Ontologies of the Image and Economies of Exchange
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FRED MYERS New York University Ontologies of the image and economies of exchange Once the inevitabilities are challenged, we begin gathering our resources ABSTRACT for a journey of hope. In the early 1970s, the Aboriginal artist and activist Wandjuk Marika asked the Australian —Raymond Williams (1983:268) government to investigate the unauthorized use of Ownership gathers things momentarily to a point by locating them in the Yolngu clan designs on a variety of commodity owner, halting endless dissemination, effecting an identity. forms, inaugurating a process of recognizing Indigenous ownership of ‘‘copyright’’ in such —Marilyn Strathern (1999:177) designs. This treatment of design—and of n the early 1970s, the Aboriginal artist and activist Wandjuk Marika culture—as a form of property involves asked the Australian government to investigate the unauthorized use understandings and practices of materiality and of Yolngu clan designs on a variety of commodity forms, inaugurat- subjectivity that differ from those informing ing a process of recognizing Indigenous ‘‘copyright’’ for such indigenous, Aboriginal relationships to cultural designs. Copyright, famously, is known to involve a particular production and circulation. In this essay I explore Iformulation of materiality, distinguishing idea from concrete expression, the significance for material culture theory of with only the latter being subject to ownership rights as a form of property. recent work on and events in the development of However sympathetic to the concerns of Indigenous Australians over notions of cultural property. One of my main controlling their culture, this treatment of design—and of culture—as a concerns is the relevance of local understandings form of property involves understandings and practices of materiality and of objectification, or objectness, and human subjectivity that are different from those underlying indigenous, Aboriginal action—as embedded in object-ideologies. I relationships to cultural production and circulation. In exploring the discuss the limited capacity of legal discourses of significance for material culture theory of recent work on and events in cultural property to capture and reflect the the development of notions of cultural property, one of my main concerns concerns of Indigenous Australians about their own in this essay is the relevance of local understandings of objectification, or relation to culture, to creativity, and to expression. objectness, and human action—as embedded in object-ideologies. I discuss [art, copyright, materiality, Indigenous Australia] the insufficiency of legal discourses of cultural property to capture and reflect Indigenous Australian concerns about their relation to culture, to creativity, and to expression. The central thesis of this essay is that materiality—as a theory of quality of objectness—is not so much an issue of matter but, rather, is constituted through ideological frameworks. Thus, the formulation of materiality (or materialities) is varied and often conflicting around different understand- ings of subjects and objects. Nowhere is this more apparent—or palpable— than in situations in which human beings attempt to secure or stabilize—or American Ethnologist, Vol. 31, Issue 1, pp. 1 – 16, ISSN 0094-0496. n 2004 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. American Ethnologist n Volume 31 Number 1 February 2004 limit—the flow of culture, to turn culture into property to their culture within the Australian nation. It was never form. Rather than proposing a theory of materiality, then, I imagined, even by sympathizers to Aboriginal cultural life, am interested here in pursuing through ethnographic that Aboriginal image-making could be a contemporary consideration the trajectory of local theories of materiality fine art, and scholars have much to learn from indigenous as Indigenous Australian paintings and designs move understandings of this outcome. through the Western art-culture system and the Western My focus in this essay roughly coincides with problems concept of property and as different object-ideologies in what is often called ‘‘cultural property,’’ an important meet. My interest in this problem derives from ethnogra- conceptual framework that has been put forward as a basis phy that indicates Aboriginal concerns over the control of for claiming protection of indigenous and minority groups socially valued knowledge and its dispersal—through prac- against cultural appropriation. The fundamental claim tices of secrecy, exchange, invisibility, and immateriality. derives from the assertion that art (or culture) is ‘‘‘essential These practices clearly depended on the materialities of to’ or ‘constitutive of’ or ‘expressive of’ the identity of the producing and circulating knowledge through voice, ritual, group’’ (Coleman in press:1). Frequently, claims for such and object-presentation and equally certainly did not protection have been articulated by extending the regimes anticipate the materiality of mechanical and digital repro- of copyright and intellectual property law, but these legal duction. Ultimately, I see this study as one consideration forms raise many difficulties in the way they formulate of what happens when ‘‘culture’’ takes on new and varied intercultural activity (see Coleman in press). Working in the forms of materiality. context of Aboriginal life in central Australia, I have by Ethnography abounds in the unexpected: in ironies, necessity struggled doubly against the weight of Euro- complicities, and incompleteness of action—the stuff of American understandings of property and things—doubly, social life. Ethnography does not accept the certainties of because these understandings are my own and they are also cultural constructs, like ‘‘property,’’ that are built on an those against which Aboriginal people themselves struggle. understanding of the radical difference between subjects Indeed, Aboriginals’ understanding of property is a subject and objects—on work that Bruno Latour (1993) would call I first began to imagine when I wrote about motorcars as ‘‘purification.’’1 My own project over the last several years vehicles of shared identity and about ‘‘ownership’’ of any has been to take account of Aboriginal Australian cultural sort as a manner of objectifying such identities in Pintupi action and creativity in the arts by following the life of communities in Australia’s Western Desert (Myers 1988). I objects and the worlds, institutions, and people those had begun to recognize what Nicholas Thomas (1991) later objects bring together (or mediate).2 This ethnography described as the promiscuity of objects, and the potential has been a response to the Primitivism debates (Clifford that things have for endless dissemination, pointed out by 1988; Manning 1985; Price 1989; Rubin 1984) that domi- Marilyn Strathern (1999:177). I subsequently have come to nated the framing of Indigenous art’s circulation and that see the way in which relationships to objects can organize ignored culturally meaningful action on the Other side of boundaries (Spyer 1998). the West—rest divide. I have been concerned with tracing the unintended developments of Indigenous Australian Categories and boundaries art as a form of intercultural production caught up in complex networks and institutions of collaboration. Let me start with an illuminating story about these matters. This is not merely a theoretical project. Humankind is At a small conference on Native American art history surely living in a discouraging moment, but probably no held a few years ago, the Haida art historian Marcia more so than that facing Aboriginal people in central Crosby confronted—perhaps confounded—the non-Native Australia in 1971, when acrylic painting began as a form people with a question. ‘‘We want to know,’’ she said, ‘‘who of cultural production in the government settlement of you are. Why do you want to study us? We don’t know Papunya. In the midst of a radical regime of cultural you.’’ At least one of the senior non-Native participants assimilation, with its apparently implacable hostility to misread the implications of her words, defensively per- indigenous culture, Aboriginal painters found a sympa- ceiving them to be an exercise in boundary maintenance thetic supporter in Geoffrey Bardon, a schoolteacher with or essentialism. He denounced the perceived challenge in art training (see Bardon 1979, 1991). Bardon helped cata- liberal terms—as ghettoizing people and potentially le- lyze the Western Desert painting movement that eventu- gitimizing the converse claims of White Rights and white ally placed its work in the most prestigious art galleries and exclusivism, which he deplored: ‘‘If Native people want venues in Australia and elsewhere (Myers 2002). Although I to close themselves off and say only Native people can draw attention to the unsettled nature of appropriation learn their traditions, what would be wrong with whites and translation here, this emphasis should be understood claiming similarly [as they had recently in Berkeley, in relationship to the unprecedented recognition and where such a rhetorical claim had been put forth by visibility painting has brought to Aboriginal people and advocates of White Rights]?’’ ‘‘Why do you want to take 2 Ontologies of the image and economies of exchange n American Ethnologist