Constance DuBois. Maria Soledad Apish Trujillo and her children, 1906. Photograph from the Constance DuBois Collection, Museum of Man, San Diego, California. Used by James Luna in Apparitions, Emendatio, 2005. Installation detail. Venice, Italy. 52 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 Ambivalent Entertainments: James Luna, Performance, and the Archive JANE BLOCKER For years I have pursued the search for a mortuary olla among the Diegueño Indians of Southern California, and, like a will-o’-the- wisp, it has allured only to escape me. The Indians all knew of these burial jars, and the whereabouts of some were known to the initiated; but to meddle with them was sacrilege. An educated Indian girl . wept when it was suggested that her grandfather should secure one for my benefit. It was represented to her that it was to be used for the benefit of science and not to satisfy an idle curiosity; that those thus buried were so long forgotten that it was not like disturbing the remembered dead. 1 In the first decade of the twentieth century, ethnographer Constance Goddard DuBois spent a great deal of time trying to dig up the bones of Diegueño and Luiseño Indians in the hills near San Diego. Despite the sacrilege of her efforts, she considered this an important scientific pursuit, one from which she could not be dissuaded by sentimental tears. Hers was a search for bones and artifacts, specifically those of the forgotten dead. In 1907, when she finally succeeded in unearthing two mortuary jars, she described the contents of one of them for the readers of American Anthropologist: Mingled with the earth which had fallen into it were many fragments of bone of comparatively large size, as large as could be made to pass through the mouth of the jar. These included fragments of a skull; a piece of the jaw-bone with one tooth still in place; many smaller bits of bone; fragments of charcoal; a perfect arrowhead showing evidence of having been in the fire. 2 Ultimately this physical evidence, which she had sought for years and for which she was willing to trespass the desires of the peoples to whom it belonged, yielded rather paltry conclusions and an article of only about a thousand words. Simply put, these jars proved to DuBois that, despite the Catholic Church’s prohi - bitions on cremation, the Diegueños buried the ashes of their Grey Room 37, Fall 2009, pp. 52–77. © 2009 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 53 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 dead in jars whereas the Luiseño did not. This was by no means noteworthy, because, as her account makes clear, her native infor - mants had already told her as much. Indeed one might claim that DuBois, to the degree that she describes her own longing—the years-long pursuit, the allure of buried artifacts—suffered from what Derrida describes as “archive fever,” the symptoms of which include having “a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a home - sickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.” 3 DuBois’s fever leads her to engage in a convoluted logic by which she first rejects the testimony of the living in order to pur - sue the dead. Once among the dead, she laments the loss of them as living. Thus she fully situates herself in the logic of the archive, which, as Rebecca Schneider explains, is a “trace-logic emphasizing loss—a loss the archive can regulate, maintain and institutionalize—forgetting that it is a loss the archive pro - duces. ”4 Notwithstanding the protests of her native informants, DuBois produces these bones as loss, as forgotten, declaring that it is not as if she were disturbing the “remembered dead.” Moreover, her claims produce the native peoples whom she studies as lost, as both forgetful of their own history and as on the verge of being forgotten. The very purpose of her salvage ethnography is to pre - serve the natives’ past because she assumes that the natives and their culture are in the process of disappearance. Her approach confirms Schneider’s assertion that “In the archive, flesh is given to be that which slips away. Flesh can house no memory of bone. Only bone speaks memory of flesh.” 5 Dismissing the memories of living natives, DuBois searched instead for bones that could tell her the truth about the past, bones that housed memories to which she as a scientist had unique access—as though she imag - ined that the jawbone she pulled from the clay urn could still speak, could still whisper the secrets that her flesh-and-blood informants could not. The dichotomy between flesh and bone upon which DuBois’s method relies is the topic of much recent debate in performance studies, which has attempted to understand the relation between history and the body, between the archive and performance. Schneider’s essay, for example, is written in direct response to the claim, first made by Peggy Phelan but subsequently repeated by many others (including myself) that performance is given to disappearance, that it eludes the archive and does not fit with its logics. 6 Although their respective claims yield somewhat different results, both Schneider and Phelan suggest that performance and the body constitute unique epistemologies that might be radically or generatively deployed against hegemonic ways of knowing. 7 In part, this essay is an attempt to work through these debates once 54 Grey Room 37 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 again, but within the specific context of native history and per - formance; it is also an attempt to think about embodied ways of knowing in relation to globalization, which is an important mechanism for the viral dissemination of this dichotomous logic. In this context, the story of Constance Goddard DuBois serves as an example of precisely where and how the archive, the body, globalization, and epistemology intersect. DuBois’s method is a persistent aftereffect of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonization and the dissemination of Western philosophy, which, as Walter Mignolo has argued, had a central role in drafting “a global design.” 8 Globalization, Mignolo sug - gests, is as much an effect of epistemology as it is of commerce, religious indoctrination, or physical violence. Key to the hege - monic European episteme is the supreme value given to alpha - betic systems and thus to denotation (wherein one thing, one sign, reliably and perpetually stands for another) and the rejec - tion of embodied forms of knowing. He describes a tension “between hegemonic epistemology with emphasis on denotation and truth, and subaltern epistemologies with emphasis on per - formance and transformation.” 9 DuBois’s belief in scientific truth, in the importance of written histories and their logic of denota - tion, secures her power to look for bones rather than flesh, to dig up a stable paleontological record while questioning the testi - mony of those whose liveness meant a suspicious potential for transformation. Long before Luiseño artist James Luna was born, his family was entangled with globalization and its hegemonic epistemes, ensnared by its archives, museums, ethnography, and photographs— tools that are commonly used, despite DuBois’s claims to the con - trary, to disturb the remembered as well as the forgotten dead. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his people had been the object of scientific scrutiny and repeatedly had their pictures taken and ancestors dug up by amateur ethnographers such as DuBois and Edward H. Davis, a field collector for the Museum of the American Indian in New York (now part of the Smithsonian Institution). One day in 1906 Luna’s great-grandmother, Maria Soledad Apish Trujillo, posed for DuBois. The photograph shows Trujillo seated with her barefoot daughter in her lap, the little girl’s small bare legs casting bent shadows on her mother’s floor- length apron. Luna’s great-grandmother, wearing a cotton print dress, looks off to her left while her daughter looks directly at the camera. Despite the familiarity of the image, the ways in which it could be at home in any family photo album, it is a “scientific” photograph taken by DuBois just prior to the publication of her study “The Religion of the Luiseño Indians of Southern California” (1908). Indeed, this photograph does not belong to Luna. In order to look at it, he must go to the Museum of Man in San Diego, Blocker | Ambivalent Entertainments: James Luna, Performance, and the Archive 55 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.37.52 by guest on 02 October 2021 where it is catalogued and archived. The Museum of Man was the site of Luna’s first staged insub - ordinate critique of archival logic, a subaltern epistemology. In his most famous performance work Artifact Piece (1987), Luna lay in a museum display case, wearing only a breechcloth, next to a vitrine filled with his “native artifacts,” such as his college diploma, a picture of Jimi Hendrix, divorce papers, and ceremo - nial rattles. This living diorama was complete with didactic labels that identified the source of various scars on Luna’s body as if he were himself a cultural artifact made available to scien - tific scrutiny. In Artifact Piece, Luna seemingly gave flesh to and reanimated the ancient remains that Constance DuBois had fer - vently sought, so as to perform the contiguity between the living and the scores of dead to which the museum makes claim through its collections of their carefully catalogued relics.