Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government
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Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822373605 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/06/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Fiona Cameron is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.
Nélia Dias is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology (ISCTE-IUL and CRIA).
Ben Dibley is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University.
Rodney Harrison is Professor of Heritage Studies at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.
Ira Jacknis is Research Anthropologist at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley.
Conal McCarthy is Director of the Museum & Heritage Studies program at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Read an Excerpt
Collecting, Ordering, Governing
Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government
By Tony Bennett, Fiona Cameron, Nélia Dias, Ben Dibley, Rodney Harrison, Ira Jacknis, Conal McCarthy
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2017 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7360-5
CHAPTER 1
COLLECTING, ORDERING, GOVERNING
We begin with four museum displays that exemplify the connections we want to explore between how the processes of collecting in "the field" were organized, how the texts and materials brought back from such sites of collection were ordered at the centers of calculation where they were gathered together, and how these collecting and ordering practices were shaped by, and helped to shape, practices of governing. Two of the displays belong to the early years of the period covered by our study: Baldwin Spencer's conjectural series connecting the evolution of the Australian Aboriginal throwing stick to that of the boomerang, displayed at the National Museum of Victoria (NMV) in 1901, and the life group that Franz Boas arranged for the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in 1896. And two belong to the later years of the period: the Maori Ethnology Gallery in 1936 at Wellington's Dominion Museum (DM) and the introductory display in the Senegal section of the Sub-Saharan Africa Hall at the Musée de l'Homme (MH), which opened in 1938. There are relations of historical affiliation between these displays. The arrangements at the DMdrew on the principles of typological exhibitions, which also informed Spencer's display, whereas the vitrine at the MH rejected these principles in favor of a more holistic approach to the exhibition of ways of life that testifies to Boas's influence on Paul Rivet, the director of the MH. It is, however, the qualities that distinguish these displays from one another, and the different relations of collecting, ordering, and governing that inform them, that are our focus here.
ARRESTED HISTORIES
Spencer's fidelity to the principles of typological displays thus matters less than how he adapted these to the particular circumstances of early twentieth-century Australia. Spencer had worked with both Henry Balfour and Edward Burnett Tylor in arranging the Pitt-Rivers collection in accordance with typological principles on its removal to the University Museum at Oxford (Petch 2009). These characteristically resulted in long evolutionary sequences in which each object, abstracted from its originating milieu, represented a stage in a universal sequence of development leading from the simple and primitive to the developed and complex. Such displays, in A. H. L. F. Pitt Rivers's interpretation, were driven by an aspiration toward completeness: each stage of evolutionary advancement would ideally be represented by an appropriate object so that the story of evolution might be told as one of smooth and unidirectional advancement, uninterrupted by any reversals or gaps suggesting a leap from one stage to the next. Pitt Rivers's exhibition of weaponry was a case in point, telling a story of (in principle) uninterrupted evolution from the Aboriginal throwing stick to the medieval musket (Pitt Rivers 1891).
Spencer followed these principles inasmuch as his conjectural evolutionary series leading from the throwing stick to the boomerang, and thence to the Aboriginal sword, depended on the specimens selected for this purpose being brought together from varied locations as part of a pan-tribal Aboriginal developmental sequence (figure 1.1). This was, however, a self-enclosed evolutionary series that had already come to an end. In writing to Tylor, Spencer described it as a "record of the Aborigine," of a history that was past. While occasionally conceding that Aboriginal culture had shown signs of autonomous development in the past, Spencer argued that it had altogether lost its momentum in the present (Bennett 2011). Spencer's (1901) introduction to the guide to the NMV's ethnographic collections interpreted these as relics of "the most primitive of existing races" (7), representative of "palæolithic man" (10) and testifying to a series of nondevelopments (no cultivation of the land, no domestic animals, no writing) that, attributed to the isolation of Indigenous Australians from the flows of competition and their subjection to the tyranny of custom, added up to a frozen history.
Frozen and done with. This was not a history that in any way connected with or fed into Australia's fledging national culture. On the colonial frontier, as opposed to the armchair distance of Oxford, the maintenance of a gap between the settler and indigenous populations had become increasingly important. For a good part of the nineteenth century this gap had been viewed as potentially bridgeable via civilizational programs designed to carry Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples across it. By 1901, however, it had come to be viewed as an unbridgeable chasm, one that was increasingly racialized. While Spencer recognized linguistic, cultural, political, and physiognomic distinctions between different tribes, he minimized the significance of these compared with the consequences of a shared bloodline that separated Indigenous Australians and settlers along racial lines. Faced with competition from a superior race, the Aboriginal race was destined to die out although individual Aboriginal people, through managed miscegenation and generations of progressive whitening, might serve as switch points, initiating a lineage that would eventually lead to the acquisition of Australianness (see McGregor 1997).
* * *
The exhibition constructs a hypothetical sequence for the development of the Aboriginal throwing stick into the boomerang as (moving from the right), a rough crooked stick becomes straightened, then rounded, and then curved, eventually acquiring a handle, which serves as a point of connection to the two double-handed swords running across the top of the exhibit. Some of the items had been collected by Spencer during his first extended visit to Central Australia in 1896 to work with Frank Gillen among the Arrernte, but these were exhibited alongside items gathered by other means from other sites of collection in Western Australia, Queensland, and Northern Australia. The exhibition formed part of a special gallery devoted to the exhibition of Aboriginal weapons, implements, and ceremonial objects. Each of the displays of weaponry — of clubs, shields, and spear throwers — was governed by a similar logic. Writing to Tylor on September 5, 1900, Spencer informed him that the exhibition was conceived as "a kind of record of the Aborigines which the ordinary public can understand and take an interest in" (Tylor Papers, Box 13a, Spencer S16, Pitt Rivers Museum).
* * *
Spencer had been appointed honorary director of the NMV in 1899, and his arrangement of its ethnographic collections in 1901 coincided with the Act of Federation. In preparing the way for the hitherto independent colonies to become part of a political federation, this act constituted the first step in establishing a "national governmental domain" (Rowse 1992) that was also defined in racial terms. The Constitution reflected this by excluding Indigenous Australians from the census that was established for "reckoning the numbers of the people" of both the Commonwealth and state levels of government, and from the provision that empowered the Commonwealth to "make special laws" for "the people of any race" (cit. McGregor 2011: xviii). While these two exclusions are seemingly contradictory, Russell McGregor articulates the logic underlying them: "active measures had to be taken to safeguard white Australia against colored aliens, but not against colored indigenes, since they were expiring independently of government action or inaction" (2011: xxi). Destined for extinction, Aboriginal people no more needed to be counted than white Australia needed special laws to protect against them. They were already sequestered by a racial dynamic that needed just an administrative tweak here and there to expedite their passage into history. Spencer's display was thus emblematic of a political logic in which earlier secular and missionary civilizational strategies aimed at lifting Indigenous Australians were being progressively displaced by state-directed programs aimed at eliminating Aborigines as a race. While "full bloods" were to be assigned to reserves for such time as they continued to exist, different possibilities were opened up for half-castes in a conception of assimilation that sought to transform the racial constitution of the Aboriginal population through programs of selective breeding aimed at the progressive dilution of Aboriginal bloodlines, thereby "breeding out the color."
LIFELESS GROUPS
Boas's life group at the AMNH (figure 1.2), first exhibited in 1896, reflected a different set of relations between the processes of collecting, ordering, and governing. A critic of both the general premises of evolutionary theory and — with some qualifications — biological conceptions of race, Boas had already challenged the conceptual basis of evolutionary museum displays in his telling criticisms of Otis T. Mason's exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington (Boas 1887a, 1887b). Rather than excerpting artifacts from their place within a particular society to represent stages in universal sequences of evolutionary development, Boas insisted that such materials derived their meaning only from their relations to one another within a particular way of life or culture. By no means his invention, the life group drew on, and mixed, the conventions of natural history habitat displays, the illusionistic techniques of dioramas and panoramas, the earlier tradition of mannequins produced for Scandinavian folk museums, the mise-en-scène of theatrical tableaux, and the emerging properties of the cinema screen (A. Griffiths 2002: chap. 1). It assembled the materials collected during fieldwork to exhibit them as interacting components of a particular cultural whole whose constituent elements derived their meaning only from their relations to one another and the uses to which they were put within a way of life that was historically, rather than essentially, connected to a particular locality. Although the AMNH's Hall of Northwest Coast Indians brought together collections that had been acquired earlier through purchases or expeditions, by far the greater part of its exhibits were collected by Boas in the course of the museum's Jesup North Pacific Expedition. The items displayed in the cedar-fabrication life group — which occupied the center of the hall — derived mainly from his fieldwork among the Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw).
The procedures regulating the movement of collections from field to museum were distinctive in other ways. The preparation of life groups often involved an artist accompanying the anthropologist into the field, selecting a spot based on its scenic or aesthetic qualities as well as its scientific value, photographing the "natural" setting to provide a backdrop for the immediate scene, constructing a miniature model of the scene while in the field, and taking life casts of the faces and, occasionally, the bodies of the Native Americans selected as models for the mannequins (A. Griffiths 2002: 19–20). Boas frequently modeled the poses he wanted to be reproduced by the plaster cast makers; he also corresponded with local theatrical agencies for samples of Indian wigs to experiment with before ordering the ones that produced the effect he wanted. However, the verisimilitude this produced went hand in hand with the dehistoricization of the subject: the effect of the Boasian mannequin, Bill Brown has argued, was that "of an uncannily lifelike body in motion but out of time" (2003: 95). The figures in Boas's life groups are absorbed in their work and among themselves, composing a scene that is distanced from the present: lifelike but no longer living.
* * *
Cedar bark being shredded and hung to dry, the implements needed for the shredding operation, the repair of fishing nets, salmon baskets in the background, a young child in a hanging cradle with cedar-bark bedding, the weave on the women's blankets, decorative ankle bracelets, the gendered division of labor between the woman shredding the cedar bark and the man beating it, the placing of the child next to the women and at some distance from the man: in these ways the relations between the artifacts and the mannequins integrate the former into specific uses that evoke a particular way of life with its distinctive internal divisions, patterns, and forms of adaptation to a natural environment.
* * *
In spite of their differences, both Spencer's evolutionary displays and Boas's life groups dehistoricized indigenous peoples. It was widely believed in early twentieth-century America that Native Americans were destined either to disappear, withering on the vine of history in special reservations, or to merge with the rest of the population through miscegenation (Baker 2010; Conn 2004). Boas shared this view. The arrival of new cohorts of immigrants from southern Europe and Asia pressed on questions of whiteness differently, presenting a challenge to America's Nordic white nativism that elicited a succession of eugenic strategies for differentiating America's earlier and later immigrant populations along racial lines. The AMNH would later, under Henry Fairfield Osborn, play a key role in the development of eugenicist policies. While this postdated Boas's departure from the museum in 1905, its anthropology department, under Clark Wissler (Boas's successor and also a former student of his), continued to collect Native American materials and to exhibit these in ways that stressed their differences from one another in terms of the configurations of the relations between the elements making up their ways of life or cultures. This conception of cultures as plural that Boas, drawing on his German training, brought to the American anthropological scene was to become the defining concept of American anthropology through the developments and transformations to which it was subjected in the work of Wissler and a whole generation of Boas's students. Yet this was a paradoxical history. For while the culture concept was developed on the basis of fieldwork studies of Native American cultures on the Northwest Coast, in the Plains, and in the Southwest, it functioned as the key operator in an "anthropology at home and away" project that found its main sphere of governmental application in the northeastern states, where it was invoked to manage the process of assimilating new generations of migrants to the white nativist culture established by earlier generations of predominantly northern European settlers. It was a paradoxical history, too, in that the intersection between this culture concept and the continuing influence of a residual set of biological race categories operated to exclude both Native Americans and African Americans from the machineries of assimilation that the culture concept helped to establish.
ENVIRONMENTAL OBJECTS
This bears on our third display: the vitrine introducing the Sub-Saharan Africa Hall at the MH. Melville Herskovits, one of Boas's students, suggested that Boas's principles of museum exhibition had been "refined and extended — but not superseded — ... by Rivet and his associates at the Musée de l'homme" (1953: 21). Paul Rivet, the director of the MH, also acknowledged his indebtedness to Boas. "Franz Boas was a master," he wrote. "Thanks to him I was able to imagine what a real Museum of Mankind should be, that is, a panoramic museum where the visitor would find the full portrait of races, civilizations and languages in the world" (quoted in Conklin 2008: 250). Yet it is the differences between Boas's life groups and the MH's ethnographic vitrines that most stand out. These partly reflect the relations among museum, field, and exhibition gallery that were developed at the MHto secure a particular set of capacities for its anthropological objects as distinctive objects of knowledge and public pedagogy. Their scientific validation via a number of procedures — the program of instructions issued to the museum's missions (Instructions 1931) and the multiperspectival techniques of fieldwork observation developed by Marcel Griaule (1933), for example — distinguished those objects from both curiosities and aesthetic collections of fine-arts objects by investing them with the distinctive epistemological value of the document. This imbued them with a distinctive moral force and authority derived from what Christine Laurière calls an "environmentalist conception of the object" (2008: 416), in which the object testifies both to the force of the environmental factors that shaped it and to the creativity of human practice. When translated into the somewhat austere principles of the MH's muséographie claire, this conferred on its anthropological objects a distinctive pedagogic quality that aimed to foster respect for other cultures as evidencing a shared human capacity for creativity. At the same time, such cultures came into view as forms of life that could be changed by reshaping their conditioning environments.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Collecting, Ordering, Governing by Tony Bennett, Fiona Cameron, Nélia Dias, Ben Dibley, Rodney Harrison, Ira Jacknis, Conal McCarthy. Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Illustrations viiAcronyms and Abbreviations xiii
Note on the Text xv
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
1. Collecting, Ordering, Governning 9
2. Curatorial Logics and Colonial Rule: The Political Rationalities of Anthropology in Two Australian-Administered Territories 51
3. A Liberal Archive of Everyday Life: Mass-Observation as Oligopticon 89
4. Boas and After: Museum Anthropology and the Governance of Difference in America 131
5. Producing "The Maori as He Was": New Zealand Museums, Anthropological Governance, and Indigenous Agency 175
6. Ethnology, Governance, and Greater France 217
Conclusion 255
Notes 273
References 291
Contributors 325
Index 327
What People are Saying About This
"Tacking between colonial peripheries and imperial centers, across oceans and continents, Collecting, Ordering, Governing delivers what its title promises and much more. A magisterial work of breathtaking theoretical richness, this book advances our understanding of the relationship of disciplinary subjects to the disciplining of subjects—and their efforts of self-determination—through material practices of collection, ordering, and display."
"Collecting, Ordering, Governing is a book that demands, instantiates, and rewards a sustained rethinking of the history of anthropology, collecting, museums, and liberal governance. Not only is its multiple authorship an innovation, but the book and its combinations push the reader to think in new, sometimes uncomfortable ways. Once-familiar stories and histories—reconsidered, recombined, and reconceptualized in the light of more recent ideas of liberal governmentality—show the contradictions and loose ends in anthropology’s efforts to provide knowledge that might improve, emancipate, or protect those it studies."