forth. I will I 994 The location of Franz Boas within the African use ellipses for the name of the city. American struggle. Critique of Anthropology I 4: 3 See Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1990: 397-407) for a 199-217 discussion of the exhibition of humans set in the context Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich of ethnographic and folkloric exhibits more generally. 1984 [1929] Problems of Dostoevsky·s poetics, tr. 4 Jonathan Spence (1988) has written about a similar Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Min individual who was taken from China. nesota Press. 5 .. de Espana habfan enviado a este Reino por unto
126 Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 Visual Anthropology Review Benedict, Ruth F Myers, Fred R. 1935 Anthropology and the abnormal. Journal ofGen 1994 Culture-making: Performing aboriginality at the eral Psychology I 0: 59-82. Asia Society gallery. American Ethnologist 21 Bennett, Tony 679-99. 1988 The exhibitionary complex. New Formations 4: Pratt, Mary Louise 73-102. Reprinted in Culture/power/history: a 1992/mperialeyes: Travelwritingandtransculturation. reader in contemporary social theory. Nicholas B. London: Routledge. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, eds. Sapir, Edward Princeton: University Press.123-54 I 924 Culture, genuine and spurious.AmericanJournal Chappaz, Frederic of Sociology 29: 401-29. 19941.e retourde I' ogre blanc. News dispatch,Agence Sapir, Edward and Monis Swadesh France Presse. November 3. 1955 Native accounts of Nootka ethnography. Favre, Henri Bloomington: Indiana University. Research Cen 1987 Unpublished lecture on the Pistaco in ter in Anthropology. Folklore, and Linguistics. Huancavelica, Peru, Annual Meeting of the Latin Sola, Donald F and Antonio Cusihuaman Gutierrez American Indian Literatures Association, Ithaca, I 967 Spoken Cu;:,co Quechua. Ithaca, NY Cornell New York, June. University Quechua Language Materials Project. Fusco, Coco Spence, Jonathan D. 1990 Managing the Other. Lusitania 1(3): 77-83. 1988 The question of Hu. New York: Knopf. Hurston, Zora Neale Sperber, Dan and Dierdre Wilson I 935 Mules and men. Philadelphia: Lippincott. 1981 Irony and the use-mention distinction. In Radical Hyatt, Marshall pragmatics, Peter Cole, ed., New York: Aca 1990 Franz Boas, social activist: the dynamics of demic.295-318. ethnicity. New York: Greenwood. Sperber, Dan and Dierdre Wilson K.irshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 1986 Relevance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1991 Objects of ethnography. In Exhibiting cultures: Stocking, George W the poetics and politics of museum display. Ivan 1968 Race, culture, and evolution: essa.vs in the history Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds. , Washington: of anthropology. New York: Free Press. Smithsonian Institution Press.386-443. Taussig, Michael T Karttunen, Frances E. 1987 Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A 1994 Between worlds: guides. interpreters, and survi Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University vors. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. of Chicago Press. Kurin, Richard Vallee, Lionel and Salvador Palomino Flores 1991 Cultural conservation ... In Exhibiting cultures: 1973 Quelques elements d'ethnographie du '"nakaq" the poetics and politics of museum display. Ivan Bulletin de l'/nstitut Franraisd'Etudes Andines 2: Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds. Washington: 9-19. Smithsonian Institution Press.315-333. White, Luise Liffman, Paul. 1977 Vampires of the Andes. Michigan 1993 Cars out of place: Vampires, technology, and Discussions in Anthropology 2: 205-226. labor in East and Central Africa. Representations Molina. Christobal de (El Cuzquei'io) 43: 27-50. c.1574 Relacion de las fabulas y ritos de Los Yngas ... Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, Manuscript 3169, Bruce Mannheim, Associate Professor of Anthropol ff. 2-36. Edition by Henrique Urbano, in Fabulas y ogy at the University of Michigan. is author of The mitos de Los incas Henrique Urbano and Pierre Language ofthe lnka Since the European Invasion Duviols, eds., ( 1989) ~Madrid: Historia 16. 47-134 (Texas. 1991) and co-editor (with Dennis Tedlock) of Morote Best, Efrain The Dialogic Emergence of Culture (l/linois 1995). 1952 El degollador (Nakaq). Tradici6n I I. 67-91 He is currently writing a book on the historical ethnography of the Andes as seen through Native Andean discourses, A Nation Surrounded.
Visual Anthropology Review Volume 11 Number 1 Spring 1995 127