- Ah, that's very good.
Thank you, very much indeed.
First of all, I'd like to acknowledge
the fact that we're on the lands
of the Cheyenne, Arapahoe,
Paiute, and Kiowa.
I'd like to welcome
everybody to this session,
Entangled Difference, Art,
Anthropology, and Museums.
It's been convened by
Fred Myers and myself,
with Aaron Glass, who
is going to be taking on
the onerous role of chairing and keeping
everybody under control and at time.
I'm just going to say so few words
that it could almost have
been condensed to a haiku,
because I don't want to
take very much time up.
But art is a means of
making the strange familiar,
it is often said.
But often, it can be a mask
that obscures difference,
making the strange
unfamiliar to the artists
who produce the works, themselves.
Anthropology has to mediate
these contradictions.
- Thank you, Howard.
Good evening, Denver, Denver, Denver...
(audience laughs)
I would like to bring
up our first speaker,
Paolo Fortis, from Durham University.
- Okay.
Well, first of all, I'd like to thank
Howard and Fred and Aaron
for the invitation to
participate in this panel.
I've never done anything
in such a big room,
so, bear with me, please.
And, I need to thank another person,
particularly for this paper,
somebody who four years ago,
wrote 10 pages of comments
on a much earlier version of this paper
and I believe he would write 10 more pages
after this version if we had the chance.
So, this paper I dedicated
to a great scholar,
jolly and very genial
fellow, Steve Rubenstein.
In this paper, I explore the relationship
between visual arts, forms of sociality
and notions of power in
an Amerindian lived world.
By focusing on an instance of
cross-cultural appropriation
of images of military power,
I focus on the making of specific objects
and powerful non-human subjects.
As well as the political
implications of such processes
in specific socio-historical
circumstances.
I considered the case of Kuna people
from the San Blas Archipelago of Panama.
Who, in the 1940s, carved
wooden ritual figures
in the likeness
of the North American
General Douglas MacArthur
and used them in
collective healing rituals
on a number of occasions.
The two known Kuna figures of MacArthur
are kept in museums in the United States.
One is at the American
Museum of Natural History,
in New York,
the other at the Denison
Museum in Granville, Ohio.
The first one was
collected by Leon Desmit,
a North American resident
in the Canal zone of Panama,
who visited the San
Blas Archipelago twice,
in the mid 1940s.
The second statue of the general
was collected by another North American,
Louis Agnew who traveled
along the San Blas Archipelago
a few years later.
Asking why the Kuna
people carved the figures
of MacArthur in the middle
of the 20th century,
I deal with the problem
of how historical events
of cultural encounter,
clash and domination
are registered in indigenous lived worlds
in aesthetics and ritual forms that escape
traditional historical analysis.
The following questions arise
when we try to deal with
these kind of problems,
ethnographically.
What is at stake, from the
indigenous perspective,
when we focus on visual forms
of cross-cultural appropriation?
What lies beyond obvious
references to symbols
of colonial or military
power and domination?
Here, I'm concerned with the
social intentions and agency
behind the making of objects
in a context of
cross-cultural interactions.
White people represent,
perhaps, the best example
of ontologically different
beings of others for Kuna people.
And yet, they initiate positive qualities
of Kuna social life and
political philosophy.
You know that to tackle this problem
I will resort to a fairly
neglected concept in anthropology,
the concept of style.
My aim is to discuss
the distinctive features
of Kuna visual style and
show that such features
resonate with wider issues
concerning modes of sociality.
In what follows I suggest
that the representation of
white people in Kuna artifacts
is an example of the
historical transformations
of Kuna style in visual
arts and social life.
Central to Kuna healing rituals
are some wooden anthropomorphic carvings
called Nudsugana in Kuna language.
These figures are the auxiliary
space of ritual specialists
and are found in almost all Kuna houses,
where they are kept as protector spirits.
What is striking is,
that often, these figures
have the appearance of white people.
Despite the number of studies
that have touched on
this interesting problem
including Carlos Sevedi
and Michial Towsig,
one question remains largely unanswered.
What meanings have white people
come to acquire for Kuna people.
To address this question we
should start by considering
two issues of recent Kuna history.
First, the role of North
Americans based in Panama
who have been instrumental in Kuna people
seeing their rights recognized
by the Panamanian state,
after their revolt in 1925.
The mediation of North Americans
helped to obtain recognition
of the Kuna territory
as a reserve in 1938.
Second, in 1930, the
Kuna leader Nele Kantule,
and the head of the North
American Army in the Canal Zone
signed a treaty establishing
that Kuna people
would be hired as civil workers
in the military bases of the canal.
From then on, Kuna men
worked in the U.S. forts
along the canal, mostly as
cooks and cleaners until 1999.
Through this long-term relationship
generations of Kuna people
became acquainted with
U.S. military forces.
Kuna workers were lodged in the barracks
and during their free-time
joined the soldiers
in playing basketball or baseball,
drinking beer in the canteens
or other leisurely activities.
After the outbreak of WWII, the U.S. Army
began to build patrol
bases and landing strips
along the San Blas coast.
One of these bases was built
near the Island of Ailigandi,
which was visited by the Desmit,
the person who collected
the first MacArthur statue.
As the people of Ailigandi still remember
there were bulldozers and
trucks working on the coast
to clear the land.
Once that was finished,
Kuna men worked as cooks,
while women washed the soldiers uniforms.
Another base was built near
Ogobsuggum, another village,
further down the coast near Columbia.
As a man told me there, still remembered
the aircraft flying,
daily, above the village.
Differently, from their direct
knowledge of U.S. soldiers
over a long period of time,
it is unlikely that any Kuna
ever met General MacArthur in person.
The knowledge of him
was likely based on what
the soldiers told them.
But, what specifically led Kuna people
to take an interest in MacArthur?
This might explain that
people in Ailigandí
decided that an outbreak of fever
that was then spreading in the village,
had been caused by the felling of trees
and the moving of rocks by the military
who were constructing the
airfield on the mainland coast.
To chase the spirits
that caused the epidemic
back in their invisible villages
a collective ritual was celebrated.
On occasion of such rituals,
large balsa wood figures are carved,
like the MacArthur figure.
As I was told they form an
army led by the master singer.
In describing such ritual
Kuna people make explicit
use of military metaphors.
The souls of Nudsugana,
the wooden figures,
wore a khaki uniform.
The singer orders the troops to line up
and prepare for attack.
He tells them to tie a net
between the branches of the trees
to entrap the enemies.
Some Nudsugana produce a toxic gas
when they lift their hat,
making the enemies faint.
I wish to suggest that the
Kuna figures of MacArthur
pose an interesting problem
with respect to style.
Namely, different from
the smaller wood carvings
used in daily life, they
refer to a specific person.
To my knowledge a general
feature of Kuna wood carvings
is that they are generic features
and do not refer or, even less, represent
any individual living being.
Whereas, the smaller figurines
are considered as multiple,
larger ritual balsa wood
figures, such as MacArthur's,
are treated as individuals.
As I've argued elsewhere,
the external genetic figure of Nudsugana
reflects in this fear of visual art
the principle of the continuity of souls
against the discontinuity of qualities
common to many Amerindian societies.
Moreover, while living human beings
are the outcome of a proper combination
of identity and alterity,
Nudsugana, because their lack
of a body are purely alters,
hence, they are destined
to be ever different
from their soul images,
different from themselves.
This has led me to describe
the nature of Kuna cult figures
as the outcome of an act of proliferation,
rather than one of representation.
Nudsugana disembodied figures
ever different from
their material prototype,
but, they are virtually
infinite in their numbers.
Their incomplete instantiation
is counterbalanced by their multiplicity.
The MacArthur figures seem, therefore,
to challenge the avoidance
of representation
by aiming to look like a specific person,
that's pushing the limits
of Kuna aesthetics.
I suggest that both the
avoidance of representation,
the ephemeral life of Kuna wood carvings
are positively related
to the ongoing avoidance
of the centralization of
power in Kuna social life.
Discussing the picture
of a MacArthur statue
with Rotalio Perez, a Kuna
man living in Ogobsuggum,
he stressed that the figure
was clearly a soldier
because it was made wearing a uniform.
The discussion turned swiftly
to the topic of clothing.
I asked Rotalio the reason
why all Kuna elder men
dress in a similar fashion?
Rotalio gave me the following explanation,
"Now you see parents and
children eat each food
"with a different taste, nowadays,
"this is because they don't eat together."
This is Rotalio speaking,
"Everyone decides how much salt and chili
"to put on their plate,
depending on their taste.
"Elder people in the past,
used to wear headdresses,
"woven with plant fibers and
decorated with birds feathers,
"they made shirts using
fabrics of different colors.
"They did not have tables and chairs.
"They sat on wooden stools
around one big plate
"from which they all ate together.
"The taste was the same for everybody,
"while they were eating
they exchanged ideas.
"Back then, people worked together.
"To build a house the
owner took the larger poles
"and built the structure,
"then a date was decided
"for the villagers to collect wild canes,
"smaller poles and leaves
to finish the house.
"They worked altogether and
built the house in one day."
Then Rotalio explained that
all Kuna village elders
adopted the standardized foreign attire
so they could be recognized
and acquire respect.
In the same way, in
Panama, one can recognize
a member of the parliament or
a policeman by their clothes.
Without a uniform the
policeman is not respected,
Rotalio emphasized, and he noted farther,
that young men now wear
all sorts of T-shirts
with different designs and symbols.
"Now everyone thinks on their own,
"they do not exchange ideas,
anymore." he concluded.
According to Rotalio's explanation,
eating from the same plate
and exchanging ideas,
are different aspects of the same process.
Before people worked together, he told me,
they shared the same idea.
If you do not exchange
ideas you have no force.
Following Rotalio's
explanation, we could suggest
that the military uniforms
of the U.S. soldiers
that Kuna people observed
from the 1930s, onward,
stood as an instantiation of
the power of white soldiers.
Wearing the same uniform,
from a Kuna perspective,
is the expression of
sharing the same idea,
which does imply being able
to work together effectively
towards a common goal and
that's to be powerful.
What then enlights of
Rotalio's explanation
was the kind of power
the Kuna people envisaged
in General MacArthur,
I wish to suggest that the power
was the phenomenal
efficacy of the U.S. Army
that unfolded before
the eyes of Kuna people.
That, for Kuna people,
was clearly not a power
that any human being
intended as Kuna person
should ever possess.
General MacArthur was
the perfect instantiation
of the power of the multitude.
His own power was the expression
of the multiciplicity of beings
that he, himself, incorporated.
The wooden figure of MacArthur,
similarly to other Nudsugana,
was a being in a state of proliferation.
He was not unique,
since he was replicable,
however, differently from other Nudsugana
he was in danger of becoming one,
that is dissimilar to
an individual subject.
So what are the implications of all this
for understanding changing Kuna notions
of power and sociality in the
middle of the 20th century?
Pier Kloster famously reported the words
of a Guaranese shaman who said, I quote,
"Things in their totality are one,
"and for us, who did
not desire it to be so,
"they are evil."
End quote.
In that search of the land without evil,
the Guaraní aimed at escaping
the imperfection of the one
by surpassing death and mortality
and reaching a land where
misfortune did not exist.
In the middle of the 20th century,
Kuna people must have begun to realize
that they were facing the new problem
of acting together as one people,
before the Panamanian state.
After the 1925 revolt, they
became progressively involved
through the mediation of North Americans
in negotiating their future as a people
within the Panamanian state.
That must have required
an unprecedented level
of cohesion and a new form
of political representation.
How to act unilaterally before
the emissaries of the state
without losing their
internal egalitarianism
cannot have been an easy feat.
The solutions that Kuna people found
are to be seen as part
of the ongoing battles
that they and many Amerindian people
have been fighting for centuries
against colonial states
and their ontological refusal of the state
and it's institutions.
I argue that there is a strong link
between the stylistic
change of Kuna wood carving,
that I've described,
and the socio-political transformations
that occurred in the
middle of the 20th century.
The MacArthur figures are the outcome
of a stylistic switch
towards individuation,
paralleled by the creation
of strong political subjects
called upon by the historical events
of the first-half of the
20th century in San Blas.
Where Panamanian authorities
pressed Kuna people
to elect one Chief and to
create a single political entity
modeled on the state,
Kuna people responded
by keeping their ethos
of fragmentation and
polarization of power,
as opposed to one of concentration.
They elected not one, but three chiefs.
I conclude by pointing out the scope
for a combined analysis
of style and sociality,
as a means to reveal
sociopolitical transformations
from an indigenous perspective.
Style in art and power in
political and social organization
are subject to changes and transformation,
but style in art and social organization
are profoundly linked in societies
that stand against the state.
Their freedom consists in
their capacity to transform,
realizing the multiple possibilities
triggered by their avoidance of the one.
(audience applauding)
- [Voiceover] Thank you.
Our next presenter, Professor Paul Tapsell
from the University of Otago
could not be with us, today, in the flesh,
however he is here on recording.
He apologizes for not being here today,
he thanks the organizers for
including him in this session.
- [Voiceover] (speaking foreign language)
With these words I
provide to the Tanta Fin--
- [Voiceover] Sorry we just
have to adjust the screens
and get setup for the PowerPoints.
Sorry we're just gonna
start the introduction,
we can't get the video
and the PowerPoint up simultaneously
because of the way this
room is configured,
so I'm gonna start this introduction over
and I'll bring up the PowerPoint.
- [Voiceover] (speaking foreign language)
With these words I
provide to the Tanta Fin
and those who have lived
and died on this land.
And farewell in those dead,
in particular the dead of
the Paiute, the Cheyenne,
the Kiowa and of course the Arapahoe.
I now would like to tend
to the subject of today
and Familiar Strange with a museum context
from a, what do I call it,
pre-indigenous context.
Turning to my first slide.
I've titled it Pre-Indigenous Pukaki,
Grounded Ancestor or Art of Otherness?
Now, who the heck was Pukaki?
Well, your looking at an image, here,
of my great, great,
great, great-grandfather
and he existed in a time
where if you didn't successfully
negotiate a boundary
you ceased to exist, not
only did you cease to exist
but also, all those descended
from you ceased to exist.
So, if he'd been unsuccessful
in a particular moment
in our past, in our genealogy,
I wouldn't be talking to you today.
So, at a very simple level
if you look at this work of art
or what was previously known,
within the museum context,
a primative art form or a curiosity
or a ethnographic artifact,
or more recently, a Talma,
you're actually looking
at a storage of knowledge
that represents the
successful amelioration
of a boundary at a particular moment
in a particular context
concerning particular resources.
With Pukaki, he lived round about the time
the Endeavor came to our shores.
It's not to say he met anyone
off the Endeavor, in fact,
he was involved in a whole
different context, inland,
where the engagement of the stranger,
though they'd be familiar
to those of Europe
but a stranger nevertheless to us
that belongs to the lands of Aotearoa
or Te Ika-a-Māui, as our people call them,
he was particularly caught up in a war
around the region of Lake
Whirirau, central North Island.
During that period that he was at war
and his children continued the war
Captain James Cook and The Endeavor
had arrived in Aotearoa.
Now, from our perspective
turning to the Endeavor
we see Tupai'a as the
first essay anthropologist
to arrive at our shores
from beyond the boundaries of New Zealand
from beyond the beach, to
use Craig Denning's phrase.
So when Tupai'a arrived,
Cook and Banks didn't pay
attention to his advice
and the result was
violence, in fact, death.
Members of those first communities
to contact Captain Cook
were killed by musket.
The next engagement was
far more successful, why?
Because the anthropologist Tupai'a,
was there to translate
and mediate, negotiate
and insure the safe passage
of his charges, Cook, Banks and his crew,
so that the Maori or the native peoples
of the East Coast,
did not take his life.
I might call this a position of heresy,
but, we are firmly of the belief
within Maori society
that if not for Tupai'a,
the British would not
have annexed New Zealand,
30 or 40 years later.
Meanwhile, back inland,
Pukaki was waging his own war,
negotiating his own boundaries,
successfully.
In death, his two sons,
whom you see on his chest,
Wharengaro, looking at the
image is the person on the left
Rangitakuku on the right,
or is it the other way around?
(laughing)
They took over and were successful
in taking control of the
geothermal collective
Potikitanga and Pohutu of Rotorua.
And between Pukaki's leg
you'll see his wife Ngapuia
and she belongs to the unsuccessful tribe,
but, nevertheless, the children came
from the marriage of both tribes.
So, I guess what we're saying here
is that marriage was a very powerful tool
of amelioration of conflict.
Without getting into too much detail
about my grandfather, here,
the main issue that I want to raise
and show in this image of Pukaki
is that for us, he is familiar,
he is our kin, he's our ancestor.
But, to those who came
aboard the Endeavor,
he was strange, he was the exotic
and he represented a form of art
that went beyond anything
that they had previously imagined.
We presented Pukaki,
three generations later,
as a gateway, when again we
were in conflict with neighbors,
Maori tribal neighbors,
the tribes of the Waikato
and the gateway was setup to defend us,
could shut like a doorway,
from these invaders
by the name of Ngaruawahia group.
The defense of our village was paramount
and defending what, the
resource of geothermal.
With geothermal, we didn't
have to go collect firewood
to light our fires, in fact,
we had central heating,
because of geothermal, warm grounds.
Our crops could grow
more easily, frost free,
and for a longer growing season.
And, the wildlife around
the geothermal springs
was, also, essential to our way of life.
And our way of life had to also,
become that of defending our borders
because everyone else wanted
access to the geothermal.
So, Pukaki as a gateway,
became the personification
of a previous generation
when we successfully fought and won a war
and defending and protecting geothermal.
And, now, to anyone
coming across our horizon
we were letting them know,
in no uncertain terms,
either you walk through this gateway
as a visitor and be recieved
through that accordingly
ritual of account and accordingly,
or you can attack us and
we'll see who's gonna win.
As the case was, Rotorua attacked us
and we're still here to tell the story,
so, Pukaki is, in a way, the
embodiment of our ancestry
or what we'd call a Maori concept.
(speaking in Maori)
Change to the next slide.
Just briefly, here's a demonstration
of anthropology in action.
This is an image of, as we understand now,
of Joseph Banks meeting a Ranatira,
a chiefly elder, leader
Muwawa on the East Coast,
tied to Aitanga-a-Hauiti
And, it's a transaction
Banks is presenting some bark cloth
to the chief and the
Ranatira's presenting a coda,
a crayfish back to Banks.
What you don't see in this lens
is who actually drew the picture.
It was Tupai'a.
Tupai'a, taking notes
and in a way translating a transaction
that was the first recorded transaction
between two cultures.
Tupai'a passed away on his way,
in passage with the Endeavor to England,
he passed away at Batavia
and the material that was with him,
the gifts that had been
presented by our people
to Tupai'a, were ultimately
appropriated by Banks
and ended up in the
museums around the world.
So, the next slide.
Today, we could probably
use the word taller
to label or to demarcate
those people in our society
that still do anthropology.
They're the learned elders
and this specialist role is to interpret
and to maintain the negotiation
between visitor and host.
So, as hosts you need to
appropriately receive people
into your space, the space
that we receive them into,
is the space in which we
prescribe the boundaries,
which we call a Marai.
And in negotiating those
boundaries we use prayer,
so as people come across the boundary
they are coming from a space
of their own type of restrictiveness
into our space of restrictiveness.
And if they agree to come into that space
then they agree to come
into our contact zone,
what is what you might call
our center of knowledge,
as we maintain it to the
resources surrounding this Marai.
And this continues today,
and it's predicated on
kinship, in the sense,
obligations, responsibilities,
accountabilities
and duties.
So, to the next slide.
We're now looking at, you could say,
the final stage of this negotiation,
of the bringing together
of visitor and host
and you'll see an elderly gentleman, here,
pressing noses with the carving, Pukaki,
on the day that he came home
completing the circle of reciprocity,
gifting, and some might call repatriation
of when the crowd appropriated Pukaki,
when we gifted it to him,
to have access to our geothermal in 1977.
Round about a 100 years after Tupai'a
had been in New Zealand
and after Pukaki had died.
And, then Pukaki, the carving,
who we see as our ancestor,
in that top slide,
you'll see him being carried up
to be placed in the Rofu District Council
the municipal government
and later, he's then taken
into the museum, where he rests today.
The next slide,
you are now looking at our leader
who passed away in 2005,
and when I took this photo of him
along with a professional photographer,
Christof Pfifer.
I looked at him and I said,
"Hey, Kuro, what are you looking at?"
and he goes, "The future."
And there he is sitting on a Marai,
in our context though,
the embodiment of all the
knowledge that represents
who we are from the beginning of time,
from the singularity,
13.8 billion years ago
to who we are today.
And why is he looking to the future?
Well, the bottom half of the slide shows,
these are our descendents
and so long as they're framed by a Marai,
well that's our contact zone
and this is why I use this concept,
pre-indigenous.
Before this whole
indigenous movement started
in the early 1990s,
and so the problem of traditions
we had with that, we as a community,
grounded in the Marai space,
we were very much engaged
in maintaining our ideas
of who we were, our identity
in counter-distintion
to all others.
So when we talk about otherness,
well, if you don't
belong to our kin group,
you are the other.
But, then we have to
work out how to negotiate
the difference between us and them,
and that's where the
Marai space provides that,
appropriate context.
Now, where do museums fit into this?
Well, that's the challenge.
Museums can be a contact zone, similar,
but to do that, they have to recognize
the land on which the museum stands,
belonging to the local,
Tangata whenua, or the people of the land,
or of the indigenous
community of that land,
going back 100s of years.
And then, we have to also
look at the source communities
whose images of their
ancestors, like Pukaki,
have been captured within that space,
who is gonna interpret that?
Who is gonna be the anthropologist
that is going to explain what
Pukaki, really, is about?
Is it going to be the
curators of the museum
or is it going to be members
of the source community?
And under who, and are
they a visitor there,
according to the hosts,
of the land on which the museum stands?
Or is it going to be
the museum, themselves?
This is the three-way relationship
that needs to be developed
within the museum context,
to bring art into, Maori
art and indigenous art
into sharp relief in a socially economic
and politically, political
space of well-being.
In the final slide, I
have here, is of Pukaki,
when he came back onto our Marai,
not very long ago,
and another descendent, also,
Toahonga, you could say
one of our anthropologists
that helps interpret between
the living and the dead
the past, the present, the future.
Because why are we doing this?
It's because of those yet born,
it's because of those young people that,
currently in New Zealand,
over 90% of our young people,
now, are born away from the Marai spaces,
away from the values
of what it means to be,
kin obligation, but also
belonging to a space
where you are seen as a member
and if we don't pass
those value systems on,
then ultimately we will all be indigenous,
in some way or another,
but how do we ground ourselves back?
(speaking Maori)
People severed from their
land have no identity.
This was quoted by Maori Massu, 1987
at the time that the Nati Fatua community
was still struggling with
the loss of their Marai
which had been removed from the landscape
and this is the landscape of the HuKa Aru,
the student of Raymond Fearth
in the School of British Anthropology.
So, to finish, we're in a situation,
I would suggest a crisis,
a crisis for museums, as
well as for anthropology.
Being indigenous does not
qualify us in any way,
to make claims of us versus
them, in terms of otherness,
unless we're grounding ourselves
back into the landscapes
out of which we came.
Museums are in a position
to become partners with
indigenous peoples,
that are grounded in those landscapes
and to assist our young people
regaining their sense of identity
and what it means to belong
and to be part of a wider kin network
that will take them to
a space of political,
social and economic well-being.
By this, all of us will
be able to benefit.
(speaking foreign language)
(audience applauding)
- [Voiceover] Now I'd like
to call up our next speaker,
Gaye Sculthorp from
the The British Museum.
- [Voiceover] I'd like
to begin by acknowledging
the first peoples of the lands
on which we meet today
and thank the session
organizers and conveners
for the invitation to speak.
Although I do work for the British Museum,
in fact, I am an Australian
and some of my ancestors were
Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
Prior to taking up the
position as Curator of Oceania
at the British Museum,
I worked in Australia for many years
as a museum curator
and as a member of the
National Native Title Tribunal.
Coming to London and
curating an exhibition
at the British Museum,
with the types of objects familiar to me,
but, to a different
international audience,
was at times a very challenging experience
involving many political,
cultural and practical issues.
Many people, indigenous and nonindigenous,
helped in that process
and I'd just like to
acknowledge two of them
who are here today, who made
significant contributions
and that's John Carty and Howard Morphy,
thank you.
So, today I will briefly
present the exhibition,
it's reception and then make
some concluding remarks.
Roy Underwood, one of the artists,
who collaborated to paint this work
depicting two ancestral men
in the form of snakes
at a place called Pukara
in the Great Victoria Desert,
described the dreaming
depicted as a big story.
Seen as the first object
in the Indigenous Australia Exhibition,
telling a big history was what
the exhibition set out to do.
Big in terms of time-scale, complexity
and indigenous engagement.
It aimed to show the success
of a long-lived civilization,
which occupied an entire continent
for over 60,000 years,
survived a traumatic colonial experience
and is ongoing today.
In debates about art and anthropology,
art and artifact and exhibiting cultures,
relatively little attention has been given
to using ethnographic objects
and art to tell history.
In Indigenous Australia,
the use of historical
and personal narratives
the juxtaposition of old
and new works of art,
archival material and digital media
resulted in an exhibition
which many commentators found
difficult to categorize.
Beyond predictable debates
about where objects of empire belong,
the exhibition also,
indirectly, raised questions
about the nature of art
through several
collaborative works displayed
and the work of the contemporary artists
in reflecting on past,
collecting histories was
a key aspect of the show.
The exhibition making process, itself,
enlivened collections and relationships
between Indigenous Australia and Britain
that are ongoing.
Before this project few people were aware
of the nature and significance
of the musuem's Australian Collection
which had been little
researched or displayed.
It ranges from rare ethnographic objects
from the first periods
of British colonlization
to artworks acquired from
the 1960s until today.
Navigating our way
between the strong views
of indigenous Australians,
who wanted the museum
to tell the truth about aboriginal history
and audience focus groups
in the United Kingdom,
saying that they would not pay
to see an exhibition
that tells them, quote,
"How poorly my country
treated other people."
We set out to tell a still unfolding story
of entangled histories
which emphasized aboriginal's
on Torres Strait Island agency
and openly acknowledged that
for indigenous Australians
museums are both valued
and contested places
of knowledge.
Although the exhibition's
title did not refer to art
the painting made by
Spinifex woman on the poster
and the turtle-shell mask
from the Torres Straight
used in advertising,
suggested an art exhibition,
whilst the word civilization,
signaled it's content as about culture.
It competed over the summer months
with Ancient Lives, New
Discoveries about Egypt
and Defining Beauty the
Body in Ancient Greek Art.
The introduction to the exhibition
presented the familiar
outline of a map of Australia
but it was a revelation for visitors
to see mapped within it,
the 100s of different aboriginal groups
and their defined areas of land.
Then the first part of the exhibition,
Understanding Country
and explained and indigenous worldview.
This was arranged both geographically
and thematically and deliberately
mixed old and new objects,
demonstrating ongoing
beliefs and practices.
Segments focused on creation beliefs,
daily life,
trading networks, such as for pearl-shell,
art and ceremony, as well
as distinctive culture
of Torres Straight Islanders.
A key work included, was one we borrowed,
from the National Museum of Australia,
the monumental 1981 painting, Yumari,
by Uta Uta Tjangala.
This illustrated, not only,
a deep ritual attachment to country,
but, also the way in which Aboriginal art
has been used to represent Australia.
Since a motive from the painting
is a watermark on Australian passports.
At a turning point,
between the two major
exhibitions segments,
we placed a Larrakitj, by Gawarrin Gumana.
It represents Barama, a creation ancestor
of the Yolngu people.
At the top, two faces are painted
on opposing sides.
The artist said one is Barama,
the other Captain Cook,
without specifying which is which.
Both attempt to imbue
the land with their law
but, Barama's law still stands strong
confronting the imposition of British Law.
The second part of the exhibition,
Encounters in Country,
presented a chronological history
of the impact of British
colonization of Australia
from 1770 until today.
In Early Encounters,
we displayed a remarkable
trilogy of objects
illustrating the historic
encounter in 1770
between the British and Aboriginal people
at Botany Bay, Sydney
through three different cultural lenses.
Firstly, at left, is the
iconic Aboriginal shield,
likely collected by James
Cook or one of his men
which was dropped on the beach
when the Aboriginal men
they encountered retreated.
Secondly, in the middle, at the top
in a small frame, is a
drawing done by Tupai'a,
who you saw earlier in Paul
Tapsell's presentation.
Cook's Polynesean
navigator and interpreter.
In this drawing Tupai'a
shows Aborigines fishing
at Botany Bay.
And thirdly, beneath it,
is a British Naval chart,
done at the same time
showing the same location
and drawn to show the
navigable depth of the harbor
and sources of water.
These historic works,
were framed by new art.
At left, by a photograph, by Micheal Cook,
called, Undiscovered Number Four.
It showed an Aboriginal man
in colonial naval uniform
silhouetted on a beach against
a image of Cook's ship,
challenging what history looks like
from the other side of the beach.
To the right, Vincent Namgira's
portrait of James Cook
with the declaration, showed
Cook with his naval uniform
extending into a document
declaring possession of Australia.
At bottom right, were the notebooks
of Lieutenant William Daws who in 1790,
befriended a young Aboriginal woman
an attempted to record
the Aboriginal language
of the Sydney region,
thus signalling initial attempts
at intercultural communication
and understanding.
The devastating impact of
colonization in Tasmania
was portrayed by displaying
a delicate shell necklace,
portraits of Aborigines living
in exile on Flinders Island,
as well as, a proclamation board
designed by colonial
authorities to hang on trees
to communicate ideas of British justice.
Opposite this was a contemporary work
by Tasmanian Aboriginal artist Julie Goff,
in which she created a shadow piece
of people hanging from trees,
reflecting on the grim reality
that lay behind the idealized
portrayal of justice
on the proclamation board.
The diplomatic strategies
used by Aborigines,
since the 19th century, to
draw attention to their plight,
was displayed by juxtaposing
art, artifact and archive.
A painting done in 1819
by leader William Barack
of a ceremony in the Melbourne Region
was displayed next to a colonial treaty
signed by leaders of that region in 1835
and an emu feather skirt
similar to the ones given
as gifts by Aborigines
to the British Royal Family in 1863.
After noting how colonial exploration
relied on indigenous knowledge
the exhibition dealt with the violence
of the expanding frontier.
A beautiful shield from
the Rainforest Region
was presented not as art or ethnography,
but, illustrative of interracial
conflict and collecting.
The label outlined how it's collector,
a pioneer of the sugar industry
rode out with native
police on shooting parties
and collected artifacts discarded
when Aborigines were wounded or killed.
He wrote in his diary,
"There was plenty of blood
"on one or two of the
shields we collected."
Moving further in time,
art was used to illustrate customary law
and political and legal
struggles for rights to land.
This was first signaled
by a protest placard
from the famous 1972
Aboriginal tent embassy.
Then, a large collaborative painting
by Spinifex women, helped show how
cold war politics
effected remote Australia,
as Spinifex people were
removed from their lands
in the 1950s and 60s to
facilitate atomic weapons testing.
In the late 1990s, Spinefex
people painted works, like this,
demonstration's of
traditional law and custom
to support their legal case
for recognition of Native Title
before the Australian legal system.
The last part of the exhibition
reflected on the collection and retention
of museum objects.
It included wall texts,
quoting different indigenous
peoples about repatriation,
and also, featured was
a turtle-shell mask,
given by Maino, a Torres
Straight Islander,
leader to the Anthropologist
Haddon in 1889.
Maino wanted this and other
objects from his father
to be displayed in a big museum in England
where plenty of people could
see his father's things.
Artist Judy Watson
created a series of prints
titled, the holes in the land,
in response to a visit to
the museum's collection.
She overlaid 19th century
architectural plans of the museum
with images of bags of native tobacco
which were displayed
earlier in the exhibition.
This challenged visitors to consider
where objects come
from, where they are now
and perhaps, where they should be.
Individual visitor and critic's
comments were revealing
and sometimes contradictory.
Some visitors were
disappointed that, quote,
"There was not enough
art on display, here."
Others disliked the way it
was displayed, one saying,
"It presented the artworks,
"which were brilliant in every case
"in a dark and depressing way,
"which removed all the joy
and vibrancy from them.
"These people don't need the
correct curator of the show
"expressing his or her correctness
"by refusing to celebrate their art."
Some visitors said that
after seeing the exhibition
they better understood the
symbolism of Aboriginal art
and others, near and far,
were inspired to create their own work.
The exhibition did make
quite an impression
amongst the British Museum staff
and this was entry in the
British Museum's staff
bake-off competition, for 2015.
The Glasgow Children's
Craft Club could not visit,
but, they made their own
Aboriginal art exhibition.
Perhaps, my favorite comment was a visitor
who said, " I was disappointed
not to see exhibits
"dealing with Bungy jumping,
which originated in Australia.
"I could be wrong though."
(audience laughing)
Influential art critic Jonathan
Jones of the Guardian wrote,
"Far from treating Aboriginal
art as an aesthetic fetish,
"this eye-opening show
sees it as part of a living
"and enduring civilization
"with a unique understanding
of humanity's place in nature."
He continued, "Indigenous
Australians question the very idea
"of isolating their
creations of works-of-art
"in a universal Western sense.
"Art in traditional Australia
is much bigger than that,
"it's a cosmic language
and stuff of history."
The telegraph headlined,
"Woe from a land of undervalued art.
"What we get is an all
too familiar account
"of dispossession and malfeasance
" and massacres by the British.
"by undervaluing millenia of achievement
"this show feels like
yet another injustice
"meted out against Indigenous Australia."
An Australian art historian noted,
"It was a difficult exhibition to review."
Saying, "It hovers uneasily
between a fine art exhibition
"showing the diversity and sheer visual
"and sociocultural potency
"of contemporary Australian
visual art practice
"and older style ethnographic
survey of objects excavated
"from the archives of the British Museum.
"While the relationship between these two
"disparate approaches is
not one of seamless fusion,
"it certainly makes for an exhibition
"that's good to think with."
Another Australian art
theorist noted the exhibition
mixed up conventional
categories of Western discourse
by avoiding a strict temporal
and racial categorization,
producing an exhibition in which history
was not an ongoing conversation
between past and present.
Contemporary indigenous
artists had positive reactions.
Wakun Wanambi had a show of his larrakitj
in an associated gallery.
He saw analogies between
the visitors swarming around
the museums round reading
room in the Great Court
and the schools of fish, each
searching for their destiny.
Alec Tipoti, a mask maker and dancer
from the Torres Straight
brought over a dance
troupe and a film-crew
to document his journey and involvement
with historic masks in the collection.
The last object in the
exhibition was a basket
commissioned from Abe Maurita,
from North Queensland,
who learned to make baskets from looking
at old ones in museum collections.
He commented, "I've taken my
work out of my cultural home,
"the home of my ancestors
and given it to the world.
"In the British Museum I saw my heritage
"surrounded by long-lost cultures
"and civilizations from
all over the world.
"To think that my culture has endured
"for so much longer than most,
"can only make me more determined
"to pass on my culture to the
generations following me."
To conclude, Eileen
Hooper-Greenhill, has noted
that objects can have multiple meanings
and are capable of being placed
in many different groupings.
I would suggest that meanings
can also differ somewhat
depending on the locations
of where the objects are exhibited.
In the context of a
universal museum, in London,
the display of diverse object types
and the use of personal narratives
subverted conventional categorization.
Objects such as baskets
were simultaneously art,
artifact and containers of
knowledge and living traditions.
Visitors were challenged to
see familiar types of art,
such as Western Desert paintings,
in new social and historical context.
Howard Morphy, noted that,
"The exhibition reflected back
"on the whole colonial process."
He said, "Moving indigenous
Australia into London,
"into a place that was, 200 years ago,
"the heart and center
of the British Empire,
"that incorporated them."
British Museum Director
Neil MacGregor, said,
"The exhibition made us completely rethink
"what we previously
only imperfectly knew."
As part of a still developing engagement
with indigenous Australians
the exhibition showed
how museums can use art
and anthropology, art and
artifact, both old and new,
to present complex histories
which attract large museum audiences
and create much debate.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
- [Voiceover] Thank
you, our next speaker is
Corinne Kratz from Emory University.
- [Voiceover] I'd also like
to thank Howard and Fred
for inviting me to be part of this
and Aaron for organizing us here.
The paper that I wrote,
is not the paper that I intended
so there's a different title.
It's Anthropoloy's Problem,
Art History, African Art.
When I was in Cape Town in September,
I was delighted when I
heard that a colleague
and a former student who
works in the Carribean
would soon arrive for a few weeks.
She was leading an
intensive graduate seminar
required of rising second-years.
They travel abroad together
and immerse themselves
in the study of an
international art world,
whether it's Moscow,
Delhi or now, Cape Town.
They visited galleries,
museums and art events,
had discussions with curators, artists
and others doing creative work.
Lectures on South African
museum and heritage work
and photographic histories, and more.
Apart from cohort building the seminar
allowed students and faculty, alike,
to start developing a grounded,
comparative understanding
of the social, political,
economic, historical,
institutional and aesthetic
dimensions of Cape Town
in South African art worlds.
While this sounds like an
anthropological approach to art
the seminar was for an
art history program.
I start with this because
of my initial response
to our session abstract, which read,
"Anthropology has had a problem with art.
"It's failure to see artistic
and aesthetic practices
"as ways of acting in the world,
"disconnected art from other
sociocultural processes
"and obscured their role
within global systems
"and as integral to continuing local,
"regional and national trajectories."
It underlined the importance of examining
the value creation processes
that are associated with art.
I had been asked to
think about these issues
in relation to how
anthropologists have, or have not,
engaged African art.
Right, I thought,
but, there's been good work in African art
in relation to value creation
and identity formation
in global and colonial context,
as social critique of political
engagement, and so on.
Some classic and pioneering
work in the anthropology of art
from the late 40s through the
60s, was done by Africanists,
bringing attention to individual artists
and aesthetic systems.
As I thought about it though,
I realized that a lot of recent work
on visual art was, in fact,
not by anthropologists, per se.
Even if it had an anthropological cast
and was based on ethnographic
and archival research.
The field of African art is
lively and interdisciplinary.
It's got it's own scholarly
organization, ACASA
a newsletter, a list-serve,
a regular conference,
journals and so on.
While the disciplinary card you carry
is not irrelevant, it's
often beside the point.
So, I had paid attention,
mainly, to the range
and quality of the work, itself.
Other anthropologists who work on art,
aesthetics, expressive
culture, performance,
or visual culture, also draw
on other collegial networks
and institutional infrastructures
and we all work on different themes
and fields, over our careers.
But, I wondered, has this
splintering deluded or undercut
what might be called
an anthropology of art?
This musing sent me to
the tangled histories
and historiographies
of African art studies,
and the anthropology of art
and how they've taken shape.
A localizing strategy that considers
how a conjunction of
region, theory and history
intersect in different
fields and disciplines.
What I want to do today, is simply,
tell a concise version of that story,
which non-Africanists may not know.
One that emphasizes
individuals and institutions
and I want to ask how it might relate
to anthropologist's periodic lament,
for over 70 years now,
about anthropology's problem with art
and the anthropology of
art's marginal status.
In the interest of time I
focus on U.S. anthropology
and with a bow both to
Franz Boas' early work
on the anthropology of art
and the work developed in
France through Grial Anditerlim,
I go directly to the 40s and 50s
to Melville Herskovits,
at Northwestern University
and a first real flurry
of anthropological work
on African art.
Herskovits was a student of Boas,
like Boas he stressed the
universal nature of art
or an aesthetic drive
that took many particular
historical and cultural forms.
Herskovits published on
topics related to African
and African-American arts,
but, at least, as important
was what his students recalled,
as setting the tone, at Northwestern.
Creating an atmosphere in
which art was taken, quote,
"As an integral part of life and culture."
End quote.
And assembling both faculty
and cohorts of students
that nurtured that interest and attitude
is taken for granted,
and stretching across forms and media.
His students see this building
on Herskovits own
interest in art and music.
He played violin and in graduate school
he was in a quartet
with Sapir and Kroeber.
This was a sociomusical experience
that Northwestern
students later replicated
with a Jazz group called,
The Academic Cats.
He and his wife Frances made collections
during their research and
Jim Fernandez noted, quote,
"Most everybody had gone to the field
"and come back with their collections.
"They talked and wrote
about their collections.
"That collection impulse was
part of all of our experience."
By the late 40s, faculty
included William Baskim
and Richard Waterman, both
former Herskovits students,
Ph.Ds in 39 and 43.
While students in the 50s,
included Justine Cordwell,
Warren D'Azevedo, Jim
Fernandez, John Messinger,
Alan Marium, Robert Plant
Armstrong, Daniel Crowley,
Simon Autenberg and later in the decade,
Jim Vaughn and Johnetta Cole.
All have worked on aspects of African art,
as well as much more.
Justine Cordwell, an artist
when she began graduate school,
described a welcoming
openness for students
interested in varied creative forms.
Something Marium, who came from music,
also recalled.
She said, quote,"To
Herskovits' great credit,
"he sought out students in
all branches of the arts
"for their possible contributions
"to the studies of African
aesthetic expression
"and that of their
descendants in the new world."
Cordwell's 1952 dissertation
on Yuraban and Benin aesthetics
was the first on African art.
The first Africanist
dissertation in art history
was Roy Seber's 1957 degree from Iowa.
The next, Robert Farris Thompson,
was almost a decade later,
it was from Yale in 66.
Seber, too, came into
the Herskovits orbit.
He met with Herskovits in Bascom in 56,
while he was working on an exhibit.
Herskovits introduced him to William Fagg
at the British Museum,
continued to mentor him
and Seber then joined the scene,
taking courses at Northwestern
as a visiting scholar.
Apart from the support
of cohort of scholars
interested in African art,
Herskovits was creating
supportive institutions
that emphasized and enhanced
the interdisciplinary
nature of African studies,
more generally, both at
Northwestern and nationally.
He worked closely with the
Carnegie and Ford Foundations
to promote Africanist scholarship
and founded the first
Africa Studies Program
in 1948, with their support.
Northwestern's Africana
Library was created in 54
and together these provided
critical research support
for students.
Herskovits also played a lead role
in founding the African
Studies Association in 57
and served as it's first president.
He died in 63, but, his
students and colleagues
developed courses in
the anthropology of art
and became part of several
new institutional clusters
where African art studies thrived.
Seber went to Indiana University, in 62,
as the African Studies Program
was starting there, as did Allen Marium,
Jim Vaughn and others.
Over the Years IU became another hub
for African art studies,
there are some others,
but, I'm only gonna focus on that for now.
It was the site of the 1964
seminars and conference
that became D'Azevedo's seminal book,
The Traditional Artist in African Society.
They added new faculty in the 70s,
including Ivan Carp and
IU became a major outlet,
IU press became a major
outlet for Africanist work.
With a critical mass of
students and scholars
more institutions supporting
and promoting African
art studies were created.
Often staffed by people
coming from these
intellectual genealogies.
The Journal of African Arts began in 67.
On a separate track,
Richard Long established
the Triennial Conference
on African Art, in 68,
taken over by ACASA,
after it's founding in 82.
The 80s saw the founding
of The Center for African
Art in New York, in 84,
and The National Museum of African Art
at the Smithsonian, in 88.
African art studies found a home
in curatorial and art history departments
as the curriculum diversified
in the wake of the so-called culture wars
of the 80s and 90s.
Often in some, kind of
general, non-Western position
and more African scholars and
curators entered the field.
While some anthropologists
continued to work
on African expressive culture,
the current membership
of the Art's Council,
the African Studies Association,
shows anthropologists,
just a small minority
of the 500 members.
Prominent topics and concerns
in African Art Studies
also shifted in recent decades.
From village based studies, classic forms
and ethnic styles, to
include colonial art schools
modern and contemporary art,
diasporic and global connections,
exhibitions and heritage
and contemporary art,
and analyses of gender, cultural politics
and social histories, related
to a wide range of forms.
Contemporary artistic production in Africa
ranges from design in
fashion, to tourist art,
adaptations of classical forms,
to work circulating in
global biannual circuits,
cinema and performative genres
that encompass puppetry,
dance, theater, music and more.
Scholars have written about all of these,
but, only a few are anthropologists.
So, African art studies
are indeed alive and well,
but not, quite, so much in anthropology,
even if they got a strong start there,
and even if that influence
is still evident.
So, what happened in anthropology?
In the late 40s and 50s,
when Herskovits was
fostering African Art Studies
at Northwestern, it was also framed
in terms of a general need
for an anthropology of art.
Herskovits, quote,
"Felt that most
anthropologists, everywhere,
"were slighting the arts."
And, he was scathing about
British anthropology's
lack of attention to
material culture or the arts.
In the late 50s,
D'Azevedo observed, quote,
"The general recognition of art
"as a primary means by which individual
"and social values are
expressed is oddly incompatible
"with the neglect of the subject
in anthropological theory."
Anthony Forge, also noted
the topics marginality
in British anthropology in the early 70s.
Before the 50s, what D'Azevedo called
the museum approach to
art, was most common.
In other words it was a
collection based focus
on objects, quote, "As
a source of information
"about other things,
largely obscuring artists
"in the creative processes involved."
Herskovits and his students
were doing early ethnographic studies
on art and artists by the
40s, especially in the 50s.
Field work took hold in
African Art History, in the 60s
and Nick Thomas dates ethnographic studies
of indigenous art in British anthropology,
as well established,
only in the 70s and 80s.
Given the far-longer history
of ethnographic research
in anthropology, we might ask,
how the most common research topics
became defined as important?
And how a hierarchy of value
is set in research foci
and how these, also, change over time.
But it may be misleading
to look only for work
with a primary focus on art and artists,
for anthropologists have
paid attention to art
in relation to a changing
array of concerns.
With topics once overlooked
brought into focus, over time.
For African work, anthropologists
long paid attention
to African art as material
culture and ritual.
Urban arts and popular culture
received sporadic attention
in the 70s, followed by
work on popular music
or a performance, popular
theater and painting
and a full-blown focus on
African popular culture,
as a field in the 90s.
Popular culture began to receive attention
in anthropology more widely, as well,
particularly in relation to
the rise of cultural studies.
In anthropology, generally,
work that might fall under
the anthropology of art,
also took shape in relation to topics
and sub-disciplines that
developed more fully
in the 70s and 80s,
and in alliance with other
disciplinary approaches.
Such as, visual anthropology,
performance studies,
tourism studies and the recent return
and burgeoning of
material culture studies.
If art was sometimes avoided as a category
infused with assumptions
from Euro-American contexts.
Anthropological work on expressive culture
and creative production
was something of a moving target,
spreading across fields as
specializations proliferated
and allied with other
disciplines and fields.
There may be a parallel
splintering on geographic lines.
I've been sketching African art studies
in anthropology and beyond,
but, there are similar sketches to be done
for anthropology in Native American,
Asian or Pacific art studies.
But, we also then have to ask
whether the anthropology of art got stuck
in the geographical assumptions about,
quote unquote, primitive art.
Paying little attention to
European and American art worlds,
their wider global and
colonial connections
and the overarching anthropology of art.
New critical attention did
turn to those connections
in recent decades, to
what Jim Clifford called,
"The art culture system."
Through which, quote,
"in the last century,
"exotic objects have been contextualized
"and given value in the West,
"and to the role of museums
and exhibitions in this."
It's contested domains
and shifts over time
have been considered in
many parts of the world.
Along with political economies
surrounding diverse creative forms,
other aspects of value creation
and interconnected art worlds
and the ways expressive
culture works in the world.
Anthropologists have also been considering
contemporary art institutions
and intersections
between contemporary art
practice and ethnography.
They incorporate contemporary art
into ethnographic exhibitions
as a way to address critiques
of ethnographic representations.
Although, Geismar argues
that this constitutes contemporary art
as an epistimologically
privileged perspective.
Exempt from the critical attention
to the artistic and
institutional processes
through which it, itself is produced.
Anthropologists working on these topics
are still a relatively small group
and may, indeed, still be
marginal to the discipline.
They may identify as
much with museum studies,
anthropology of religion,
material culture,
media studies, visual
anthropology or other sub-fields,
as much as they do with an
anthropology of art, per se.
And, they may have strong alliances
with scholars in other disciplines.
Such interdisciplinary
connections are productive
and as a colleague remarked to me,
when I was working on this paper,
quote, "The interdiscipline
is always marginal
"and interstitial within the departmental
"and disciplinary structure
of the university."
Nick Thomas thinks that
the anthropology of art
will always be marginal,
in curious situations
because it's irretrievably eclectic.
It's diverse concerns, hard to synthesize.
But, it remains productive and valuable
to bring such diverse
work into conversation,
through comparative thematic workshops,
conference sessions like this,
in books and in teaching.
These nurture and enhance
work on expressive culture,
but, they're also ways to shape attitudes
and produce value for
such work in anthropology
and beyond.
We should continue to
pay attention to the ways
that anthropological
categories, art, craft,
material culture, ritual and the fields
and specializations that I've mentioned
have shaped research on creative practice.
And ask how to set the
tone and maintain it?
As Herskovits' students
described the orientation
towards creative practice
at Northwestern in the 50s.
So, how do we set that tone,
so that attention to
creative practice and art
as modes of social action,
producing knowledge,
creating identities and value,
engaging social and political issues
and forging wider
networks across the globe,
becomes a taken for granted aspect
of anthropological research?
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
- [Voiceover] Our next scheduled presenter
Gwyneira Isaac,
unfortunately cannot be here,
however, she was originally scheduled
to present with Jim Enote
from the A: shiwi A: wan Cultural Center
who's name didn't get into the book.
And, so I'm very happy to welcome Jim,
up to the stage now.
(audience applauding)
- [Voiceover] Thank you, Aaron.
When I got an Email
asking if I'd be interested
in participating in this panel,
I got only part of the Email.
It said, Entangled Differences,
and I was thinking,
"Aaron, what the hell is
an entangled difference?"
And, I was thinking last night,
I was having dinner,
and is it like when you're arguing
over who's gonna split the dinner bill?
Something like that?
Or is it, maybe, like a
definition of a stalker?
Like when two people go for a
long romantic walk, together,
but only one of them knows about it?
(audience laughing)
Maybe that's an entangled difference?
But, I got the rest of the Email,
about art, anthropology and museums,
and so, I started thinking about this
and I think, yeah, we do
stuff like that, we do.
So, what I want talk about, really,
is a conglomeration of efforts
that we've been doing at
the A: shiwi A: wan Museum
and it has to do with art,
anthropology and museums,
but, first starting somewhere
and then working up to a
thing called buyer-beware.
At the A: shiwi A: wan
Museum, first of all,
we are in service to the Zuni people,
that's what we do.
We are an interesting museum
because we are a NGO.
We're not part of any government,
we're not part of the federal government,
state government, or
even tribal government.
We're just a group of people
that formed a small
tribal museum, on our own.
And, not knowing much
about museums, actually,
but we just redefined
what we think a center is.
So, we are in service
to the Zuni community,
we are not, necessarily, acquiescing
to any standards of museology.
Actually, we bend the rules, quite a bit,
and we are nimble, we can try new things,
we can experiment.
We are always looking towards
trying to engage the field of museology
and hopefully making some
kind of contribution,
and, maybe, change.
And finally, we are doing
it for our children,
our children's children, and
so on, it's for our future.
While we spend time to
think about the past,
we are very much in the present.
Our work is about the present
and preparing for the future.
So, I was thinking
about this subject then,
these entangled differences,
I started to think about what--
let's untangled it.
and start thinking about what
is elemental and pure, first.
Pure things in art, things like,
things that come from
the earth, first of all.
It is pure, like a baby,
when a baby is born,
it is pure, innocent,
it hasn't gotten the entanglements, yet.
Thank goodness, and
the earth is like that.
The water, things that we see
that are truth, that is pure.
They are beautiful things,
things that we begin with,
but, they also are things
where we start to
develop our own patterns,
are own kind of pattern
languages about places.
They set our rhythms,
our day and our night,
our summer, fall, winter,
spring, on and on.
So, again, thinking about
this entangled differences,
then I started to think about, well,
on the way to that are what is mixed,
what is separable and
maybe, what is superimposed.
Things that are mixed,
looking at nature itself,
bringing them together.
We are not in the world, just ourselves,
it's not individuals, not
communities, not just tribes,
there are other living
things with us on the earth
and we honor them, in our art.
But, things are mixed now,
as we have started to
move forward in time,
things like maps, for example,
become part of our world.
But, we can adjust to that,
we can make new kinds of maps.
We've always had maps, of course,
maps in songs, maps in prayers,
etched in stone, we've always had maps.
So, we can create counter-maps, also,
we can mix.
And now in this century, anyway,
the last century, actually,
has things like technologies such as film,
started becoming a part of our world.
For example we started
seeing these things,
they were art forms, yes,
they were technologies, also.
But we started to see them
and this one particular film that we saw
at the American Museum of Natural History
was quite interesting and very disturbing,
because when we started
to watch this film,
we were looking at it
and kind of doing this,
like I don't know if we
should see that, or not?
We watched it and watched it play out
and one of the first things we noticed,
well actually, when it finished
we asked, "Who owns It?"
And the staff said, "Well,
it was created in 1923
"and it's open-source, right now,
"and it's been digitized
"and we don't know how
many copies were made."
And we said, okay, well,
"Well, there's a lot of
misinformation in there,
"a lot of misinformation in this film."
There are things that are
in the inter-titles, right,
the script, the text that's
at the bottom of the page,
because they are old films,
so there are inter-titles.
We said, there's a lot of things in there
that's just incorrect.
As is the case with much of
museum collections, actually.
Archival materials and
physical collections,
there's a lot of misinformation.
And we said that there's images
that shouldn't be in there,
so we said, why don't
we just, if you would,
they were not repatriating
the film, obviously,
we had a digital copy,
I don't ever want to hear people say,
digital repatriation, right?
So, we got a copy
and we remade it.
And so, for things like the inter-titles,
originally, they said, "The
fire god represents the sun."
And we said no, it's not a
fire god, it's a Shula:wit'si,
And actually, is the keeper of the fire
and does not represent the sun.
So, we're correcting it, we're
setting the record straight.
Also, things that were
in the original film,
there was these images,
and we put this text in there.
That was an important,
powerful point in the film.
So, things are mixing, they
are starting to overlay.
Speaking of information and collections,
this is a kind of conventional
catalog description.
We have visited, about, 32
museums around the world
and looked at, and
reviewed in great detail,
tens-of-thousands of Zuni objects,
and this is typically what we see.
But, very often, when
we look at the catalog
and look at the actual objects
they're not really what they are.
The catalog may say a bone pendant
and we say, no, it's not a bone pendant,
actually, it's a turkey call
or the catalog's description
may say it's this
and we say, no, it's not actually that
it's something different.
The point is that you
have to go to the source
to find the truth, it's
just like a detective story.
If you really want to know the
truth you go to the source,
as close as you can to the source.
Obviously, a lot of
things in the collections,
in museum collections, were collected
sometimes registered,
sometimes guessed at,
sometimes there were field notes,
but, very, very abbreviated
and very inadequate,
and sometimes quite wrong.
Actually, here at the Denver
Museum of Nature and Science
there was a really important piece,
because we saw that the
catalog description said,
"A Zuni net-sinker."
And if you know where Zuni is,
it's in the high-desert
of the Southwest, U.S.
and we said, a net-sinker?
What could that be?
And we pulled out the drawers
and it was just a small ax-head,
but, it was revealing.
It says, okay, we've got some work to do,
all of us have work to do.
So, we started doing some things to--
we exposed Zuni community
members to images
that are in museum collections
and they just let it fall out of them,
they just talked about the images.
And, we got a lot of information
and so on the right-side of this sphere
is the, kind of, conventional
museum collection information
and on the left-side is
the Zuni information.
Essentially, two different ways
of looking at the same thing.
The same thing, but, two
spheres of knowledge,
two different ways of
looking at the same thing.
So, our work is very much about
setting the record straight,
but, it's also how we communicate
and transfer our knowledge
across different knowledge systems.
Now, entangled differences,
we're certainly getting to the point now,
where there are a lot of entanglements.
Recently, I'm sure you've heard about
the issues around mascots.
The owner of the Washington football team,
actually, came to my office,
to our museum.
And, I probably have the distinction
of being the only Tribal
member in North America
to tell him face-to-face, what I think.
Well, he came to the museum
and our Tribal leaders said,
can you come out and talk to this guy?
And I said, "Hell,
yeah, I'll talk with him
"and, I've got a lot to say to him."
So, I was tactful, at first,
but, I told him about the contributions
that the Zuni people have made,
of all indigenous people have made
to the human experience
and I went on-and-on about
all these good things
about our contributions
and then I walked him to his car,
his entourage that he had, to his car
and I put my hand on
his shoulder and I said,
"You know I like football,
I watch it sometimes,
"if I have time,
"but I really don't like
the name of your team."
And he was pretty pissed off about that.
But, yeah, at that moment
I knew he didn't care.
But, there are these kinds
of entanglements, out there,
because remember our work is about,
at least in my community,
we are really about
heritage, about learning,
about understanding why
we are the way we are.
And these kind of things undermine that.
There's sacred images, like of Kokopelli
that are found throughout
the Southwest, also.
Very sacred images around fertility,
but, just about anywhere in the Southwest
you can find that image, commercialized.
In fact, I found this, just this morning,
happens to be here in Denver, actually.
So, as I've said we've
been doing a lot of work
around collection reviews
and we've looked at
tens-of-thousands of things
and we're finding that there are a lot
of not only, misidentified
items, there's certainly that,
but, they're also a lot of
things that are in collections
that are fakes, just as
there are Roman, Egyptian,
all sorts of other things
that are in museum collections
that are fakes, the same with Zuni items.
There's a lot of fakes,
a lot of replicas in the collections.
So, there's one collection
at the School for Advanced
Research, in Santa Fe,
and we went looking at
those, over some time,
and now we're also,
in addition to all the kinds
of other work we're doing,
we're trying to build a list
of the replicas in museum collections.
So, if any of you have
some items that are Zuni
and would like to think about creating
a separate collection of
replicas, I want to talk with you.
This is important,
this is important for several reasons.
One of them, more contemporary and modern,
is that in Paris, as you know,
there have been some
auctions of sacred items
and this has been very disturbing to us,
not only as Zuni, but
also for Hopis, Navahos
and other tribes in the region,
that these sacred items,
to us, are being auctioned.
Well, we had to take a look
and we looked up the catalog, online,
sure enough, some of them are fakes.
So, I felt like,
well, I wrote a letter to the director
of the auction-house, for one,
and I said you know,
let's think about this,
that, first of all, we'll let
the lawyers and the attorneys
do their noble work
and find the instruments of law
that will prohibit this from happening.
Second, there's going to be people
doing the shaming, believe me.
But, third, I told this
director in the letter,
I said, "Buyer beware."
Because only people from the source
can definitely authentically
validate something
and they may not want to do that.
So, buyer, beware.
Because there may be
things in the auctions
that are fakes, so not
only the auction houses
but the potential buyers should know that.
The only people that can validate those
are people from the source.
So, these are quite
difficult entanglements
that we're dealing with now.
But, we have to do it, it's our M.O.,
it's our modus operandi,
these days, unfortunately.
When we do our work around
heritage and learning,
but we have to deal with these
other entanglements, as well.
And, we do it for our future generations.
Well, thank you very much.
(audience applauding)
- [Voiceover] Thank you, Jim.
I would now like to welcome
our final paper-giver,
of the afternoon,
John Richard Carty
from the Australian National University.
- [Voiceover] Never been introduced
with my middle name
before, that's correct.
(audience laughing)
So, I'm kinda like the
warm-up act, for Jim Clifford,
but, I don't really have
time to be funny or charming,
so, I'm gonna scintillate you with a map,
to start with.
This is the western half of Australia
and in the middle of that
is the Western Desert
and just for those of you who don't know
that's the area I'm talking about, today.
This is Western Desert painting,
as is this,
this,
this.
Now, art historians regularly employ
Western Desert painting as a case study
for examining categorical transitions,
from ethnographic to fine art,
or from world art to contemporary art
or whatever label is
the currency of the day.
Yet, somewhat remarkably,
and unlike their comrades
working in Africa,
I was stunned to find out,
art historians in Australia
don't actually do any
research on art or artists.
These paintings and the
people that I'm talking about
become pieces moved around
on a theoretical chessboard
where categories and
theories move back-and-forth,
but, rarely forward.
And so anthropologists working
in Aboriginal Australia
have tended to become the
accidental art historians
and theorists of these movements.
This is not because, despite
how we might want to think
that we have any privileged insight,
but because our discipline
encourages the kinds of holistic attention
required to do justice to art.
Formal analysis, historical
and social context,
biography, aesthetics,
you know, in other contexts
these would be the descriptors
for a comprehensive art
historical approach.
But, in Australian
discourse it falls under
the strangely pejorative
framework of being ethnographic
and you'll be shocked,
but, ethnographic's not
a good word in Australia.
Why is that?
Well, for the past decades,
curators, anthropologists,
art commentators, have fought really hard
to have Aboriginal painting
recognized as fine art,
as the equal of any great art
made anywhere, at anytime, in the world.
And an important
and perhaps necessary
stage in that process
was what involved
distinguishing Desert art
from the ethnographic or the
category of the ethnographic.
But, this temporal kind of,
or this temporary categorical two-step
has been a little bit too successful,
because it's calcified
into ideological positions,
into disciplines and, indeed,
into whole institutions
and here's a classic
example of what I mean.
In 2010, at the opening of
the most important display
of Aboriginal art in Australia,
the Director of the National
Gallery, Ron Radford,
stated that, "The galleries of rooms,
"consciously and
unapologetically are designed
"for the permanent
collection of indigenous art.
"not anthropology."
That's exactly how he sounded.
Now, I can still hear the
collective groan of indignance
from the anthropologists
present that night.
Howard Morphy may have fainted, I think,
when he said that,
but, such simplistic oppositions
between indigenous art
and the ethnographic,
particularly, ones in which anthropology
is positioned as a kind of
murky synonym for content
continue to impede the development
of more nuanced
scholarship and exhibitions
in Australia, but here's the kicker,
art historians, critics, curators,
are constantly arguing for
the need to move beyond
some scarecrow in a pith-helmet
called the ethnographic
and to treat Aboriginal works
of art, on their own terms.
But nobody goes on to establish
what those terms might be.
That's precisely because
such terms are not possible
without the ethnographic information
that has been dismissed.
So, I live in a state
of almost permanent agitation about this,
as those of you who know me, will know.
So, I'm gonna put on a blue painting
before I get upset and just calm down.
But, what I've learned is it's
not enough to be indignant
or dismissive of that attitude.
If we want better scholarship,
better understanding of the artists
who are increasingly claiming their place
in the globalized world,
then anthropology has to claim
it's place in those debates, too.
And that means claiming some
of the public real estate
around these issues
and taking art historians,
critics and curators with us.
It may also involve anthropologists
engaging in some subterfuge,
perhaps wearing black skivvies
and bare A's to exhibition openings,
rather than bare feet and bilums,
which is our standard thing,
(audience laughing)
but, I'll come back to that.
Now anthropology and art history overlap
in really important areas,
I want to acknowledge that,
but in Australia this overlap masks a gap
in the disciplines
and it's a gap, partly, methodological
and partly conceptual
in which the formal analysis of artworks
is disconnected from the biographical,
cultural and ultimately
historical processes
that shape those forms.
The gaps kind of like a black hole
that has sucked time into it,
or out of our analysis.
So what I've been trying
to do over the past decade
is create kind of a bridging body of work
to establish the terms, so to speak,
or to insert the time back in
and to create what Howard Morphy
has framed as an anthropologically
informed art history
or what may also be
considered the first steps
in simply Aboriginal art history.
So, what I want to do now is quickly
walk through this work
and through the field
work that I'm about to do
and how I'm thinking about that,
in relationship to all the
things we're talking about today.
So, the research project
that I'm undertaking
over the next six years, or so,
is titled, An Art History
of the Western Desert
and it's a phase in which I'm
really consciously engaged
with the challenge of producing
art historical outcomes
from anthropological scholarship.
Oh, well I didn't mean
to lay all those images,
but, that's like
serendipitously, very meaningful.
So, my project is looking
at all these art centers
around the Western Desert
and building up where there
aren't localized art histories,
localized art histories of each community
and then connecting those art
histories across the region
and looking at how
abstraction, configuration,
different kinds of aesthetic processes
have happened in space and
time in the Western Desert.
And using individuals,
long-term engagements
with individual artists
to connect-up the questions of kinship,
aesthetics, style, transmission,
throughout this whole region.
So, the computer's done me a favor
by layering over the
aesthetics, the kinship
and the geography, there.
So, the model for this regional work
comes from my field work in Balgo,
which is up at the very top of that line,
just above the pallum, just there.
in the Southern Kimberly
and north of the Desert
where I've tried through formal analysis
to develop a ritual language
around aboriginal
processes of abstraction.
Now, the limitations of our
discussions about aboriginal art
often stem from failing to recognize
that it did not merely resonate
with a Western taste for abstraction,
but, it involves a process of artistic
and cultural abstraction in and of itself.
But, you can't know this by
reading Clement Greenburg.
In Australia you have to read Nancy Munn.
And I'll show you what I mean by that.
Over the past 30 years, or so,
there's been a clear visual
and statistical decline
in the occurrence of what might be seen
as traditional iconography in acrylic art
and a significant increase
in the proliferation
of those aesthetic elements
that used to accompany iconography
in the early days of
the painting movement,
outlining and dotting, in particular.
You see these two paintings
by the same artist,
Nancy Nananarra, produced 20 years apart.
The first painting that she ever did,
from 1984, you can see
is deeply iconographic,
it's a painting about
women singing for men
during a ceremonial event.
And, you can see the sacred forms
of women sitting around and
the dots in the background.
Twenty years later, those forms
have receded completely from the canvas
and the whole canvas is dots.
There are two nominally, kind
of, iconographic forms there,
but, they're actually just there
to kind of structure the act of painting.
There's this process
that's gone on in Balgo art
that is understandable and intelligible,
but it requires engaging
with paintings through time.
So, I'm not gonna talk
about this in detail today,
because I'm trying to skim
over the whole project,
but, you can see in the
very first paintings
of Belgo art, where
iconography's outlined by dotting
and the dotting makes it pop off the page,
it creates the animation in the image.
Over time in Balgo art, you
can see that those outlines
actually fall away from the iconography
and they become the background,
they become the animating
field for those icons.
And eventually, the icons
themselves disappear
and all you have is lines or outlining,
painting become about outlining, itself.
It's the classic equation of abstraction
or that process in cubism,
where content becomes form.
And, you see that really
in a fascinating way
in Balgo art, through dotting,
where individual styles,
it's made me think of Paolo's work,
it's the opposite in a way,
is that this process of
indiviudation in Balgo
happened through this
process of abstraction
where individual dotting styles,
and you can see Ubin
Anapagin's hand here just,
she pushes the paint into these
sculptural florets of color,
but it's still a dot.
Ninin Analla, mixes up all the paint
in this really viscous form
and then drops one dot down
and then puts another one down
so that they sort of run
together like acrylic mercury,
but creates these incredibly
linear looking paintings,
but it's all built up out
of these protein of dots.
And Elizabeth Newmy paints
with this peripatetic
over locking technique with
these tiny little sticks
and out of that energetic act produces
these wonderful compositions.
Her paintings used to be of women
sitting around collecting seeds
and you'd see in the form of the kulaman,
all the seeds and over time
the seeds spilt out of these kulamans
and became the painting.
There's this iconic inversion, almost,
where the iconography in her work
is just structuring the act of painting,
it's not telling a story.
So, these kinds of
things are what I look at
in artistic movements in Australia.
Wow, was that really loud when I said, Um?
It came back at me, in
an unfortunate fashion.
So, I've conducted this
formal analysis of Balgo
and shorter research around the Desert
sometimes with the Spinifex artists
that Gaye showed you earlier.
Actually, they're a great example
of people who haven't
really gone into abstraction
but have gone, much more
forcefully, into iconography,
their paintings really pulse with snakes
and tracks and iconography
because the local art history, there,
was tied to Native title
and questions of evidence and proof
and that iconography was the evidence
of peoples claims to land
and it's become and stayed
a really important part
of their artistic process.
So, there's differences in the Desert
and I'm interested in why things
do and don't happen
in different art historical contexts.
So, I think most art historians
are kinda happy to follow this far,
but you know there's abstraction,
style, localized art history,
but, this is where it
gets kind of uncomfortable
because, you know, there's
kinship diagrams on the screen.
Now, art historians
can't talk about change
occurring in these traditions
because the only way to understand
how this artistic system
is reproduced through time,
how processes of apprenticeship
and stylistic transmission
congeal into cultural practice
is to understand the role of
kinship in Aboriginal life.
And let's face it, kinship
isn't particularly sexy
and talking about kinship systems
has not been a big feature
of the art world discourse, to date.
But, it's going to be,
cause I've got these diagrams to prove it.
I'm not gonna talk in detail
about these either, today,
but, you can see the process
of transmission going on
with different parts of an artists style
becomes passed on to a
member of the family.
People even configure
mother and father style
into their own style.
What I've found in my research at Balgo
but also around the Desert
is that the innovations and abstractions
pioneered by individuals are passed on
as a form of cultural
property, between kin,
and cannot be reproduced by
people outside that family
without creating significant cultural
and political problems.
Style, even techniques have become
a form of cultural property,
have become a form of identification.
That it seems to operate in the art world
but it's also operating
on a really local level.
You can see in that image there
that Ubina's style has
actually been reproduced,
not just the basic
aesthetics of her painting
but the very technique, by her
granddaughter on your right.
The impact of kinship in
influencing the nature
and timing of apprenticeship
and stylistic transmission
in Aboriginal art
is crucial to understanding the intimacies
of artistic development in the Desert,
but, it's also critical to understanding
the more expansive Aboriginal processes
that inflect and influence the development
of painting practices at
different times and places
over the past 40 years.
Here's an extended, sort
of, family style tree,
where you get all of those art centers
that I showed you in the first,
so, there's an artist from
each of those art centers
in that one, sort of, family group.
You can see people have
been moved around the Desert
through the processes of history
and are painting in different styles
and different places
for different reasons,
but, you can connect those stories
up through kinship.
I won't go into that in detail.
Genealogy, for all it's--
did you want to tell me something?
I didn't hear that.
Genealogy does not guarantee
a thorough Aboriginal perspective
on style and how it passes between people.
It tells you how style should pass down,
but not necessarily how
it does in practice.
And, this is why working
directly with artists
is essential and a lot
of what I'll be doing
over the next few years is recording
extensive oral histories with artists
around the Western Desert.
It's not rocket science,
you just press play,
on the tape recorder and the rest happens.
Oral histories tend to include
the kinds of people relationships
and events in an artists life
that formal genealogies or
formal analysis leave out.
Recorded in Aboriginal languages,
these narratives also
bring indigenous categories
and conceptual frames to
bear on the questions of art
which we so regularly
find debates ensnared
at the limits of language.
Euro-American history tends
to deal with dead artists
and it can afford to
because there's usually
an archive of information
about their lives.
We can't afford that luxury in Australia
where the lives of Aboriginal
artists become opaque
if not completely unknowable,
after their death.
So, I find myself talking about
the slightly contradictory
notion of real-time art history,
because if we wait for art historians,
if we wait to analyze these
movements in retrospect,
we actually won't have the information
that would allow you to have
an art historical body of scholarship.
These long-term engagements
with individual artists
will generate the material
and conceptual frameworks
that I want to produce out of this project
which is catalogs resonate,
which is a really classical
art historical, kind of, text
where you connect the body of paintings
that an artist has
produced over their lives
with a biographical portrait.
And, I've done a little bit
of this with artists, to date,
but, I'm doing it in this
particular research project
as a way of sort of trying
to bring art historians
and other kinds of scholars
into the dialogue with anthropology,
about what's going on
in these art movements.
And my ambition actually is to
turn those catalogs resonate
into exhibitions, over the
next four or five years or so.
This focus is in part, strategic,
it's about creating a common language
with art historians and theorists
and giving them a familiar
genre of scholarship
in which they can grasp the value
and indeed the necessity of
anthropological approaches
to art in cross cultural context.
But it's also underscored by
a more elemental consideration
about how it is that we come to understand
and how to make such
understandings possible
in the public sphere.
Without the human scale I
think we become a little lost
and this for me is the
beating heart of anthropology.
At the level on which anthropological
and art historical analysis
has been directed today
which is generally
localized groups of artists,
tends to obscure the temporal
and spatial dynamics,
the specific relationships
that bring the lives
of individual artists into articulation
with broader art historical processes.
It tends to obscure the personalities
that make these kinds of processes
legible on a human scale.
Anthropologists are
better placed than anyone
to eliminate the extraordinary individuals
at the heart of these movements
and it's time we pulled on our berets
or at least pull them
over our pith helmets
and got on with it.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
