Curious Exotica (Ink on Paper) 1443885797, 9781443885799

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Curious Exotica (Ink on Paper)

Curious Exotica (Ink on Paper) By

Andrea Zittlau

Curious Exotica (Ink on Paper) By Andrea Zittlau This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Andrea Zittlau All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8579-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8579-9

Birds? We can only guess what the birds on these pieces represent or if they are birds at all. —Text label, George Gustav Heye Center (2011)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix Preface ........................................................................................................ xi Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... xv Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Spectres and Ghosts Chapter One ................................................................................................. 7 Curiosities Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 19 Specimen The Ishi Poems .......................................................................................... 37 Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 41 Souvenirs Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 53 Lessons Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 61 Voids Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 71 Voices Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 83 Museum Travels: A Conclusion Epilogue..................................................................................................... 95 The Veil

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Bibliography .............................................................................................. 97 Index ........................................................................................................ 103

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 3-1: The Ethnographic Object (detail) by Andrea Zittlau (Amsterdam 2013) ..................................................................................... 51 Fig. 4-1: The Ethnographic Object by Andrea Zittlau (Amsterdam 2013) ..................................................................................... 54 Fig. 4-2: The Ethnographic Object (detail) by Andrea Zittlau (Amsterdam 2013) ..................................................................................... 57 Fig. 4-3: The Ethnographic Object (detail) by Andrea Zittlau (Amsterdam 2013) ..................................................................................... 59

PREFACE

For centuries, ethnographic objects have been collected, categorized and ordered in museum environments to represent European knowledge about non-European societies with complex patterns of interpretation, intention and effects. The idea of the exotic was a crucial part of Renaissance cabinets of curiosities, but it was not until the nineteenth century that ethnographic objects became essential in the process of forming the discipline of anthropology and thus collected systematically. NonEuropean societies became objects of study in the belief of their imminent extinction. Thus, scholars and amateurs excessively accumulated the materialized remains of people they believed doomed, an activity best known as salvage anthropology. Many objects obtained in that context still populate contemporary ethnographic museums and collections, and continue to present and promote ideas of an exotic other that has not lost its popularity ever since. Nevertheless, ethnographic museums and exhibitions are disappearing; their name is already no longer fashionable. They are part of the dusty past of adventurous expeditions and unprecedented observations, of the codes of natural history and anthropology, of a time when objects were evidence of spectacular narratives of science—of an imperial and empirical approach to the world. These tropes have lost their public appeal and museums attempt to overcome the decline of visitor numbers with new names that suggest contemporary cosmopolitan and global themes. Current ethnographic exhibitions try to bridge the gap between scientific and popular discourses, old and new objects; they recognize non-European aesthetic expressions as art and increasingly involve those exhibited into curatorial practices. Nevertheless, the ethnographic exhibition (in whichever new disguise) continues to be haunted by its past, imprisoning objects and ideas of the exotic other while talking about the self. It can be nothing else but a monument to its own history and the ethnographic object remains trapped by the limitations of its category that is inseparable from the museum setting. My interest in ethnographic objects grouped in exhibitions (found mainly in museums of anthropology, natural history and medicine) arose from the strangeness of the idea that objects arranged behind glass communicate concepts of difference and information about different

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societies. I have never been able to understand the implicitness with which such a form of communication had been established and wondered about labels that spoke of the visually obvious while most of my questions remained unanswered. Studying exhibitions was not an attempt to answer these questions but rather to understand their absence. In this book, I explore the idea of the ethnographic object in the exhibition and its multiple dimensions and intersections. When and why is an object ethnographic? What and how do ethnographic objects communicate in displays? I approach these crucial questions with theories of haunting, thinking about the display as a surface beneath which several layers of object-related information are lurking. This information relates more to the ways in which different audiences have approached the objects throughout the centuries than to a desired essence of material-related knowledge. In particular, the object categories of the curio, as an emotional impulse of interest, and of specimen, as a form to classify objects and humans, linger with us even when seemingly reformed. I look at these categories and show historically where they appear and how they reappear (or refuse to disappear) in today’s museum world. I observe the voids, the missing narratives and unsolved lives, and their significance in and for contemporary ethnographic exhibitions. Here I come to the questions that remain unasked. My inquiries are at times unconventional. I believe that every question needs a different (textual) approach. Thus, the textual strategies may appear diverse at first glance but they show as such the different dimensions of academic and creative inquiry. Ethnographic exhibitions are different from art exhibitions. Art displays are perceived as comments on the world. As such, they are granted a depth denied to ethnographic displays, which are perceived by their audiences as samples of the world. Therefore, I will not include art projects or galleries into my analysis but try to make use of strategies and techniques more connected to the art world than the academic context to make my points. Because in many ways, the academic text is like an ethnographic museum—thought to be neutral and obvious, it classifies and provides categories of thinking—it attempts to master the things unthought-of. It does not give room to the weird dynamics of ghostly interactions. Everything has to be said. However, some things become more obvious when they remain unspoken. In recent years, ethnographic museums have eagerly redefined themselves as institutions of art on the basis of aesthetic perception and market value, but without allowing their objects a metaphysical depth. The objects are presented as beautiful, as sensually overwhelming but disconnected from their collecting and pre-collecting pasts as they are

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disconnected from the ethnographic discourse—and yet they remain objects of ethnography. They still function as samples (of other aesthetics) rather than creative comments on the world. As such, they remain surfaces for guided projections. However, there is an abyss spreading large and dark like a hungry mouth beneath the material skin of the ethnographic object and behind the questions that have not been asked. This abyss threatens the ethnographic exhibition into extinction. This book is part of that process and a memorial to that category that has significantly shaped the world. In many ways, this is a ghost story that will remain incomplete.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been a long journey, beginning with my PhD project more than a decade ago. I would like to thank my colleagues at the English Department and the Graduate School “Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship” at the University of Rostock for their encouragement, support and their critical suggestions, especially Gesa Mackenthun, Gabriele Linke, Klaus Hock, Franz Josef Holznagel, Sünne Juterczenka, Michael Bowen, Jennifer Kaiser and Nadine Lübbe. I am deeply indebted to all scholars and friends who read and discussed ideas, chapters and fragments of this book with me, most importantly Juliane Schwarz Bierschenk, Moosje Goosen, Timo Schulz, Jennifer Gonzalez, James Clifford, Wayne Modest, Ruth Phillips, Stacy Kamehiro, Christian Feest and Dominik Collet. I very much appreciate the contributions of Courtney Leonard, Bea Caballero and Tobias Sperlich who shared their thoughts in the interview chapter with me. Courtney Leonard also provided the beautiful book cover and thus shared her outstanding work. The Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis has provided a great intellectual space to discuss my ideas and experiment with form. The University of Santa Cruz has welcomed me as visiting fellow and provided access to research material as well as a wonderful space for exchange. I would also like to thank all mentioned museums for inspiring me and for being open and responsive in spite of my critical attitude. Above all, I am deeply grateful to have such a supportive and loving family, my parents Anke and Bernd Zittlau, my sister Birgit Zittlau, my partner Emiliano Leonardi and my children Luan and Luna, whose patience, love, laughter and support I cannot thank enough.

INTRODUCTION SPECTRES AND GHOSTS

In “The Horror in the Museum,” a story ghost-written by Howard Phillips Lovecraft in 1932, George Rogers, the owner of a private wax museum, is increasingly absorbed by his obsession with Rhan-Tegoth, a deity he had shipped from Alaska to London. In the museum, the artefact is part of a collection Rogers assembled on his “mysterious trips to Tibet, the African interior, the Arabian desert, the Amazon valley, Alaska, and certain little-known islands of the South Pacific” (Lovecraft 2010, 282)— geographical regions that were prominently exoticized during the nineteenth century and became the focus of study for anthropology. The story suggests that Rogers successfully reveals the secrets of ancient civilizations in good anthropological fashion and dangerously engages with things long gone. In the end, ghostly powers turn him into the most gruesome object on display—a memorial to ignorance. It is no coincidence that it is the mad amateur explorer who owns a museum in the story, and that his business is eventually taken over by Orabona, “the dark foreign-looking fellow who always served Rogers as a repairer and assistant designer” (Lovecraft 2010, 283). It is only towards the end of the story that the protagonist Stephen Jones, “a leisurely connoisseur of the bizarre in art” (ibid., 281) comes to believe in the existence and power of objects he had all along perceived to be marvellous representations of classifiable specimen. Thus, the rationalist gets a grasp of alternative knowledge, the showman gets his lesson for awaking Gods, and the Native gets everything. How easy it is to read the story as a parody on museums of ethnography in the early twentieth century when anthropologists collected objects they did not fully comprehend, when elitist visitors marvelled at exotic forms and native assistants could only stand back and watch the spectacle—or become part of it. Egyptian mummies, bog people, shrunk heads, and skeletons—the storage and display of human remains inside museums and their spiritual heritage have inspired numerous ghost stories. So did the exhibition of ceremonial or other objects thought to be powerful. But as Sigmund Freud sought to convince us a century ago, animism is a pre-religious concept of

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Introduction

primitive societies, a childlike perspective of the world that Western civilization has overcome—a thesis he certainly developed in an interdisciplinary exchange with anthropologists such as Herbert Spencer, Edward Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer whose work he had been reading. That museums nevertheless inspire ghost stories may say as much about the concept of animism as it is evidence of the missing link in the logic of the dualism promoted in museum settings—the past and the present, self and other, the distant and the close…male and female, sacred and secular, death and life. The multi-layered distances created by these dichotomies assure safe encounters without ever meeting. They allow for fantasies beyond time and place and transform the museum into a place of desire that cannot be addressed with the formula of Western scientific rationality. These fantasies become the ghosts as they remain like words unspoken in the dark corners of the museum-like mind. I am not writing about museum horror, though, a popular genre and comfortable category for numerous films, novels and short stories, from Shawn Levy’s Night at the Museum (2006, 2009, 2014) movie trilogy, to Anna Lee Walters’ Ghost Singer (1994), a novel set in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., in which ghosts of human remains kill several members of the staff; from the Hollywood classic Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) to Steven Millhauser’s short story “The Barnum Museum” (1990)—a description of Phineas Taylor Barnum’s museum as a claustrophobic labyrinth home to strange creatures and events. Museum horror feeds on the remains of the once living, on the seemingly dead but alive, on the exotic and unknown. It narrates the museum as a place of curses and magic, illusions and confusions—a haunted house. To distinguish these ghosts from the hauntings that inhabit this book, I will speak from now on of spectres when addressing the uncanny notions provoked by the display of ethnographic objects. Introduced by Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon almost simultaneously in the early 1990s, the theory of haunting—different from notions of popular ghosts—has become a concept widely applied in the humanities. In Spectres de Marx: L’Etat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (1993), Jacques Derrida coined the term hauntology (hantologie) a near homonym (at least in its original French) to ontology. Hauntology questions the focus on material and manifested forms of being by introducing the spectre as an omnipresent and yet absent character—an invisible and influential form of presence. The spectre, Derrida suggests, is in between; a state of irritation, confusion and mystery that we have to learn to live with. He speaks of the revenant, a repetition,

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always expected to return (from the past or from the future) and haunt. Thus, the spectre becomes potentially the remains of that which cannot be forgotten (or that which is too easily neglected). Conceptualized as an inevitable threat, Derrida’s spectres (dis)embody what should not be, they are emotional diagnoses and moral categories depending on notions of fear of the unknown (the unseen) whose presence (a timeless existence) is never impossible, whose dark power cannot be denied. At the heart of Derrida’s hauntology is the inevitability of being seen while not being able to see the observer, a familiar recipe of power and oppression. In this context, ethnographic museums are clear-cut power constellations of collectors and collected. Hauntology then threatens the omnipotence of the collector by suggesting that the objects are not detached from their collecting contexts or their pre-collecting pasts. It questions the superiority of the collector’s gaze (represented by the display) by introducing its limitations through a possibility of other presences. The academy has perceived (ethnographic) museums as institutions of power that determine the norm, as manifestations of science’s uncertain order, as evidence to the world made rational and comprehensible. As Benedict Anderson, Tony Bennett and others have argued, the museum developed as a division of an apparatus of institutional control producing an economy of cultural power in the nineteenth century (Anderson 1983, 178-185; Bennett 1995, 20-23). It created a much-needed collective consciousness and made an expanding world easily accessible. In many ways, ethnographic exhibitions replaced travel experiences by simulating them, thus enforcing exotic encounters as educational enterprises. The museum presented collected communities as childlike, primitive, backward and uncivilized (compared to European ideas of advancement) and thus confirmed the superiority of the scientists (and the collecting communities). As an object-driven institution, the ethnographic museum stores, presents and preserves material culture. In current post-, neo- and decolonial scenarios, the visually and materially exotic is mass produced and readily available in advanced technological ways. Ethnographic exhibitions are trapped by strategies of estrangement that rely inevitably on the dichotomies provoked by the collecting context of the material. The display of objects has become a familiar trope that in a way has lost its exotic appeal but not its power of enchantment. Postcolonial approaches to ethnographic museums recover the suppression and silencing of voices (of the collected) with an attempt of reconciliation. Scholars uncover the tricky distributions of agency and insist on the presence of various points of view in exhibitions (see for example Lavine and Karp 1991, McCarthy

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Introduction

2007). However, the attraction of the ethnographic object derives from an imperial nostalgia that is in itself almost historical (Rosaldo 1989). Its audience can (re)claim the objects as evidence to imperial history, to scientific discourses, to adventurous discovery stories or traumatic processes of dispossession. The approach to objects (and their interpretation) is faithful to the concept of ownership—whose (version of the) story is illustrated, confirmed or created with the help of ethnographic objects? Moreover, whose story is lost? In Ghostly Matters (1997), Avery Gordon does not so much trace the spectres as she follows the events that create the spectres. Therefore, her spectres are not the ultimate threats lurking in dark corners of power systems but essential aftermaths that resist reconciliation. They are the lives that remain unsolved and unsolvable—the missing stories. In this context, ethnographic museums become containers of spectres in which the haunted and the haunting are the same depending on the point of view. Traces of the unsolvable and unsolved are everywhere. Nothing is easily distinguishable. Gordon’s spectres are ambivalent and manifest in words unspoken. Power is no longer clear-cut, but a troubled misadventure. Norms, (scientific) order, chaos and control become shadows of larger things unsolved. Hauntology turns into the questions that have not been asked. While Jacques Derrida explores the nature of spectres and Avery Gordon traces their source, Diana Taylor provides a theory for making them visible. In her book The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), she understands performance as a possibility to interact with the spectres. She writes: Performance makes visible (for an instant, live, now) that which is always already there: the ghosts, the tropes, the scenarios that structure our individual and collective life. These specters, made manifest through performance, alter future phantoms, future fantasies…The power of seeing through performance is the recognition that we’ve seen it all before—the fantasies that shape our sense of self, of community, that organize our scenarios of interaction, conflict, and resolution. (Taylor 2003, 143)

A performance is a non-static interaction, a unique moment in time that dissolves the sense of time by its radical interactions beyond time. The ethnographic museum wrongly suggests a non-performative setting by giving supposedly universal (thus static) categories and definitions. Nevertheless, exhibitions are not representations of scientific endeavours—they are performances of objects. The objects can produce meaning only when interacting with each other and the museum space.

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They are not isolated signs pointing from A to B in the semiotic sense but need to be thought of beyond their glass case scenario. The museum’s architecture, the museum’s often-neglected facilities such as the café and the shop, and the objects’ devoted companions—the text labels all contextualize the objects. As they shine on their individual stages, they depend on the rest of the setting. They enact visions and histories; they remind us of the missing stories and the lives unsolved. This is where the spectres are. In the following, I understand the museum exhibition as a performance of ethnographic objects in which the spectres are made visible in the voids, the gaps, and the silences. The display becomes a re-enactment of previous displays and in this continuous conversation with the past, the objects are turned into an archive of display strategies and collecting discourses. The exhibition space becomes as significant as the objects’ histories themselves and the past, present, and future strangely dissolve. Chapter One, “Curiosities,” deals with the first appearance of ethnographic objects in museum settings. During the Renaissance, the cabinets of curiosities assembled a variety of material that fell out of the ordinary object experience. I argue that these cabinet structures not only return in today’s museums as means of clever exhibition designs with historical reference possibilities but more so, that the notion of the curio has always been the dominating force in collections and exhibitions. In the second chapter, I explore the shift from the category of curio to the category of specimen that took place during the nineteenth century as part of the establishing scientific discourse. I focus on text labels and the exhibition of people here as two significant phenomena that current museum settings are still haunted by. The Ishi Poems are part of this chapter, making texts related to the case of Ishi, who lived in the Hearst Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco, available in different ways. I continue chronologically, looking at souvenirs as a popular object category that recreates the preconditions of museum settings and focuses on aesthetic expectations. The objects are linked back to the curio scenario and reveal the trap of ethnographic displays. In the following chapter, I discuss an experiment in art-based research during which I created an ethnographic object together with exhibition visitors and interpret their approaches in the context of my analysis. In Chapter Five, “Voids,” I understand the object on display as a marker of voids that need to, or in several cases cannot be, filled. I wonder about the voids we are already conscious about and try to establish connections with. In the chapter’s second part, “Raven,” I think about a case in which the void is consciously avoided, in which we indeed have all

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the information about a particular object and what that does to the category of ethnographic objects. Chapter Six is a roundtable discussion. I asked three outstanding scholars and practitioners to think about their place in museum settings, the place of ethnographic objects and to share their visions for ethnographic objects in museums. That chapter is also important since museums likewise attempt to include a number of different voices into their displays. The seventh chapter is a conclusion in which I exercise the previous theoretical discussions using one very particular private museum in Germany. I analyse the display and its meta-museum qualities while thinking about the role of the imagination in museum exhibitions. My epilogue is a fragmented story about an ethnographic object I personally own. While most examples focus on objects from indigenous North America, the theory developed using these examples is applicable to all objects randomly grouped as ethnography and exhibited in museums with intent to reveal a glimpse of other lives.

CHAPTER ONE CURIOSITIES

In Renaissance Europe, ethnographic objects entered the exhibition stage as part of a new celebration of curiosity. In pre-Renaissance Christian Europe, curiosity had been the sinful desire for knowledge when wonder marked the valuable point of departure into inquiry. Connected to pleasure and greed, curiosity (as a desire for explanation) was commonly banned, most famously by Augustine of Hippo who firmly promoted the obedient and uncritical acceptance of all phenomena of the world as (the Christian) God’s creation. In this context, wonder involved a state (an emotional statement) when encountering the formerly unknown. Thus taking Augustine’s writings as a discourse of early Western Christianity, the authorities of the church celebrated the extraordinary while damning explanations of its extraordinariness. This dual concept of curiosity and wonder was maintained for centuries as obvious in the writings of René Descartes who identified wonder as an emotion that “has no opposite and is the first of all passions” (Greenblatt 1991, 20). Accordingly, an object of wonder “is so new that for a moment at least it is alone, unsystematized, an utterly detached object of rapt attention” (ibid.). This contextual disruption as an act of (dis)possession marks the birth of the museum. Within the Christian sphere of (pre)Renaissance Europe, the church— as institution and exhibition space—was the first museum celebrating marvels as purposeful miracles of God’s creation (see for example Altick 1978, Pomian 1986). Relics (or pilgrims’ and crusaders’ souvenirs) were often displayed in premises adjoined to European churches and monasteries.1 Collections included for example [a] drop of the Virgin’s milk, a pot that figured in the miracle at Cana, a scrap of a martyr’s shroud, nails or a fragment of wood from the true cross … antediluvian giant’s bones and teeth. (cited in Altick 1978, 6)2

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Relics and other marvellous objects were integrated into the biblical narrative to be celebrated as wonders of God’s creation. The Reformation brought these collections to an end since the Puritans opposed the greed exposed by entrance fees, as well as the very idea of displaying objects of marvel (Altick 1978, 9). Eventually the sixteenth-century religious upheaval and its outrageous destruction of the early displays of wonder led to the establishment of the cabinets of curiosities in the secular sphere legitimizing curiosity as an investigation into the processes of life. This phenomenon coincided with the addition of the New World to European maps. Collecting became an activity of the economically privileged, who commonly referred to their (private or semi-public) displays throughout Europe with the German terms Wunderkammer, Kunstkammer, Raritätenkammer, or Naturalienkammer. It is difficult to separate collections from their display, as their arrangement is always already an exhibition even when in the private domain.3 The word cabinet initially applied to a cupboard with shelves and drawers that held small objects. By the seventeenth century, the term was used in reference to the space occupied by the collection. None of these terms describing the collection connected the establishment to curiosity. All of them remained in the domain of wonder.4 The origin of the museum is then not connected to knowledge and inquiry but to an affective impulse of encountering the strange, the visually overwhelming, and the extraordinary. The term Wunderkammer connects the collection to the marvels of the world whereas Kunstkammer defines the objects as art (and aesthetic expressions). Raritätenkammer as well as Kuriositätenkabinett focus on the exceptional whereas Naturalienkammer exclusively on the category of naturalia. During the enlightenment, narratives of nature became increasingly important explanations of life, whereas religious narratives continued to be materialized on a smaller scale. The cabinets of curiosities are often presented as evidence of those new efforts to categorize the world since the very same objects previously found in Christian collections now referred to secular (scientific) narratives and thus to new ways of making sense of the world.5 “Antediluvian giant’s bones and teeth,” for example, were now no longer evidence of Goliath’s existence. Carefully measured they became part of a scientific narrative of the monstrous as can be seen in the cabinet of Robert Hubert who listed “a giant’s thigh bone more than four feet in length, found in Syria” next to horns of a dog from China, a rib of a Triton or Mereman, and a pelican’s head.6 In contrast to persisting assumptions, the cabinets of curiosities were not just creative chaotic displays of amassed objects. Frequently, the order

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of the exhibitions was ruled by space or the aesthetic perceptions of their owners, displaying the entire collection to reveal wealth by quantity. In accordance with the scientific discourse of the time, the display was usually divided into artificialia, embracing everything made by man, and naturalia, referring to the marvels of nature. A third category, scientifica, was often added, comprising instruments and automatons and sometimes exotica, in reference to objects supposedly from geographically distant regions, were set apart. 7 According to the individual preferences of the owners, specific categories dominated. Peter the Great is known for having had a particular interest in the monstrous, whereas Rudolf II of Prague had apparently been attracted to the occult and August II the Strong to technical inventions and exceptional artisanship. The collections were framed by paintings depicting scenes from the Bible. Portraits of the collection-owners established an interpretative context to the exhibition governing the objects. The display did not focus on the individual objects, but on their relationship to other objects in direct visual comparison to establish a “compendium of all rare strange things” (Borel cited in Daston and Park 1998, 272). All objects were perceived to be extraordinary as examples of exceptional workmanship, decorative rarities and unusual creations of nature. While some of the extraordinary objects fall in the category of the monstrous as has been discussed by scholars like Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park (1998), many objects were perceived to be particularly beautiful or seemingly impossible (for example miniatures such as the canonical cherry stone with engravings). The aim was to assemble a bizarre parade of the grotesque with a canon of objects easily recognizable as part of that parade such as the “manucodiata or bird of Paradise,” as noted in Hubert’s inventory list, with feet, for it hath great feet, to show that it perches on trees in a land as yet unknown, for they are never seen alive, but are always found dead in the Malaccos Islands, by reason of a continual wind that bloweth six month one way and six month the other way, and because of their sharp head, little body,

Chapter One

10 and great feathered tayle, they are blown up so high that they fall dead in another climate or country. (cited in Altick 1978, 13)

The bird of paradise was usually brightly coloured and not natural to the location in which it was exhibited. Its name easily gives away the religious connotations that were then projected onto the regions in which the bird was found. Yet the narrative in the inventory suggests a desire to observe the bird alive when apparently the narrator has only seen it stuffed and prepared for trade and travel. The conclusions drawn from the stuffed body seem to be adventurous to today’s readers and yet of a desperate attempt to explain the specific object’s origin. The fragments of experience, stories and conclusions in reference to the bird’s stuffed body reveal the transition from curiosity to science—no longer a desire for an explanation but the explanation given with the help of natural phenomena loosely related to the exhibited object. Curiosity then was the longing for a different, non-biblical master narrative that by its nature questioned the Christian world order to eventually confirm it.

The Cabinets The main characteristic of early exhibitions was the visible attempt to order the world by a synchronic fashion of multiple stories developed in connection to the displayed objects. As Ken Arnold observed: “What were presented were not so much objects that spoke for themselves as narrative webs constructed about objects…” (Arnold 2006, 87). Comparable to Pueblo story telling techniques, the narratives in the cabinets of curiosities developed just like spider webs: Many little threads radiated “from a center, criss-crossing each other. As with the web, the structure will emerge as it is made” as Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko suggested (cited in Fitz 2004, 16). But as with the spider web, the narrative was (pre)structured and evolved around a centre, that is not so much a core of narrative material but a frame of possible relations, i.e. to the world. In the cabinets of curiosities, the narrative (in the form of objectrelated anecdotes) was not indicated by text labels but usually communicated by the collector himself who guided his visitors through the

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exhibition. Certainly, multiple narratives about the objects and their contexts coexisted, particularly when the cabinets of curiosities were open to a larger number of visitors (Collet 2007, 222). In diplomatic negotiations as well as social events, the exhibition of the strange was an ideal stage to encourage conversation departing from the curio. Personal associations and experiences were for social purposes just as relevant as the master narrative communicated by the collector and their narration stimulated by the objects that became source and illustration of the inexplicable to be explained. Thus, the narrative forms an essential but non-visual component of the exhibition in the cabinets of curiosities. Next to references to natural and geographical discoveries, inventory lists such as the one by Robert Hubert reveal the persistence of particular narratives to explain the objects in the collection. The assembled artefacts stood “in a special relationship to the totality and, hence, offer[ed] a means of acquiring knowledge of, and privileged relation to, that totality” (Bennett 1995, 40-41). Yet it seems that their out-of-ordinary-status precisely does not communicate a common sense of the world but an anti-thesis to that sense of the world, not making a statement about the normal state but its very counterpart. In other words, the cabinets of curiosities secure normality by exhibiting difference. Therefore, the exhibitions in the cabinets of curiosities referred to common discourses and master narratives, which were based on oppositions (and thus comparisons) to establish and confirm Christian European norms and precisely not encouraging alternative interpretations of the established world order. Objects of the non-European world exhibited in the European cabinets of curiosities, for example, had clearly been (pre)selected to support the European master narrative (and consequently did not offer opportunities to contradict it). For example, preferred among ethnographic objects from North America—that did not form an extra category of exhibition in the cabinets—were those that somehow opposed European culture, such as bows and arrows (opposing guns), wampum (opposing money), and woven baskets (opposing metal containers). Only those elements of everyday life that were easily comparable (and easily identifiable as primitive in European eyes) were selected (Calov 1969, 72). This narrative of progress is not immediately evident in curiosity displays. The objects are not related to each other in terms of a linear development towards advanced superiority. Nevertheless, by focusing on exceptions the cabinets of curiosities eventually helped to establish the natural sciences as fields of knowledge that categorize and institutionalize perception of the normal.

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Chapter One

In addition to the objects documenting everyday life in other parts of the world, monstrosities of nature—perceived as unusual also in their places of origin—were displayed as signifiers of the exotic and the unknown (and thus transported the formerly mentioned objects of ubiquitous practices into that realm). John Winthrop Jr., for example, who collected in North America for the Royal Society in the 1660s, sent branches of oak trees that grew miniature acorns, a strange kind of fish, as he himself described it, and a “head of a deer which seems not an ordinary head” (cited in Collet 2007, 288) from North America to Great Britain. Thus, an exotic environment was created which put people, nature and objects (perceived as an undividable unity) into discourses of (unusual) environments illustrating variety by using exceptions. The idea of oppositions became crucial to pattern the world. During the Renaissance, several descriptions of the New World inhabitants circulated, which all originated from a similar perspective and created the image of a singular culture defined by its “deficiencies” in comparison to the Europeans. To take the most obvious source, Christopher Columbus observed “no great diversity in the appearance of the people or in their manners and language. On the contrary, they all understand one another, which is a very curious thing,” as he writes in a letter to King Ferdinand of Spain in 1493. Columbus, as many others, divided the New World population in biblical manner into Good and Evil. Whereas the first category comprised people described as friendly, helpful, modest, handsome and brave, the evil person was usually a lusty cannibal drawn to lechery and polygamy, dominated by superstition and human sacrifices—a fierce and unpredictable warrior.8 This bipolar approach to the world was interwoven with travel narratives, which were dominated by ideas of the exotic and did not necessarily correspond to the actual observations made. Yet there is an obsession with connecting and relating these kinds of writing to some sort of authentic experience, which is troubling in its way because it continues to hold within science the claim of truth. Dominik Collet, for example, explains how Caspar Schmalkalden, who travelled extensively for the Dutch West India Company in the mid-seventeenth century, described the non-European people he encountered in Brazil as heathens who practised polygamy. According to his travel reports, the women proudly exhibited their naked bodies, carried their babies on their backs and threw their breasts over their shoulders to nurse them. Children that were born dead were immediately eaten, Schmalkalden reports (Collet 2007, 105), which evokes the cannibal motif.

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Clearly, non-European (imagined) customs were narrated in the cabinets as an inversion to European customs. This inversion was not only illustrated with objects from the quotidian sphere, but also (or more so) with objects of the category of naturalia like cashew nuts, manioc roots, or calabash that were part of the discourse of sinful life of non-European communities (ibid., 110-112). A spectacular example was the fruit of the Ahouvay tree, which was a popular collector’s item for Europeans. It was rumoured that the fruit was used especially by vicious women to murder their husbands at the slightest suspicion of unfaithfulness (ibid., 250). Nature and culture became interchangeable and non-European communities clearly part of an untameable wilderness. This narrative also involves discourses of gender and Christianity that insisted on the female sex being closer to instinct and nature and thus more dangerous as well as endangered. Fantastic tales such as these were a result of the impossibility to contextualize the artefacts or the lack of effort to do so. In most cases, the collectors did not come across the objects in contexts other than commodity exchange. They relied on dealers who made the objects available in the first place and thus purchased with the object a particular narrative (manufactured for sale). Objects that showed European influence and could not be included into the discourse of the non-European world were not collected. Clearly, the collections can only reflect the European imagination of non-European communities, constructing those as exotic (and therefore curious) entities of desire that ultimately reflected the collectors’ longing. The cabinets of curiosities were not, as they were celebrated to be, a window into the world, but a mirror of Europe’s elite (see also Collet 2007, 355), the microcosm of their imagination, and served to define the self as civilized in contrast to an abstract other, thus justifying a right to power claims and domination. Nevertheless, this postcolonial interpretation only becomes evident when the collections (as representations of discourse) experience a transition to the (natural) sciences. In Renaissance inventory lists, the fascination with the strange often involves admiration (and maybe envy) that gradually, but not necessarily, transforms into claims of superiority. In the previous church collections an authoritarian claim was made by embedding the objects in the biblical narrative and turning them into relics: An inconspicuous piece of wood might stem from the holy cross, a piece of stone from the spot where Christ ascended to heaven, and a bone might be evidence of a particular saint or martyr. This way, the artefacts became commonly accessible and lent credibility to the events that they testified. In the cabinets of curiosities, a narrative of (scientific)

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investigation replaced this religious narrative. Hubert’s “bird of Paradise” is contextualized in categories of zoology and meteorology that seemingly help to solve—not merely accept—the mystery of its existence as a dead (and stuffed) specimen. Interestingly enough, this particular example explores the object already as a museum object, i.e. the pre-museum past of the objects remains obscure even in the explanation. The curio then is a category inherent not to the object but established by its contextualization. This contextualization involves narratives to explain the previously unknown, the unfamiliar, or the extraordinary. The object then becomes the archive of the narrative. However, the void of the objects’ pre-museum context remains. There is no information about its life before the curio category. Initially, all objects have the potential to be turned into curiosities by narratives, since curiosity “resists control, both as an appetite and as a material object,” as Barbara Benedict writes (2001, 5). During the Renaissance, wonder and curiosity become conjoined twins. While wonder is always part of the extraordinary, it seems that curiosity, in its attempt to explain and rationalize (and thus dismiss the emotional value), tries to disguise wonder as a scientific category (devoid of emotional and subjective elements). Wonder had become despised during the age of Enlightenment. Emotionally overwhelming acceptance of the extraordinary is dismissed as ignorance and ultimately to be erased by rational (scientific) explanations. This interaction between curio and wonder is the point of departure for haunting when the exotic as an emotional category of marvel is always hauntingly present and yet suppressed by the narrative of science.

The Renaissance of the Cabinets No cabinet of curiosity has survived throughout the centuries and only very few curio objects have been preserved. The Wunderkammer Olbricht in Berlin, a private collection, exhibits a selection of curio artefacts such as the neck and head of a giraffe, an anatomical model of an eye and a narwhal tusk (originally exhibited as the horn of a unicorn) from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Other cabinets have been reconstructed such as the Kunst- and Wunderkammer at Ambras Castle in Innsbruck (Austria), which originates in the sixteenth century, and the famous Green Vault in Dresden (Germany) still housing some of its eighteenth-century objects. Contemporary artists such as Mark Dion employ the cabinets of curiosities as a strategic chaos whose affect derives from the combination of extraordinary objects. David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology (which has received particular attention after the

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publication of Lawrence Weschler’s book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, 1996) can likewise be seen as a museum-size art installation employing the strategies of the cabinets of curiosities. The focus on the strange has never ceased to stir attention and has been exploited with economic success since the nineteenth century, for example by Phineas Taylor Barnum whose museum projects departed from the Renaissance conception of curiosity. The same context can be attributed to Robert Ripley’s franchise Believe it or Not. Both are perceived to be institutions relevant to popular culture and not taken seriously as museum endeavours although they also provide opportunities for critical metareflection. For instance, at the beginning of the tour in Believe It Or Not in Copenhagen, one of the first items the visitors pass is a mirror and the instructions next to it encourage the visitors to try incredible tongue tricks as shown on a photograph. At the end of the tour, the visitors realize that the mirror was in fact a window displaying those who try the tongue tricks at the beginning of their tour to other visitors. The visitors themselves become oddities and objects of curiosity here and the museum provides an interactive opportunity to reflect on strategies of display and observation. During the last decades, the cabinets of curiosities have been made relevant to the educational mission assigned to museums. The seemingly random arrangement of artefacts devoid of written contextualization supposedly encourages an active (and fun) engagement on the part of the visitors. Particularly curators of art exhibitions, for instance Sönke Dinkla, recommend the strategies of the early displays. According to her, the presentation of one master narrative is no longer a desirable approach to communicate ideas in exhibitions (2007, 55). Complexity and diversity have to be merged via a net of connections that the visitors have to uncover. Such claims do not recognize the biblical and colonial master narratives of the cabinets and perceive the thematic and associative displays as devoid of didactic missions hence de-politicizing the cabinets (as well as their contemporary counterparts). While art museums attempt to twist the canon in this way, 9 other museums visually recreate curio displays. Examples can be found in the Museum of Natural History in Berlin where a curiosity installation operates like an opera’s overture opening a gallery that links the museum to its history, or the National Museum of Scotland that connects its different galleries by a curiosity installation in the hall. While in both examples the cabinets of curiosities are mimicked to link collections to their history, other museums attempt to recreate the experience of the cabinets in terms of an affective, associatively effective space, such as the

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Windows on Collections in the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Ethnographic displays are not archives of cultural information but archives of display strategies (and their implications) that haunt with their silence. In other words, the spectres are not made visible in individual inquiries about single objects but evoked by their very display, which is the overlooked crucial starting point for such inquiries.

Notes 1

The display of religious artefacts was not restricted to Europe. In the northeast of Iran, the traditional pilgrimage location of Meshed can be compared to the European medieval church collections. In the temples of Japan, religious objects were exhibited next to art, which is comparable to the phenomenon described previously. Furthermore, Germain Bazin (1967, 34) mentions the Todaiji monastery, which includes the so-called Shoso-in and was founded in the eighth century, as the oldest of all museums in the world. It included everyday objects as well as musical instruments, medicine, and weapons and is comparable to the cabinets of curiosity of Renaissance Europe. 2 The Royal Abbey of St. Denis in France owned a celebrated relic collection of which a catalogue by Abbot Suger (twelfth century) survived from which I quote here. Altick furthermore mentions St. Omer, which was also well known for its collection (1978, 6). 3 To Susan Stewart there is little difference between the private and the public collection. These are categories of exposure that do not influence the idea of classification that is at the heart of the collection (Stewart 1993, 148-151). 4 Even the term Kuriositätenkabinett does not refer to curiosity as a mode of inquiry and a desire for knowledge, but to curiosities in its German translation as non-familiar and rare objects. 5 Sylvia Spitta, for example, discusses the cabinets of curiosities as evidence of a new world order significantly influenced by the experience of (and objects from) the New World (2009). Spitta is primarily interested in the transnational exchange between the Americas and Europe. However, other continents and places played an equally significant role in the establishment of collections and material-based communication of knowledge. 6 The reappearance of the gigantic as a significant element in these collections has been discussed by Susan Stewart (1993) as expressions of collective visions and by Sylvia Spitta (2009) as a particular American narrative of antiquity. 7 In his well-received work The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine (1995), Horst Bredekamp describes the order of the cabinets suggested by Samuel Quiccheberg (1529-1567). However, these instructions called Inscriptiones vel Tituli Theatri Amplissimi (1565) were designed for Albrecht V, the Duke of Bavaria and his Wunderkammer in Munich and are only one example (and possibility) of display.

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8 Classic works on European perceptions of America are John Huxtable Elliot (1970); Boies Penrose (2001 [1952]); Edmundo O’Gorman (1961); Robert F. Berkhofer (1978) and Stephen Greenblatt (1991). 9 The MOMA exhibition “Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities” (2008), organized by Sarah Suzuki, made deliberate reference to the cabinets and tried “to explain the world through its wonders” (Smith 2008). The Tate Modern in London does not exhibit paintings according to time or school but uses thematic references between paintings (Ritter 2003, 96-107). In this way, the canonical interpretations of the works can be overcome and redefined.

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Museums belong to the nineteenth century as much as experimental medicine (Claude Bernard), evolutionary biology (Charles Darwin) and the naturalistic novel (Emile Zola) do. They all claim to “present a comprehensive social study” (Bal 1992, 560). Benedict Anderson has revealed the close connection of museums and the construction of the nation state during the nineteenth century (1991, 182-189) and Tony Bennett (1995) discusses in depth the transformation of museums from private temples to important institutions of the public sphere. The first public museum in the United States was built on the initiative of Charles Willson Peale, who was a painter and devoted naturalist. It opened its doors in 1786 in Philadelphia focusing on natural history. Its structure and politics have been the scope of extensive scholarship (Hunter 1965, Alexander 1979 and 1983, Alderson 1992, Brigham 1995). The rich collection embraced objects of natural science, ethnography, art and history. Peale grouped the animals according to the Linnaean classification system and included the indigenous population of America. Portraits and paintings exhibited were mainly concerned with heroes of the American Revolution and founding fathers of the nation. The overall arrangement of the collection corresponded to the cabinets of curiosities of early modern Europe. Quotations from the Bible framed the exhibition to testify to the purposefulness and goodness of God’s creation (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 26-27), one of the criteria Samuel Quiccheberg has suggested for the cabinets of curiosities. In that sense, Peale’s museum represents a hybrid between early modern exhibition techniques and nineteenth-century museum discourses, in which the classification of nature became foregrounded. The British Museum is among the oldest public museums in Europe and has its roots in the Hans Sloane collection that opened in 1753 in London. The first ethnographic museum in Europe was established in 1773, at the University of Göttingen, Germany, which housed the collections of Captain James Cook, Reinhold Foster and Baron von Asch. Other early ethnographic museums in Europe opened in Leiden (1837), in

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Copenhagen (1841), in Munich (1868), in Berlin (1873), in Leipzig (1873), and in Rome (1875). The first museum devoted entirely to anthropology in America was the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University (1866). Its generous initiator was the entrepreneur and philanthropist George Peabody. In its early years, the museum struggled to establish itself among other institutions and to legitimize the discipline of anthropology (Hinsley 1985, 51). Other museums with an anthropological approach in North America were the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (1869), the United States National Museum in Washington, D.C. (1881), the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia (1887) and the Columbian Museum in Chicago (1893). The objects exhibited were arranged to represent different communities from around the world. Yet the selection of artefacts was not coincidental. Similarly to the systematic search for extraordinary objects for the cabinets of curiosities that eventually formed a canon of the exotic, the anthropology branch of museums was shaped by ideas of the other that then shaped the academic discipline. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues in her essay “Objects of Ethnography,” anthropology, as an academic field of inquiry, constructed its own objects: Such objects become ethnographic by virtue of being defined, segmented, detached, and carried away by ethnographers. They are ethnographic, not because they were found in a Hungarian peasant household, Kwakiutl village, or Rajasthani market rather than in Buckingham Palace or Michelangelo’s studio, but by virtue of the manner in which they have been detached, for disciplines make their objects and in the process make themselves. (1998, 17-18)

Anthropologists (and others) collect objects (that then become ethnographic) as evidence of things observed, potential informants and trophies of (scientific) travel conquests. Conclusively, the objects seemingly contain and withhold information as they also illustrate narratives and discourses. While collections order and store this information, the objects are arranged in museum exhibitions to communicate a selected part of the anthropologists’ findings therefore justifying the collection (and the interest in the objects). Obviously, the objects do not speak of these findings on their own or reveal information in an arrangement with other objects but are most commonly assisted by explanatory text labels. Either these labels direct the visitors’ gaze to the objects by drawing attention to the visually obvious or

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they diffuse the gaze by placing the objects into contexts of anthropology where they become evidence of science. In both cases, the object is a mere surface of projection. Questions are neither openly raised, nor provoked, nor are they sufficiently answered. Inevitably, ethnographic objects become metonymic for the societies the anthropologists study. They are taken to represent cultural practices and thus illustrate different ways of life that are interpreted mostly as backwards and primitive or in some cases as heroic and original. In combination with text labels, the objects reveal crucial parts of nineteenthcentury discourses that made ethnography—most importantly the scientific racism of nineteenth-century anatomy lessons and the rise of a consumer society that trades and values material manifestation of capital (and makes the objects available in the first place). In both cases, the objects are reduced to two functions: to prove a theory and/or to prove market value—functions that become evident in the text labels and still linger on as spectres in current museum settings.

Exhibition Labels During the nineteenth century, anthropology was inevitably part of the discipline of natural history clearly dividing human life and nature, categorizing the societies studied (and humanity’s past) as nature. The nineteenth-century narrative of evolution—the main narrative of anthropology, biology, and other sciences at the time—was at the centre of natural history museums. As visitors walked through the grand halls of object displays, they journeyed through the history of civilizations. The display of people(s) among dinosaurs and other distinct species suggested a connection to nature, to the primitive, and, inevitably, to extinction. The museum created an environment of the long gone—a cemetery atmosphere of the sacred and dead. Quite obviously, natural history’s narrative was shaped around Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, published in 1859. The book helped to spread the theory of evolution, which then was quickly transferred to human beings and to the discipline of anthropology that rose out of a medical interest in comparative anatomy. Nevertheless, in the Origin of Species, Darwin did not place human beings in a hierarchal relationship to each other nor did he indicate in his work that there is a logical movement towards a particular type of human being. In fact, he did not examine humans at all.

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Still, the theory of evolution moved towards the “chief interest of 19th century anthropologists” (Gossett 1997, 68) and led to an obsession with the measurement of race difference. At the time of the publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871, a rough concept and hierarchy of human races was widely accepted based on the idea that all human races strive for advancement (defined as EuroAmerican life). Anatomical measurement was translated into stages of development that did not take place as progress but as forms of replacement. Conclusively, the lesser advanced would soon be replaced by the advanced races. Darwin borrowed this idea stating famously that: At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. (Darwin 1871, 168-169)

Evidently, this implied the extinction of all “savage races” and transformed for example the non-European population of the Americas into vanishing species (and thus valuable for study). The idea of evolution (and its transformation into the study of human races) dominated the natural history museum discourse as well as its collecting policies during the late nineteenth and much of the first half of the twentieth century. Once scholars recognized the threat of extinction of societies as part of the theory, museums became crucial institutions to preserve things soon to be lost. As such, they developed into places that imprison the discourse of evolution as it manifested in nineteenth-century fantasies. The spectres are a dangerous pitfall and whenever we desire to recognize them, we undeniably have to recall these discourses. Their language formulas are preserved on paper; they are like magic spells in text—even when deconstructed. Museums became places of memory and mourning of the anthropologists who saw their subjects of study vanishing (which justified the study in the first place). The ethnographic object became not a container of information and knowledge but evidence of the impossibility of research; it materializes that which is lost. The context of the objects is then reduced to the coordinates directed by geography and natural environment, including eating and hunting habits, blurring the borders

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between descriptions of animals and humans—sketching vaguely an anthropologist’s vision. The American Museum for Natural History, which is located right across from Central Park in New York City, is a classic case of a haunted museum. Established in the nineteenth century and supported by wealthy patrons, it quickly became the centre of ethnographic research, counting Franz Boas and later Margaret Mead among its staff. For almost two centuries, that museum has been faithful to the traditional exhibition techniques and policies that made it popular in its infancy: it is a perfect case in point for spectrality theories. The museum has different sections for the exhibitions of people(s) divided into continents, or—in the case of North America, into rough regional parts. The Northwest Coast Indians are on the first floor near the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins, the Grand Gallery and the IMAX Theater. The second floor is shared among others between the South American Peoples and the African Peoples; and on the third floor, Eastern Woodlands Indians and Plains Indians are displayed next to the Primates and the Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples. These categories go back to nineteenth-century ideas of classification and simulate a journey in time and place. Entering the gallery on the “Eastern Woodlands Indians” and then “Plains Indians,” visitors encounter a terminology that dates back to the early days of anthropology. Though the exhibits are partly dated, thus visibly outdated, they suggest by their existence alone that their people(s) either did not change or have already vanished as the following text label illustrates: The life of the modern Plains Indians, whose numbers are now increasing after a period of population decline, differs radically from what it was in buffalo days. Many Plains Indians are now participating successfully in every aspect of modern American life, but some, handicapped by poverty and inadequate education, have been less successful. The transition from a nomadic hunting culture to full participation in a modern industrial society has been difficult. (Museum Label, AMNH, 2009)

The introductory text to the Plains Indians resembles the description of animals that are threatened by extinction linking them only to reproduction. Additionally, the “Plains Indians” are still summed up as a homogeneous group that remains homogeneous and distinguishable from other homogenized groups in contemporary society. The sentence contrasting economic conditions is immediately followed by a sentence that clearly articulates colonial attitudes. Not only does the text suggest that the inability to adapt to society (an odd assumption to make in the first

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place) leads to poverty, it furthermore leaves out everything concerned with colonial history, holding “the Indians” responsible for their own fate. It intends to link assimilation to the dynamics of inferior and superior cultures, turning history into a mood of nature, into a sudden and inevitable disaster. Although the text suggests a contemporary perspective, it finishes in the distant past, since the transition from a nomadic culture to a non-nomadic culture did not take place recently. The indigenous peoples in the American Museum of Natural History are portrayed as fictional creations inhabiting the minds and not the lands. The ethnographic objects illustrate the information collected and presented by the anthropologists. They are not agents of communication and data related to them is fragmentary as the following museum labels from the National Museum of Natural History (New York City, 2009) illustrate: Man’s costume, nineteenth century, Winnebago

War cup of copper

Kwakiutl masks worn by dancers in winter ceremonies. Detachable lips are fastened to the mask with wire through holes in the mouth.

The objects are categorized. The costume is that of a man and from Winnebago, the cup is a war cup and the masks are used in ceremonies. But the costume does not say anything about a man in nineteenth-century Winnebago, the cup does not tell us anything about the wars and the masks do not reveal anything about the ceremonies—apart from the fact that the dancers can detach their lips at some point (a detail that must have fascinated whoever was involved in its collecting and display). The museum tries to compensate the missing narratives by providing lengthy texts in cases in which information is available explaining cultural practices in seemingly objective details (to preserve that which is soon to be lost):

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Snow-snakes which were thrown on the snow or ice. The player who propelled his snow-snake the greatest distance was the winner. The snow-snakes with short shafts and rounded heads were held at the small end and whirled around the head to provide impetus to the throw. The ones with the flat shafts and upturned noses were slid over the ice or snow, flat side down.

The text labels do not point to the objects but become the objects in the museum environment. They do not say “these are snow-snakes” or “this is a war cup,” but suggest that object and information are one and the same. Objects and texts are inseparable. The past tense proves that the objects are no longer in use and at the same time suggests that the cultural practices in which the objects had been used are no longer performed either. Detailed descriptions are the results of close (careful and intense) observations—a record of truth. We learn about throwing snow-snakes and yet the words distance the objects even further from the lives of their viewers. They are historically and geographically detached—a process Johannes Fabian has called the denial of coevalness (2002, 31). Nobody will use these museum snow-snakes to play. They merely prove the existence of a game that is not explained by the mere sight of the wooden sticks accompanying the text to outsiders. The objects cease to be used once they enter the museum halls. The masks no longer serve in ceremony (the lips forever detached); the Winnebago man no longer wears these clothes. The anthropological discourse as present in the American Museum of Natural History is devoid of emotions seeking a neutral description of (visible) facts—facts that are observable, explicable and classifiable. The de-emotionalized gaze locates its subject where it does not concern the viewer’s life: in the distance of place and time, detached from historical decisive moments, reduced to cultural ceremonies, and quotidian practices of every day survival. The observers are not involved. The paradox lies in the nature of ethnographic objects that are never historic. They are timeless. With the end of ceremonies, snow-snake games and fashion, the people of the ceremonies, snow-snake games and fashion are presented to be gone as well. The story of evolution that haunts the natural history museum cannot be a story of progress but of episodic moments in human history. This history becomes an inevitable present state and the future non-existent. The objects of ethnography are evidence to these processes of classification. They can only stand for lost moments

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and memories. Who was the man in Winnebago whose clothes we see? More importantly, can we tell a life by its clothes? In museum settings, ethnographic objects are metonymic for the societies the anthropologists study. But a metonymy is always incomplete and thus in some ways dissatisfying. Ethnographic objects only poorly replace the societies of study and this default was a great worry to museum anthropologists. While the objects could be preserved, the people were vanishing—thought the collectors. The objects were traces of their existence and yet not able to talk (back) and while the objects can be easy repositories of collected and projected information, they unfortunately do not answer questions.

People on Display On my way to the research library of the National Museum of the American Indian in 2009, I passed an open classroom in which a woman in traditional dress was weaving a colourful carpet. A huge window blurred the border between the interior and the exterior of the room, offering the classroom as a stage to the public. While the door was open, inviting observers to take a closer look, visitors did not enter but watched from the outside at a safe distance transforming the woman from a potential teacher into an object of study. The research area locates the museum (and particularly its content) within the sphere of education. The library, digital learning stations and the classroom offer preselected knowledge related to the exhibitions. The woman became part of the knowledge offered in two ways. For one, she shared her weaving knowledge in regular intervals with the public in little workshops becoming a teacher. More frequently though, the woman worked on her own project in a classroom behind glass. Here the room became her cage of specimen discourse, the woman the revenant of people on display, the museum haunted by an obsession with the classification of the physical other. This chapter explores people on display within the discourse of specimen as promoted in the nineteenth century. While we are commonly aware of the racist implications of this discourse, we continue to perceive the exhibition of people in museum contexts uncritically. The weaving woman is a reminder of the museum’s past, a living memorial of colonial and imperial strategies to categorize human beings in order to justify power claims. It is important to keep in mind that nineteenth-century anthropologists did not study objects—they studied people. They studied people the way

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they would study objects. Some of these people haunt academic texts as their spectres refuse to disappear from museum environments. Although they are individuals, their fates become representative of others and their stories reveal the troubled nature of ethnographic objects. Yet everything is more complex than just telling the story of people exploited by museum crowds eager to study their practices. Obviously, the people on display were the greatest ethnographic objects, confirming the scholars’ narratives in scripted performances of radical difference (that naturally appeared as non-scripted spontaneous events). However, they were never passive puppets. To analyse them this way, would continue the exploitation— keeping them as subjects/objects of study. To analyse them as active agents and willing participants would obscure nineteenth-century power constellations and their consequences. The exhibition of people(s) as others is no past phenomenon. Ethnographic museums thankfully employ living examples of the societies they display. Particularly in the form of guides, presenters and sharers of cultural activities, these people authenticate the material culture and offer an illusion of embodied truth. As they stress current narratives of culture(s), they mainly negate the past fantasies of vanishing and premodern people(s). In addition to the fact that our current narratives of genetic codes are very similar to nineteenth-century assumptions about embodied (physiognomic) differences, past inhabitants of ethnographic exhibitions haunt contemporary performers on the museum stage (from guides to performers in events). These spectres remind us of the missed logic of ethnographic displays: Museums continue to exhibit material fragments as samples of societies that are presented as curious others under the guise of scholarly investigation. The history of exhibiting people(s) as others is usually traced back to Christopher Columbus and the group of Taino (Arawak) whom he brought back to Europe where he presented them to the Spanish royalty. By the nineteenth century, this form of entertainment was popular beyond the enclosed circles of nobility and became a lucrative business as German menagerie-owner Carl Hagenbeck discovered in 1874 when his order of thirty reindeer arrived accompanied by three Sami men, one woman, a girl and a baby. The group walked from the harbour to the centre of Hamburg, when suddenly some of the animals escaped and the Sami men, expertly in control of the situation, caught them. Due to the success of that coincidence (and the financial decline in the animal trade), Hagenbeck exhibited the Sami together with the reindeer in his zoo. Visitors caught a glimpse of the Hagenbeck schedule of Sami life, including the continuous

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building and dismantling of tents to pitch them again a few metres further away, and catching the reindeer to release them almost immediately. These so-called habitat exhibits were soon replaced by scripted shows in which the people staged dances or theatre-like (historical) plays. The business involved negotiations with governments, agencies and complex contracts that often included a daily show routine of ten hours. One agent in the adventure of collecting objects and people was the Norwegian seafarer Johann Adrian Jacobsen. He contacted the performers for Hagenbeck and collected for several ethnographic museums and societies in Germany and Scandinavia.

The Bella Coola The Bella Coola men that Jacobsen brought to Germany in 1885 can be considered the most influential group in the history of anthropology. The performers toured for over a year until 1886, and caught the interest of medical professionals and anthropologists, significantly shaping their investigations. They performed and were studied not as individuals but as a group; not as the last of their kind but as samples of exotic Northwest Coast life. Their show (performed in zoos, circuses, lecture halls and theatres) included several dances, such as the Hamatsa and the Nutlamatla, a demonstration of bows and arrows, games such as a gambling stick game, and a mock potlatch (Haberland 1988, 27). Sometimes their performance was combined with other cultural performances, as for example with a concert of the military orchestra in Weimar that then played a march by Strauss followed by the Hamatsa dance of the Bella Coola (ibid., 20). At other times, school groups attended their show as part of their curriculum to learn about other cultures (ibid., 36). Throughout their tour, the Bella Coola changed the programme several times and included, due to weather conditions, new features such as a competition in snowshoeing. The main attraction, however, was the public burning of the shaman. After excessive dancing, the shaman-character stepped into a wooden box. Then a lid was fixed on top of it and the box was thrown into a fire where it went up in flames. While the astonished crowd stared paralyzed into the flames, the shaman reappeared with a sudden yell like a ghost and quickly disappeared in darkness (Cole 1985, 69). However, the show—more theatrical spectacle than scientific presentation—was not considered a success by its initiator, the Hagenbeck agent Adrian Jacobsen. He felt that the performers did not meet the visual expectations of their audiences. This disappointment of the public (that is

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perhaps nothing more than Jacobsen’s own frustration) made the group particularly interesting for scholars. The Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory in Berlin, for example, studied the nine men enthusiastically. Rudolf Virchow, head of that very influential society, commented: “by their particular facial features, their curious language, their skilled craftsmanship they can be distinguished immediately from other indigenous peoples. They prove to be an interesting object to every learned man” (cited in Haug von Kuenheim 2007, 5). 1 All renowned scientists at the time included the Bella Coola into their research. The ethnomusicologist Carl Stumpf recorded their songs (and founded the Berlin Archive of Ethnomusicology), well-known anthropologists Adolf Bastian (founder of the Museum für Völkerkunde Berlin) and Aurel Krause studied them and so did Rudolf Virchow, who measured them intensely, for which the performers requested gifts in return. Franz Boas pursued his linguistic interests in publishing about the Bella Coola. They inspired him to travel to the Northwest Coast, which became the focus of his career. Hence, the whole field of anthropology benefited from the Bella Coola show. Others, whose trip to Europe ended in the disaster of illness and death, overshadow the group’s straightforward narrative of their year in Germany. Others, who decided against the journey to Europe and those who were willing to go but did not meet the expectations of the agents, paved the way for the Bella Coola. However, they remain absent, unknown possibilities for other—unwritten—stories. All those others precondition the Bella Coola’s journey. All those others likewise shaped anthropology and in the documents about the Bella Coola, those others live on—as spectres, just as the Bella Coola are spectres to those cultural performers in museums today. However, some performers have been and can be traced in more detail, and some did reclaim a voice and discourse of their own. As for the Bella Coola, their show model—performing traditional dances, songs and games—is still popular in museum settings. Consequently, the spectres are manifold stigmatizing ethnographic objects and performances.

The Kwakwaka’wakw The Bella Coola would not have come to Europe if Jacobsen’s original mission had been successful. This is a story that has rarely been told. In 1882, Jacobsen travelled to the Northwest Coast of North America to obtain ethnographic objects for the Museum für Völkerkunde Berlin (Museum of Anthropology). Originally, his trip encompassed South

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America, Polynesia and Micronesia. Then the Berlin committee, responsible for enlarging the ethnographic collection of the museum, heard about the planned Northwest Coast trip of the ethnographic museum in Bremen, Germany. In fierce competition for the best objects, the committee sent Jacobsen spontaneously to British Columbia. Busy collecting, he encountered the “Quakult” (as he referred to them in his journal—today called the Kwakwaka’wakw) whose female community members’ head deformations he predicted to be an attraction in Europe. He writes to zoo-owner and ethnic show organizer Carl Hagenbeck (honorary member of the Berlin Society of Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory) suggesting a possible show. Hagenbeck agrees hesitantly, due to his experiences with a group of Inuit in 1880/81, insisting on the vaccination of the new show group prior to departure and a rather short show stay during summer so the group can be back by winter. He writes that he is pleased with Jacobsen’s engagement, but does not want a group of more than twelve people and insists in his letters that vaccination before departure is crucial to avoid the misfortune of the Inuit group.2 In 1880, Jacobsen had brought two Inuit families from Hebron, Labrador to Germany. Engaged by Hagenbeck, they were thoroughly inspected by the members of the Berlin Society of Ethnology, Anthropology and Prehistory. In 1881, they all died of smallpox. Abraham Ulrikab, a literate devoted Christian, kept a journal that has been published and portrays his view of the journey (Lutz 2005). In March 1882, Jacobsen travels to Nouette, Koskimo and Qatsine where female members of the community had skull deformations. He participates in potlatches and other events to establish a friendly relationship with the local communities (as he explains in his journals). Somehow, this goal was not an easy one, possibly connected to language barriers and Jacobsen’s idea to trade friendship with buying objects. Perhaps he is unhappy in general—he does complain a lot. He complains about the people of Nouette who do not want to sell him anything, he complains that nobody wants to come with him to Europe or that people are unreliable and change their minds frequently (128-129). Finally, Wachas, chief of Koskimo, and his wife agree to come to Europe and Jacobsen waits while they prepare and buys objects he is not interested in to keep everyone appeased (another complaint). After a few days, he has a little group of Kwakwaka’wakw to join him on the journey to Europe. Despite the immense financial input by Jacobsen (who bought several objects he calls useless in his journals, 129) the show group was not enthusiastic about the trip to Europe. They were afraid the journey would take a lifetime and eagerly debated the insecurity of a future on the ocean.

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Jacobsen and the show group begin their journey down the river but are followed by canoes filled with people from the villages who request the return of one of the women. After Jacobsen successfully threatens them (proudly stated in his journals), they leave his ship alone. Eight days later, the villagers appear again only to repeat their request of the return of one of the young women. Freshly married to William Hundt (the translator), the woman refuses. An uncle of another woman also appears and threatens to kill his niece if she sticks to her travel arrangements. Jacobsen appeases again with gifts and money, but his journals portray him as increasingly annoyed and anxious (138-139). On their way to Fort Rupert, storms teach their lessons about seasickness and the little group becomes less and less willing to continue its journey. In Fort Rupert, the local communities told horror stories of years on the ocean—Jacobsen’s time specifications are ignored. Angrily, Jacobsen writes that the local indigenous population spreads these stories as a result of jealousy—in his interpretation the local rumour spreaders eagerly want to go to Europe themselves, but alas, their heads are not deformed thus less interesting for audiences. Three days after their arrival in Fort Rupert, Jacobsen receives Hagenbeck’s notification to refrain from engaging “the longheads” due to the death of members of the group from Chile: The same year, another show troupe, “the Patagonians,” eleven people from Chile received medical care and vaccinations against smallpox in Paris, shortly after their arrival in Europe. Still, five of them died of pneumonia, measles and consumption. Part of their show routine had involved a bath in ice-cold water to show off their impressive resistance against harsh natural conditions. Hagenbeck grieves the “Patagonians’” deaths and cancels all future shows. He writes that he regrets the bad news that ruins all his plans for exhibiting people(s). He is discouraged from arranging further ethnic shows, as he stresses several times in his letter.3 Meanwhile a new delegation from Chief Wacha’s villages succeeds in convincing him and his wife to return. Jacobsen is left with the translator Hundt and the remaining woman. The show business is cancelled, but Jacobsen has made other arrangements. In a journal entry from the 17th of March 1882 (as cited by Hilde Thode-Arora 1989, 36) Jacobsen again stages himself as the clever hero having fooled everyone. The content (as well as the spelling and grammar) is highly adventurous: Jacobsen and William Hundt secretly rob graves to steal two deformed (female) skulls and one not deformed (male) skull whereby Jacobsen injures his hand in a hurry while twisting the head off the dead body. When the local community approaches them suspiciously, the two pretend to be occupied

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with hunting. According to Jacobsen, he fooled the naïve indigenous crowd. While the show-group did not make it to Europe, the skulls surely did. Their impact on anthropology within the discourse of crania cannot be denied. While human remains are increasingly repatriated and put to their final rest, their spectres continue to haunt the museums that house(d) them and the scientific discourses that they inspired. In many ways, anthropology would not exist without the study of skulls and the Bella Coola that Adrian Jacobsen recruited instead of the Kwakwaka’wakw on the Northwest Coast in British Columbia. Thus, anthropology also depended on the failure to recruit the Kwakwaka’wakw group. As museum performances are haunted by the ethnic shows of groups like the Bella Coola (and their spectres the Kwakwaka’wakw), the actual display of people as specimen in museum environments is rich in famous cases that continue to haunt the specimen discourse as displayed in public. As such, it also haunts academic discussions that still wonder about cases like Ishi.

Ishi “This is a special story about an exceptional man,” reads the dedication in my used copy of Theodora Kroeber’s classic Ishi in Two Worlds. The book is a Christmas gift, obvious from the dedication date. It is partly responsible for Ishi’s stardom. Written during the 1950s and first published in 1961, Theodora Kroeber narrates the story of someone whom she never met. She relies on sources and memories particularly of her husband Alfred Kroeber whom she did not yet know when Ishi lived in the museum. The story it tells has been circulated, told and retold in various versions for the past century. And it usually begins on the 29th of August 1911, when an indigenous North American man appeared in the corral of a slaughterhouse near Oroville, California. Almost immediately, he became a media attraction and a local curiosity because his language proved to be a challenge and communication next to impossible. Newspapers named him the “last of a wild tribe,” “the lone survivor of southern Yahis,” and the “stone-age man” (cited in Kroeber 1961, 7). These headlines reached nearby anthropologists who expressed their excitement. They had documented traces of nineteenth-century accounts of American Indians not yet classified, obscure pieces of a puzzle and this man seemed to be the missing piece. Alfred Kroeber, director of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum

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of Anthropology in San Francisco, enthusiastically notified the Sheriff of Butte County: Newspapers report capture wild Indian speaking language other tribes totally unable understand. Please confirm or deny by collect telegram and if story correct hold Indian till arrival Professor State University who will take charge and be responsible for him. Matter important account aboriginal history. (Kroeber 2002, 6)

Because the man seems to be the clue to a little known community, the anthropologist offers him refuge in the museum. Kroeber’s message stresses the scientific value of the man whom he came to call Ishi. His colleague Thomas Waterman meets Ishi in the local prison, where the authorities of Oroville had placed him. He confirms the rumours—his language was indeed nowhere to be found in their records, but similar to some dialects that were already registered. “He has some of the prettiest cracked consonants I ever heard in my life,” writes Waterman to Kroeber. “He will be a splendid informant, especially for phonetics, for he speaks very clearly” (Kroeber 2002, 6). The following four and a half years— until Ishi’s death from tuberculosis in 1916—the scholars surrounding him tried to obtain as much information as possible about his society, cultural practices, his personal history and his physical condition. As such, Ishi is the very embodiment of academic interest and thus vividly illustrates the anthropologists’ desire to complete their records, to collect all the possible information in seemingly neutral descriptions that objectively document the varieties of human life. However, the gaps in his life narrative, the blank spots, and missing information were constant reminders of the failures of academic inquiry: “We know nothing of the parentage of our subject,” physician Saxon Pope writes in May 1914. “He was born probably around 1860 in northern California, consequently is approximately 54 years of age, but appears about 45. There is no record of childhood diseases” (Temple Pope 1920, 190). There is no written and traceable record of anything before Ishi encountered the medical and anthropological professionals. Anything that happened to Ishi before August 29 of 1911 is an obscure matter of speculation. Very recently, James Clifford devoted a chapter of his book Returns. Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century to Ishi and writes: “we have only suggestive fragments and enormous gaps: a silence that calls forth more versions, images, endings” (2013, 91). Instead of looking for a closure and a final version of the story, Clifford is interested in the loose ends and their potentials as unresolved pieces.

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At the essence of all the publications about Ishi—and they are numerous—is the unknown and the desire to perhaps recover new material, to apply new ways of reading material we have already read, to shed light on the mystery of Ishi’s life. What do we see when we look at the numerous photographs and what do we hear when we listen to the recordings of Ishi’s stories? As such, any writing about Ishi is a troubled dialogue with the spectres of his museum presence. We continue to inquire into his life and study him as we also study the ways in which others have studied him. As we try to understand the scholarly spectres, Ishi’s mystery continues to haunt as unresolved and unsolvable. Any writing about Ishi can only be a memorial to Ishi (or to the anthropologists who studied him). And while we accept the anthropologists’ interest in Ishi’s life and their approach to him as troublesome if not ethically wrong, it is thanks to their texts that we remember Ishi and thanks to their texts that we can continue writing about him (and consequently also about them). In the beginning of her famous (and by now controversial) biography of Ishi, Theodora Kroeber recalls the case of the padres of the Mission San Barbara who relocate the San Nicolas Indians from their island to the mainland in 1835. Due to unknown circumstances, a baby had been left behind and since the captain refused to go back, the mother jumped over board and is lost. Eighteen years later, seal hunters spot her on the island when all her relatives have already died on the mainland. The baby had died as well. In Kroeber’s book, that story haunts Ishi. It is the frame that justifies the intense study of a man in a museum. The woman on the island dies shortly after “her rescue”—before anything could have been documented. Ishi instead, is excessively documented and every detail carefully noted—as if to make up for the lost story of the woman on the island. However, he cannot speak in these texts. In some way, every scholarly or creative attempt to write about Ishi is an attempt to make him speak, to hear his version of the story—the version and life that is forever hidden from us—and to hear all the other stories that remain mysteries. As Ishi moves through time, new readings of his story are offered, new versions appear—but at their source is the ultimate longing for the original version, the truth. Ishi is the search for the authentic, for the source that anthropology and other sciences trust in. All the versions of Ishi are looking for a singular, non-contradictive account of his life, the most plausible possibility. Inevitably, the search for Ishi becomes the search for the inner life of humans, of Ishi, of Kroeber. What did they feel? What were their motivations? (Why do we want to know what they felt? How is that going to change our version of the story?)

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As we retell Ishi’s story, we ask for catharsis. He may or may not have been terrified of the bones of the dead in the museum halls. He may or may not have hated his museum surroundings (because even the texts that document his joy may be untrustworthy). What a relief if life in the museum walls allowed for happiness. What a relief if it did not—because we always knew. If there is no new material, then we read what has already been read. Because many things are between the lines. We try to look where nobody else was looking. Then we write about the silences. However, I wonder if reading and writing—as a crucial practice of academic understanding—will bring us closer to the desired truth. More precisely, I wonder whether it is truth we desire or a form of catharsis, a sensation that Ishi has been solved (although his story can never be told?). There are many ways to tell a story. Science calls for a narrative of things that happened, other versions articulate the ethics implied in Ishi’s encounters with the academy while others again spell the potential for healing. Stories can be circular, never ending as they keep haunting us into the future. Ishi’s story is one of them and its spell remains unbroken. It lives of the silence, of the fact that we have a man whom we do not know. It reminds us that ontological evidence is a mere shell barely able to house our desires.

Notes 1

My translation. The original reads: “Durch…die besondere Bildung ihrer Gesichter, ihre ganz eigenartige Sprache, ihre hochentwickelte Kunstfertigkeit heben sie sich aus dem Gewirr der amerikanischen Naturvölker sofort bei der ersten Bekanntschaft hervor. Sie bieten somit der Betrachtung jedes denkenden Menschen eines der interessantesten Objecte” (cited in Haug von Kuenheim 2007, 114-115). 2 The original letter reads (in a very poor spelling): “Betreffs Ihren Engagements bin ich ganz zufrieden….Mochte aber doch nicht gerne mehr wie 12 Leute…Ich mache Ihnen nur darauf aufmerksam dass es unbedingt nothwendig ist dass Sie die Leute gleich befor Sie abreisen gut impfen lassen damit wir nicht ein ahnliches Unglück haben als mit die armen Eskimo” (cited in Thode-Arora 1989, 72). 3 The original letter reads (in a very poor spelling): “Ich habe Ihnen heute nun Leider eine schlechte Nachricht zu geben die alle meine Pläne Betreffs dieser kaum angefangenen neuen Speculations mit einem Schlag vernichtet und mir allen Muth genommen hat mich ferner mit Menschen Ausstellungen zu befassen…fest vorgenommen habe, nie wieder Menschen Ausstellungen zu arrangieren…” (cited in Thode-Arora 1989, 35).

THE ISHI POEMS

Ishi’s story has been told in multiple versions multiple times. There is little to add and yet James Clifford shows in his book Returns. Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (2013) that the story remains incomplete. Yet, we cannot let go. For some reason we need Ishi’s story and we need to retell it. We need to keep looking at the material we have. Perhaps in similar ways, perhaps in different ones. The following poems are collages of texts about Ishi. Not a single word has been added. I see this rearrangement of words as a method that may provoke different readings and understandings of Ishi’s story—a story that has never been his but has always belonged to the sphere of scholarship. Poetry adds perhaps a different voice and reaches beyond. It calls attention to the fragment, to Ishi as a fragment, to the body in fragments that like shards of pottery will forever point to the incomplete.

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The Ishi Poems

Last evening at the slaughter-house last evening at the slaughter-house an aboriginal Indian, clad in a rough canvas shirt which reached to his knees, beneath which was a frayed undershirt had been picked up last evening at the slaughter-house. The canvas from which his outer shirt was made had been roughly sewed together. His undershirt had evidently been stolen in a raid upon some cabin. Last evening at the slaughter-house. he came from his wanderings. Last evening at the slaughter-house he came from a mystery.

Based on the newspaper report of the Oroville Register, August 29, 1911. As reprinted in Heizer and Kroeber (1979, 92)—a collection of edited documents relating to Ishi.

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Ishi’s Feet broad and strong toes straight and unspoiled longitudinal and transverse arches perfect. Skin of sole thick but not rough. Toenails round in outline, strong, and short. He springs from the great toe that is wonderfully strong in its plantar flexion and abduction method of locomotion rather short steps, each foot sliding along the ground as it touches. Neither the heel nor the ball of the foot seems to receive the jar of the step. The foot is placed in position cautiously, not slammed or jammed down. He progresses rather than pigeon-toed, and approximates crossing the line of his progress each step.

Based on sources quoted in Kroeber (1976, 239-240). Ishi’s feet were cast by Saxon Pope, his physician and supposedly best friend. Several images of the casts and of Ishi’s actual feet exist. It was a common practice of physical anthropology to not only focus on the face (that prominently featured in photographs and continues to be studied) but also on the feet. Theodora Kroeber reports that Pope used the casts as teaching instruments and lectured his students about the perfection of Ishi’s feet.

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Ishi Odour of body is faintly musty Suggests the smell of tanned deer hide Scalp shows some evidence of dry seborrhea Tongue is clean and normal in colour Slight pad of fat over the seventh cervical vertebra He is not an agile runner. He is a good informal wrestler. He can box. Length of head, 193mm. Breadth of head, 163mm. Cephalic index, 84.4mm. Length of face, 131mm. Breadth of face, 152mm. He was given perfect freedom.

Based on the report of Clinical History, May 1914 (cited in Heizer and Kroeber 1979, 232-234). Heizer and Kroeber take this document from Saxton Pope’s medical writings about Ishi. As already mentioned, Kroeber narrates Pope as Ishi’s best friend.

CHAPTER THREE SOUVENIRS

As Pia Arke argues in her essay “Ethno-Aesthetics,” anthropology, as an academic field of inquiry, creates and worships an aesthetics that is conceived to be intrinsic to the ethnographic other. Based on her analyses of Edmund Carpenter’s book Eskimo (1964) and Bodel Kaalund’s book Gronlands Kunst (1990) she concludes: The Eskimo, by constitution, is an artist, which is to say that in the Eskimo view of the world nothing and everything is art. A good harpoon is a beautiful harpoon. The worship of the ethnic is the worship of human authenticity, of the original nobility of man, of primitive in the sense of genius. Ethno-aesthetics is a critique of Western civilization carried out by its own members, as the rediscovery of authentic goodness is being connected to art: art is authenticity. (2006, 5)

Anthropologists (and others) collect objects (that then become ethnographic) as both authentic curiosities and aesthetically appealing artefacts (which determine each other). Conclusively, the collecting impulse is an emotional one focusing on the visual appearance of the material artefact. As the aesthetics are increasingly translated into art (a transition from artefact to art), the ethnographic context becomes a pre-condition for the aesthetic perception. However, perceiving ethnographic objects as general (generous) expressions of the human ability to decorate, the historic context disappears entirely. The idea of the aesthetic is enforced by specific museum displays. Here the object is not contextualized to be a metonymic fragment and thus exhibited together with other objects from the same geographical region. Instead, it is a sample of aesthetic expression that is ultimately translated into ethnographic representation and evidence of the authentic artefact. In these cases, the object labels refer to the materiality of the object as becomes obvious in the next example of the George Gustav Heye Center—a museum, and branch of the National Museum of the American Indian, situated in New York City.

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Contemporary Curiosities The George Gustav Heye Center is situated in New York City in relative proximity to the American Museum of Natural History. It was established by the collector and influential banker George Gustav Heye in the 1920s— the time in which ethnographic artefacts were popularly connected to art discourses that closely aligned with anthropology (a complex connection that James Clifford reveals in his essay “On Ethnographic Surrealism”). Heye was openly obsessed with Native American objects and yet distanced himself from the academic discourses of anthropology. Perhaps due to that tradition, the text labels in the George Gustav Heye Center are very much focused on the objects as can be seen in the labels (2011): Caddoan Bottle with Serpent Design AD 1500-1700 Arkansas Modeled and engraved ceramic

The object is given a name and a description, the date and place of its origin (not its time of collecting) and a brief account of its material appearance (as common in art—see “oil on canvas”). There is no information about the use of the object, no interpretation and, in fact, no anthropological or historical observation. The object is not placed in a framework of evolution, of civilization or any sort of chronology (in fact, chronology is avoided as the objects are grouped by aesthetic similarity in ahistoric ways). At times, the museum provides background information:

Late Mississippian Vessel in the form of the Underwater Panther AD 1400-1600 Rose Mound, Cross Country, Arkansas Modeled and painted ceramic 17/3425 A major figure in the Mississippian underworld, the Underwater Panther was feared, but also considered a keeper of spiritual knowledge. The vessel’s redand-white slip as well as its teapot shape represents a style that marks the closing centuries of the Mississippian way of life. Thomas E. Evans (Pawnee)

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Again, the object is located in time and place and in the collection. The spiritual context is rather a link provided by the object than a story the object illustrates. In an effort of authentication, the author of the brief text is mentioned and the tribal association strengthens his position of authority. This current trend to give the names of the authors is also an attempt to make the process of museum narration transparent (although eventually each label has many more authors). The more the objects are individualized, the less they can become part of a larger anthropological narrative. In the National Museum of the American Indian (a branch of the George Gustav Heye Center), a crabshaped object is labelled the following:

Crab Figure Oaxacan Jolanda Rios Vasquez Oaxaca, Mexico ca. 2000 Eagle wood or copal wood, paint 53cm. L; 31 w.; 12 H. 26/603

No further textual context is provided. All the object-related information is given: place and date of manufacture (and its creator), its material and treatment, its size and the catalogue number. As a contemporary object, it is not presented as art, but aesthetically confirms notions of ethnography as other or as a possibility to experience the world differently. The crab is part of the Windows on Collections, an exhibition in the National Museum of the American Indian that experiments with objects in the absence of text. Thus, the above quoted object-related information is only available to visitors on a computer screen once they turn their eyes away from the object. This strategy is not entirely disconnected from nineteenth-century scientific discourses when museum guides in the form of books and people provided further context. However, nineteenth-century anthropologists categorized and grouped objects according to the communities with which they were associated. The Windows on Collections follow a thematic arrangement of, for example, animal representations that respect their natural habitat: birds situated on the top third of the windows, land animals in the middle and water animals on the lower third. While this form of categorization seems to be a play on biological taxonomies, it is also a

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comment on the idea of the curio (the visual impulse) in relation to ethnographic objects. The objects arranged in the Windows on Collections neither present aesthetic expressions nor ethnographic information but only function as an installation in relation to the museum and hence in reference to the idea of museum displays as such. Thus the gallery questions the categorization of human beings through the arrangement of objects (and on a broader level the idea of classification) by its existence in a museum specialized in Native American cultures, which is likewise a thematic and ethnographic approach. In other words: visitors are not used to seeing a wooden crab as the animal it represents but require immediately a connection to its community of supposed origin when they encounter the object in an ethnographic setting or any other context that explains the object’s significance (why else would it be in a museum). The Windows on Collections refuse the established ethnographic context and yet the display cannot offer an alternative reading because it is haunted by museum discourses that inevitably present all objects of ethnography as curio—that is as objects that are perceived to be exotic and represent the unusual to the supposed majority of visitors. The installation haunts by the lack of written information—it triggers curiosity (by dissatisfaction). It thus confronts the visitors with the longing for information and the limits of inquiry while it becomes obvious that in ethnography the objects become categories of knowledge. The close description of material and measure (the visually obvious) create the gap between the object’s emotional (affective) quality of being an “other” and the neutral seemingly objective language of science (revealed in the texts about cultural context) that denies such irrational interest. Therefore, the ethnographic object is related to a geographical area and a community or society where its appearance is common. The object has to be both rare (which creates market value and aesthetic authenticity) and a sample that relates metonymically to the community it represents in the museum and collection (which creates scientific value). Only by being rare and common at the same time, the object justifies the interest of the anthropologists. This explains anthropology’s obsession with authenticity. The rarity is often best confirmed by visualizing the object’s pre-museum life. Often objects show clear traces of use or need some other form of authentication (e.g. someone from the community confirming its origin and use). I argue that the tension between satisfying and dissatisfying informational needs is essential to the museum context and we can grasp it with theories of haunting not only by insisting that the void of the objects’

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previous lives remains uncannily present but more so because it becomes obvious that the objects have to be arranged in familiar patterns to be recognizable as material knowledge at all. This way we satisfy the longing (expectations) but also avoid questions. The confusion about the lack of information and the thematic arrangement in case of the Windows on Collections can be translated into a disturbing spectre that links this installation to the supposed origin of museum displays in the Renaissance cabinets of curiosities by revealing the objects as curio—as supposed premuseum items that are in need of explanation. It is a presence in absence. Not visible but sense-able. Marked by a void. However, Derrida’s spectres of a present absence are not enough to grasp them theoretically. We can always make statements about things that are not there. The Windows on Collections are haunted by the display strategies of the Renaissance cabinets of curiosities. There are obvious similarities between the cabinets and the exhibit: No labels, seemingly random, explicitly non-scientific order. What is the difference between making use of an early exhibition technique and being haunted by it? To state that the Windows on Collections are in direct reference to the cabinets of curiosities is an obvious diagnosis. As such, the exhibit is a comment on the spheres of curiosity and the exotic into which ethnographic artefacts continue to be placed and interpreted in museum environments. The objects then are haunted by past strategies of museum displays and become an archive of those strategies and the discourses connected to them (which is fundamentally different from being a reference to the museum’s past). Understanding the display as ultimately haunted consequently means that in whichever way you re-arrange the objects, they still conjure past discourses. This also means that they remain exotic curiosities in spite of all efforts to deny that past.

In the Museum Shop Only those objects that have not been manufactured for ethnography can be turned into ethnographic objects. Ideally, the objects have been used (in their intended use) and show evidence of that use. This way, they are proof of cultural practices; they seemingly contain the narratives they illustrate in museums as they prove the universal creativity of humanity in its purity. In ethnographic contexts, the intention of the object must visibly exceed its material surface to have ethnographic value. Objects manufactured for sale for decorative purposes only do not exceed their material surface; they have no meaning beyond their materiality (or derive their meaning particularly from their materiality such as in art).

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A popular category of objects manufactured as exotic for sale is the souvenir. As objects of reminiscence and evidence, souvenirs are materialized (travel) experiences that have a personal meaning. Any object can serve the purpose of personal remembrance of a distant place restored through a narrative. As such, the souvenir is by definition always incomplete: it is metonymic to the scene of its original appropriation in the sense that it is a sample; and as a sign, it refers from object to experience (Stewart 1993, 136). Souvenirs are rooms in the memory palace for a narrative of experience and life and are thus similar to ethnographic objects that equally illustrate (not produce) an encyclopaedic information assembly about different places and societies (closely connected to travel and experience) in the museum setting. As Susan Stewart argues in her book On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1993) about the nature of the souvenir: The souvenir involves the displacement of attention into the past. The souvenir is not simply an object appearing out of context, an object from the past incongruously surviving in the present; rather, its function is to envelop the present within the past. Souvenirs are magical objects because of this transformation. Yet the magic of the souvenir is a kind of failed magic. Instrumentality replaces essence here as it does in the case of all magical objects, but this instrumentality always works an only partial transformation. The place of origin must remain unavailable in order for desire to be generated. (1993, 151)

Susan Stewart’s words can easily describe the ethnographic object. The souvenir is the perfect example for the dynamics of the ethnographic object. It is also iconic, in the sense that we know which type of object would prove a specific travel narrative. It is connected to time and place— not of its origin but of its acquisition (that equals its origin in the narrative). The past, in case of ethnography, is a universal human past not a temporal past in the sense that the objects that were collected during the nineteenth century were always perceived to be evidence of a past and primitive state of being (even when they were contemporary). During the nineteenth century, a dense trading network developed in which objects of ethnographic interest circulated between traders and collectors. Necessarily, the visual provoked the first impulse and stimulated inquiry. Soon enough, a clear canon of objects developed (as in the cabinets of curiosity)…masks, pottery, tools…In many cases, the ethnographers did not travel themselves to acquire the objects and in many cases, these objects were produced for sale to the ethnographers—an

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industry of ethnographic objects (Cole 1985, 12). There are no personal memories attached to the objects nor are they metonymic travel experiences. Yet they function in relation to geographical (travel) regions. Like the souvenir, they are exotic and like the souvenir they illustrate a narrative, not the one of personal travel (which may also occur in certain cases), but the one of ethnography (as samples of societies that are perceived to be exotic). However, to reduce ethnographic objects to study material with the purpose of illustrating a narrative/discourse invented by the anthropologists is obviously absurd. The societies and communities presented in ethnographic museums exist. Objects presented in connection to them have also been manufactured for use in cultural practices (or to illustrate these practices on the museum stage). This is not the point. The question is whether one or a sequence of objects can explain (not merely illustrate) these ways of living and what discourses and effects are provoked with the display. Neither souvenirs nor ethnographic objects exchange meaning in their transition but they exchange function. The museum object is no longer in practical use but as it represents its practical use, illustrates history, and makes itself available for political and ideological claims. The already mentioned Windows on Collections guide the way to the museum shop, and are reminiscent of shop windows not only through the arrangement of objects, but also through the exhibition’s name linking it directly to commodity culture, in which museums have always been a part.1 The exhibition gallery mirrors the shop display. It is a surface of projection of desire behind glass. But the shop suggests satisfaction in the sense that the customer will be able to take the desired object home. Finally, all the senses can take part in the experience, which is in fact the only difference between the two display strategies; when in the museum, the object is conventionally not to be touched or smelled because it is protected by a case of glass. To read the shop as a comment on historical exhibition strategies becomes increasingly difficult but both displays share more than what separates them. The arrangement of objects is not only an aesthetic strategy but also a discourse of knowledge that has not been replaced or overcome but continues to be influential in knowledge productions also in consumer environments (and the museum is a consumer environment). The gift shop bridges “the boundary between the academic precinct and domestic consumption” as well as the “individual and collective memories stored inside the objects” (Phillips and Steiner 1999, 19). Museums and shops have never been separated in the sense that ethnographic museums are always product and promotion of intercultural trade. Thus, the cabinets

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of curiosities were warehouses that became important in acts of diplomacy when their assembly of rarities was turned into a gift catalogue. When museums became popular and promoted public institutions in the nineteenth century, the gift shop immediately became an integral part of them. As objects of reminiscence and evidence, souvenirs are materialized (travel) experiences that have a personal meaning. Any object, from a shell picked up at the beach to an extraordinary painting purchased in a specific gallery, removed from its original place serves the purpose of personal remembrance that can only be restored through narrative (Stewart 1993, 136). The narrative is not a narrative of the object but of the possessor or ethnographer (often the same person), the point of view applied to almost all objects, since museum explanations also often include references about the collectors (even if only in the form of a catalogue number). In his classic Ethnic and Tourist Arts (1979), Nelson Graburn defines the souvenir as an inauthentic aesthetic expression developed out of economic need and dependency thus employing a victim discourse (1979, 1-32). However, the souvenir is not an aesthetic category, nor is it a measuring utensil for authenticity, which is still a problematic concept applied to material culture particularly in ethnographic contexts. Souvenirs have no other value than being rooms in the memory palace for a narrative of experience and life, a narrative of their possessor. The souvenir must “remain impoverished and partial so it can be supplemented by a narrative discourse” (Stewart 1993, 136). This narrative discourse turns the souvenir into a curiosity employing the same functions of objects in the Renaissance cabinets. It generates (self)narrative in episodic, spontaneous associations, narratives of the exotic. To have a souvenir of the exotic is to possess both a specimen and a trophy; on the one hand, the object must be marked as exterior and foreign, on the other it must be marked as arising directly out of an immediate experience of its possessor. (Stewart 1993, 147)

It is the distance, in space and time, as well as the contrast between the origin of the souvenir and the possessor’s culture that remains crucial for the narrative. It is a trophy because the narrative’s hero of the story is always the possessor of the object, having consumed another culture (see also Root 1996). The souvenir has to be recognizable as the foreign, which is often done in direct comparison (as in the cabinets of curiosities), having developed a standardized format of object categories such as carvings and pottery that are traditionally linked to handicraft and expertise.

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The museum shop is a haunted house. Material culture is here in free fall in the abyss between private and public, infinite and finite, past and present, exotic and familiar. The wide product range in the National Museum of the American Indian, for example, is framed by bookshelves that underline the educational aim of the institution. Among them is an illustrated edition of How Raven Stole the Sun (Williams 2001) and in the toy section dozens of bright red soft toy ravens await their new (child) owners. They are carefully arranged to catch attention but disorderly piled next to other products. Thus, the museum shop is already the revenant of the exhibition in the sense that the almighty strategy of display is disrupted and yet its spectre is present, conjured by the selection of products. Many items in the shop have labels contextualizing them within the realm of the exotic. Zuni fetishes are marked as symbols for strength, enlightenment, and growth. The text (provided for buyers and non-buyers) relates them to the spirit world animating the objects like a magic spell. Clearly produced for the tourist market, the objects become sacred in their museum context. This process likewise occurs with medicine wheels, Navajo sand paintings, and dream catchers. Originally objects regarded to be powerful; they become pale revenants on the mass market (the discourse and obsession with the phenomenon is as old as the mass market itself). Their individuality (and with it their animation) is regained by the texts—a display strategy taken over from the museum exhibition. In many cases, it is possible to take the text home without purchasing the object, so treasuring information (and knowledge) in souvenir fashion. The absent object has then to be recreated by the imagination and becomes detached from memory (which is connected to the text) and a ghost. The mysticism and secrecy of these objects connects them to medieval ideas of wonder, preceding the concept of the curio (Daston and Park 1998, 137). Medicine wheels are said to cure various diseases, sand paintings are essential parts of sacred healing ceremonies (and therefore always sold incomplete to “defuse their potency” as the text label reads) and dream catchers are said to be able to influence the world of dreams. By their museum context, they are still understood to be sacred helpers of rituals instead of secular tourist items. Yet none of the objects has been produced for a sacred context or used in one. Furthermore, they represent the canon of objects visitors are easily able to identify as ceremonial Native American artefacts. Other items for sale in the shop fulfil the same criteria: woven blankets and pottery are not reduced to their practical purpose (ceramic vessels or keeping warm) but clearly canonical (and sacred) in their image of culture. “The danger of the souvenir lies in its unfamiliarity, in our difficulty in subjecting it to interpretation,” writes Susan Stewart.

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“There is always the possibility that reverie’s signification will go out of control here, that the object itself will take charge, awakening some dormant capacity for destruction” (1993, 148). In the National Museum of the American Indian, the indigenous cultures of the Americas can be consumed in the souvenir store and the educative attempts of the exhibition may be negated by haunting fantasies of exotic worlds. In that sense, all objects in the museum shop are miniatures linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presented as diminutive, and thereby manipulable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination. It marks the pure body, the inorganic body of the machine and its repetition of a death that is thereby not a death. (Stewart 1993, 69)

The souvenir becomes the revenant embedding the discourse of wonder and curiosity in its very essence. The exotic has to be comparable; it stimulates a narrative necessary to its interpretation, a narrative of the geographically distant and the culturally other. The museum shop manipulates the narrative, turning the objects into symbols of the museum. It is not a cultural encounter that will be remembered but its representation in the museum far away from its geographical origin. Little soft toy Raven is a trickster planting seeds and twisting the game becoming a memory and a teaser: A memory of an enshrined encounter and a teaser producing a desire of the still unknown. He is a promise and reminder of the absence of experience. Visitors have been to the museum but not to the Northwest Coast where the tale of Raven is widespread and supposedly originates. Souvenirs bought in museum shops are spectres from the start dragging the weight of nonexperience. They are the very essence of un-satisfiable longing for the exotic.

Notes 1

For the connection between museums and consumerism, see Leach 1989.

Souven nirs

Sou uvenirs Littlle miniature no on replicas are going g to be sh haped by theirr takers into adventurous copies c of materialized m naarratives abouut their assumed makkers.

Fig. 33-1 The Ethnoggraphic Object (detail) ( by Andrrea Zittlau (201 13)

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Object and text have a recognizably symbiotic relationship. In current museum contexts, they belong together and debates about word count and complexity of the text show that the text is as essential to the exhibition as the object. Thus, writing about the ethnographic object seems in many ways ironic. Again, the text explains the object and the object in its agency provokes the text. The text can once more reveal this relationship and yet is unable to deconstruct it (a dilemma present in many academic settings). Perhaps there is no need for deconstruction as in the symbiotic scenario both the object and the text would disappear. Both text and object have their limits in what they can communicate. That is why they depend on each other in the first place. While the limits of the object have been revealed before, the major problem of the text is its credibility that has seemingly been solved in museum settings by a) not giving an author (thus enforcing a universal claim of truth) and b) by giving an author (ideally from the community presented)—a problematic notion of embodied truth and juridical responsibility. What authenticity is to the object is truth to the text. We question the first with texts, but if we question the truth of a text with further texts (thus continue to claim truth) we encircle the problem rather than approaching it differently. Departing from this dilemma, I experimented with a sculpture as a vessel to communicate the theoretical concept of the ethnographic object. It was also an opportunity for me to meditate about loose ends that kept coming back in my investigations. The academic text has no patience for loose ends. The interactive sculpture called The Ethnographic Object (although the title as such is already text and obviously guiding the interpretations of the object) consisted of an unfinished coil pot of colourful plasticine, building material, a box called “souvenirs” and a trash pile. The audience was invited to engage with the object and/or the material in any possible way. Thus, the process of constructing ethnographic objects and the community-creating effect of that process became obvious, as the field of ethnography is based on a shared interest in the same objects. In the following, I share my notes (and loose ends) in

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the form oof text (fragm ments) and images i ratheer than analy ysing my experience ((and providingg answers): thee ethnograaphic object is an em mpty vessel

Fig. 4-1 The Ethhnographic Objeect by Andrea Z Zittlau (2013)

The Sh hape The Ethnnographic Obbject’s shape resembled a coil pot sincee pottery, ceramic scuulptures, but also a woven baaskets and othher vessels arre among the most prominent objects o in etthnographic collections. Often a particularly shaped or deecorated vesseel presents a ggeographical region in the ethnograaphic museum m and ultimattely becomes its brand. Lik kewise, a popular arcchaeological artefact, a potteery resists tim me and conn nects the disciplines oof archaeologyy and ethnogrraphy that in the nineteenth h century were both concerned withh the origin of o the human rrace(s). It ofteen comes

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in shards, incomplete and fragmented, a broken puzzle, knowledge deformation. Coil Pottery: A technique whereby the potter forms the vessel gradually by adding and smoothing out coils of clay. It is one of the basic ways to create a ceramic vessel. No further equipment (apart from the clay, of course) is needed. Among the oldest and most basic techniques practised and found in several regions around the world, it can be linked to the ancient, the simple and the original—three concepts that drag complex contexts with them in which cultural practices are often presented in ethnographic museums. In the process of creation, the coils are quickly smoothed and become invisible…like the structure of the ethnographic object as a category that attempts to “see beyond” objects and in semiotic fashion decode them, and yet is very much based on visibility. The vessel is an empty container, thus a symbol of the construction of the other (as ideas are filled in) or, to put it more positively, for the room ethnographic museums make for our fantasies and imaginary worlds.

Coil Somebody added another coil, a blue one, placed carefully on top, yet the unfinished layer remained unfinished and the coil appeared to be odd and singled out and yet almost invisibly different. Thus the pot was continued, because its structure was repeated. Also hesitantly, people had moved little piles from the souvenir box to the trash pile—a beautiful statement about the trashy and kitschy nature of souvenirs.

The Material By not using clay, the issues of nature and authenticity that play such a significant role in ethnographic discourses as well as the attention we pay to the material (and the very materiality) become more obvious. Clay would have linked the object too closely to its actual other and thus confuse more than help in the process of critical reflection. Furthermore, discourses of nature/ecology/environment(alism) are closely connected to “natural” materials such as clay that establish problematic narratives connected to communities presented in ethnographic museums. Most prominently, exhibitions stage objects as evidence of a community’s close

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connection to nature and thus continue notions of the pure and primitive man (as ethnographic exhibitions are often also gendered in troublesome ways) detached from the harmful civilization shaped by industrial evils. Plasticine stresses the infantile aspect linked to curiosity and the idea of exploration. As a material, it connects to the tensions of museum work when young visitors are addressed with contents trivialized for these purposes. The scepticism provoked by “edutainment” or “infotainment” then is concerned with the necessity to somehow unite fun and learning that are in fact never disconnected phenomena.

Green Frog Somebody made a green frog with a crown and placed it inside the vessel. True, the idea of the ethnographic is a romantic fairy tale, a popular narrative of loss and transformation. The golden ball that was lost in the depth of the well is reclaimed in the story but for the price of having to invite the frog to the palace where he is repeatedly mistreated until he becomes a prince and marries the princess. He eventually finds out that his faithful servant has never given up hope and is ever so happy to continue his work. Now the ethnographic subject is reclaimed first in the form of archaeological artefacts, literally obtained from the ground, and the existence of the exotic other is denied until it can no longer be dismissed and is reluctantly invited. The royal element is also present since the idea of royalty, of hierarchy, is of particular importance to many objects obtained that are claimed to have been in the former possession of nonEuropean kings. InfantilityCuriosityExplor ationCreationTransformati onImaginationEducationC olourfulModelCopyDestr uctionFunReBuildArtAni mationManikinSculptureT heEthnographicObject

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Fig. 44-2 The Ethnoggraphic Object (detail) ( by Andrrea Zittlau (201 13)

The Process Assemblling the objecct in an interractive audiennce project makes m the creation proocess obviouss. The ethnog graphic objectt is a commu unity idea built by a coommunity but also building a communityy. Buildingg the object in i a universitty context onn a table in a lecture theatre was highly symbbolic since th he ideas the eethnographic object is based on devvelop in such a context. The material useed for construction was recycled from other such projects stressing the fact tthat ethnograp phic ideas are based onn pre-shaped concepts that are continuoously reprodu uced. The fact that the final productt is labelled with w my name is significant since we rarely acknnowledge thaat academic concepts annd ideas dev velop in interaction. Thus, we offfer our acadeemic communnity a producct that is never finishhed, but maay change treemendously during our academic intercourse.

Television n placed Someboddy made a litttle yellow teleevision with a blue screen not inside or cloose to the object but claiming its own sppace on the table. The

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television is obviously the ideal symbol of representation par excellence. Poststructuralists like Jean Baudrillard used the television to comment on the failure of reality, on the recreation of reality by the medium as such. The reproduction of images, the shaping of knowledge by trivialized images and the idea of visuality was embedded in the little object on the table. As such, it was also a powerful comment on anthropological films that perpetuate the image of the exotic other using the style of natural history and animal documentaries. The little television also had an antenna signifying the signals that are sent by the images. Sending and receiving was put into relation and yet the screen in which the moving images seem to live was not communicated as the result of this sending and receiving process but as its outcome of communication. The antenna was shaped like the antennae of an insect that is using them to orientate itself in the world, in fact that is making sense of the world through its antennae as many have taken to making sense of the world through the images delivered by the television. As such, the ethnographic object is a creation that reflects the idea of an overkill of images creating a reality that is forever reproducing itself.

Minotaur Somebody made a purple Minotaur and placed him at the margin of the pot playing the guitar evoking the romantic and yet juvenile atmosphere of a summer camp. The YMCA, for example, as well as other organizations of summer activities for children still promotes “multiculturalism” by romanticizing ideas of the other. The Minotaur is also a significant and well-known character of Greek mythology thus a very Western idea. Its character combines both human and animal, is in-between the two, crucial to all sorts of narratives about cultural encounters. In its animal part, it connects to the buffalo, a significant character in historical and imaginative narratives about Native Americans. Somebody exchanged the guitar with a heart. Eventually the Minotaur fell down.

Coil Life Someone turned the fringe of the vessel into a prison fence—protecting the exclusive idea of ethnographic objects.

Lesso ons

Someone buuilt a bridge coonnecting the elements on tthe table. The bridge eeventually colllapsed. Someone wrrote, “I am Annother.” Confessionss were made. Phallic shappes reappearedd. Coil life: thiings that get out o of the vesseel. Disconnections. Ethnographic objects are full of coil liffe. Thee Ethnographic Objeect Build ds a Commun nity of Builders of the Ethnographic Object.

Fig. 44-3 The Ethnoggraphic Object (detail) ( by Andrrea Zittlau (201 13)

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CHAPTER FIVE VOIDS

In her lecture “Silences in the Museum. Reflections on the European Exotic,” the American anthropologist Sally Price insists “the silences in a museum gallery speak volumes to us” (2010, 176). 1 Price’s work on ethnographic museums focuses on the recent Musée du quai Branly in Paris, which she criticizes for its ahistorical and aesthetic approach that denies the objects their ethnographic complexity (see particularly 2007, 174). The museum was conceived in 1995 by Jacques Chirac and Jacques Kerchache, both passionate art collectors and opened its doors in central Paris to the public in 2006. It unites the collections of the Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie and the Musée de l’Homme, presenting nonEuropean objects as arts premiers while carefully avoiding contemporary art(efacts). Its permanent exhibition is divided into continents (Africa, Oceania, America, Asia) and singles out objects that have been perceived (by the curators and collectors) as aesthetically appealing. Price shares her inside knowledge about the museum (2007) and illustrates her concept of silence with numerous examples, of which the “imposing statue from the cliffs of Bandiagara in Mali, said to have been carved in the tenth or eleventh century by ancestors of the Dogon people” (2010, 179) is perhaps the most prominent. Among ethnographers, the statue is well known and well discussed and has achieved, academically speaking, a prominent place in art history (ibid.). Yet the text label in the museum links it only to those who helped in the donation process (a French insurance company and a prominent art dealer), not to the artist or any other context. However, further information is available via the audio guide, in which a voice decodes the statue’s symbolism semiotically. The seven bracelets of the statue, for example, are explained here as “an ideal of perfection” that “symbolizes divine unity” (cited in Price 2010, 179). This way, all attributes and gestures of the statue receive an assigned meaning, a procedure that is complemented with online material. In her book Paris Primitive (2007), Price criticized this ethnographic interpretation in a number of cases in which she reveals the information given to the museum visitor as misguiding and wrong (2007, 67-78). The

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silence in the case of the Malian statue, Price argues, is concerned with the acquisition of the object (and acquisition policies in general). She proceeds in describing a set of obscure deals that resulted in the statue being announced a national treasure: Listening for the silent spaces in this account, we gradually come to understand that they occur in the interval between mention of the dealer who bought the statue in Paris in 1969 and mention of the art historical expert who established it as a national treasure…The fact that these two roles have been played by one and the same person…is carefully excised from the story. (2010, 181)

Silence here means the purposeful obscuring of information that may reveal the obscure processes of canonizing and evaluating objects in the art world—of which the ethnographic museum is a very particular branch—that has an almost illegal overtone.2 The other aspect of “the silence surrounding this figure concerns its life prior to 1969” (Price 2010, 181). Price’s inquiry into the museum records revealed “no information on the past of this particular piece” (2010, 181). However, a documentary film by Augustin Viatte (Quai Branly: L’Autre Musée, Paris 2008) filled this gap with a narrative of the art dealer, donator and expert discovering the statue in a cave (!) in the depth of the Malian wilderness surrounded by killer bees. Price resists commenting this story of discovery, perhaps because it so plainly illustrates the master narrative of the Dark Continent promoted most famously by Joseph Conrad. Her ironic transcription of the relevant film scenes underlines her scepticism. For her, the story is just a dramatized replacement of a set of different events which confirm the almost criminal activities of the art dealer and expert, who—and I am interpreting Price’s fragmentary information here—obtained the statue in obscure ways, added ethnographic and art historic value to it and then pronounced it a national treasure to benefit financially from a law that appears to have been designed for the collector in the first place. This argument is obviously based on the assumption that the statue may have been obtained against the will or without the knowledge of its owners not based on the ethical standards of the art market (if there are any).3 However, neither is the absence of information about the statue’s life prior to its “discovery” and acquisition by the dealer of immediate concern to Price here, nor is its place within the exhibition context (and consequently its place within the history of museum representation). She only asks questions concerning the ownership, not the manufacture of the statue or its use prior to its “discovery” by the dealer,4 thus wondering

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only about the second life of the statue after its contact with Europeans, its life as an ethnographic object. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues in her essay “Objects of Ethnography” (1998), the objects are fragments that blossom in their “poetics of detachment” (1998, 18), they are ruins in their function to stand for a whole. The image of the ruins also recalls the notion of the romantic that is omnipresent in the context of ethnographic museums. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett looks at the objects as outcomes of selection processes that employ the museum as a frame for further studying the objects—a frame that already determines their interpretation. Within the exhibition context, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett observes a movement in categories of perception “from curio to specimen to art” (1998, 25), the exotic (here also a synonym for the ethnographic) remaining the static component of all three categories. 5 The ethnographic object becomes a construct being chosen to illustrate a narrative, which is confirmed (not constructed) in ethnographic exhibitions. In its most radical form, the narrative envisions the extinction of the primitive, pre-modern savages by means of their own failure. Sally Price illustrates how the functionalised creation of a (national) treasure (and consequently also of the construction of heritage for the community of origin) is absent from the exhibition narrative, but she does not question the exhibition narrative as such. Her silences evolve around dubious actions of transfer, around market strategies that obscure ethnographic knowledge, but the authority of the anthropologist remains inviolable. In conclusion, Price asks for more transparency (implying a purposeful absence of information) and accuses ethnographic museums of fragmenting and manipulating information (not objects). She thus encourages revealing the (consumerist) dynamics of the art market to understand museum selections, but believes in anthropological knowledge (especially when confirmed by the community of origin). Instead, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s analysis of ethnographic objects as academic constructs questions anthropology and the role of museums as institutions of power and control in the Foucauldian sense. Inevitably, the gaps revealed by this approach are of larger dimension than the silences Price investigates. They are ethnographic voids that embrace the object’s life from its initial perception, a process Elaine Scarry would call made-up to its manifestation (made-real) and continuous exchange of categories up to the present understanding of the object (see also Scarry 1985, 223). The voids consist of everything we do not know, the things we cannot know— of everything that is lost in the process of transformation from an object into an object of ethnography, and the things we refuse to know. Price’s

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silence is concerned with concealment. Ethnographic voids are concerned with loss and denial. In museum contexts, voids gained prominence as an architectural language that visualizes traumatic experiences. In the construction process of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in 1993 on the Mall in Washington, D.C., the representation of silence was a particular issue. Elie Wiesel, who was actively involved, argued intensely that silence was the only way to approach the topic of the Holocaust because neither objects nor texts could appropriately communicate the impact of the historical event (Linenthal 1995, 43). Silence here is no purposeful concealment but an inability of appropriate representation. To visualize a lack of language (in the sense of expression) and the impossibility of representation, the museum’s architecture employs socalled voids, in this case the Hall of Witness. The Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind, to provide another example, includes a set of voids, spaces that have been left empty on purpose and cannot be used. They are dead corners with symbolic value. One of the voids can be accessed on the tour through the museum and is publically understood to symbolize the traumatic experience of the persecuted Jews in all stages of the Holocaust. Some visitors perceive this symbolism in the claustrophobic structure of the room, which is cold and empty, without a roof, including a ladder at unreachable height. The void in these cases is not a vacuum, but an emptiness made visible by non-usable space to communicate what cannot be communicated, a language of absence illustrating not an experience but its non-communicable nature due to its traumatic impact. I do not intend to suggest a comparison here between Holocaust and ethnographic museums in terms of the experience they communicate (although a number of communities that are commonly represented in ethnographic contexts have made the claim of genocide). I am not suggesting that there is a comparable trauma to be visualized in ethnographic contexts (although there may be in some cases). Instead, I intend to agree with a presence of silences in museum environments, as Sally Price insists, and that those silences cannot be filled with information (as Price would like them to be) but need to be made visible as voids instead—they are ethnographic voids, a presence of absence. In her book Ghostly Matters, the sociologist Avery Gordon develops a concept of haunting inspired by the desire to understand “modern forms of dispossession, exploitation, repression, and their concrete impacts on the people most affected by them and on our shared conditions of living” (1997, xv). With the concept of haunting she marks the blank spots in

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Western epistemologies which conceal the troubled process of knowledge production in colonial contexts. The always already “unsettled relationship between what we see and what we know” (24) is nowhere else more obvious than in the ethnographic museum. The objects are so obviously misplaced and de-contextualized, and yet they make perfect sense since their visual appearance seemingly neglects those (invisible) assumptions. The exhibition narrative appeases doubts, satisfies the desire for the exotic rather than challenging those expectations. Disappointedly, Price reflects: People who visit a museum have absolutely no need to be shown a vision of the so-called primitive world set in the kind of jungle scenery dominated by animism, shamanism, cannibalism, and totemism that the Quai Branly’s architect very explicitly created. That is the vision that is readily available to them pretty much anywhere in their daily lives…When they [the visitors] enter a museum of the 21st century, it is my feeling that they deserve something radically different, something uncoloured by mid-20th century stereotypes. (2010, 189-190)

What is “radically different,” what is the museum without silence Price seems to envision? Can we mark knowledge as well as the absence of knowledge? Would the creation of voids make a difference that has not been made yet? Ethnographic voids are markers for the construction and history of ethnographic objects. They mark what has been lost in this process of construction. As a concept, the ethnographic void reminds us that only because things are forever lost, it does not mean that they never existed. After all, the ethnographic object itself is a void, taking the Latin origin of the word from vocivus—unoccupied, vacant—the objects had been perceived as such to be filled with anthropologically relevant information, available to be obtained and transported into museum contexts. Only because they had been perceived as vacant, ownership becomes an issue, and narratives such as the spectacular story that Price uncovers become possible. The presence of ethnographic objects within a museum context always points to absence. This absence (only detectable in the presence of the object) may involve information that can no longer be obtained or contexts forever lost or disguised along the way of constructing an ethnographic vision. We only have fragments (of which an object itself is a part), which are—as Price states—often concealed to uncover a darker (mostly colonial) history. In that sense, the ethnographic voids are not only produced by facts lost, but also by experience beyond expression. Avery Gordon suggests that it is up to us to understand the voids, “the kinds of

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visions they produce, and the afflictions they harbor” (Gordon 1997, 19) not in order to eradicate them—“but to fill in the content differently.”

Raven What do we have when we do not have voids? When we somehow succeed in eradicating questions by providing all the answers? Will the spectres disappear? Are voids not the crucial drive of scholarship? Isn’t haunting the precondition to detect the voids? In his well-known 1997 essay “Museums as Contact Zones,” James Clifford describes how a group of museum staff, anthropologists, experts on art, and Tlingit elders as well as translators engages with ethnographic objects in the basement of the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Oregon in 1989. At the sight of the artefacts from the museum’s Northwest Coast Indian collection (as it is called in Clifford’s text) the Tlingit elders shared stories and songs, thereby producing unexpected (from the perspective of museum staff) dimensions of object-related knowledge. A beaded jacket, for example, inspired a story about Raven who had flown into the whale’s blowhole, a story Clifford describes as a “Bible story” being reminiscent of Jonah and the Whale (1997, 190). Whereas Clifford asks for inter- and intracultural negotiations in museum environments with his essay, thus addressing collecting policies, he also illustrates the desire for the object’s pre-museum context (and a process of authentication). Instead of delivering material-related data or histories of use and ownership, the elders delivered stories. Instead of enriching the object’s biography, the elders used the object to illustrate a narrative. However, the scientific data expected are also nothing more than information inspired by (but not inherent to) the object. The ethnographic object remains in all cases an illustrative component to a larger narrative discourse that is recognized as being very fragile. Therefore, both archives, the material-related one and the archive connected to narratives, are carefully preserved. Oral narratives have been written down and techniques have been developed either to preserve the material objects in their condition or to replace them in identical forms. In all cases, the objects are crucial to a number of very vulnerable archives and constitute as such collective identities. Contacting the communities presented by the objects is now thankfully a standard procedure. It is obviously based on detecting voids symbolizing urgent responsibilities. An awareness of perception and perspective. There are diverse versions of twisting narratives in museum environments. To rearrange objects, means to rearrange narratives—and to add to the archive

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of museum strategies and display. Often the voids become more obvious in these processes as the desire to fill them completely. Thus, there is a tendency to create objects that answer all the questions. To give an example: Raven, materialized by sculpture artist Preston Singletary, welcomes the visitors of the National Museum of the American Indian to “Our Universes,” a permanent exhibition dealing with nonChristian philosophies of the Western Hemisphere explained by festivities and mythologies responding to the solar year. The sculpture refers to a prominent character in Northwest Coast mythology, already collected and prominently spread by anthropologists such as Franz Boas in the nineteenth century. The particular story that materializes at the beginning of the museum tour is the following: Once upon a time, a chief had a precious little collection of nicely decorated chests containing the sun, the moon, and the stars. The chests were firmly locked and the darkness of the world was only disrupted by the light and danger of fire. Raven—determined to change that—tricked himself inside the chief’s daughter where he grew to be a baby boy and the chief’s favorite grandson. One day, the little boy was desperately crying until the chief gave in and opened the smallest chest, which included the stars that quickly escaped and returned to the sky. Another day, the little boy cried again desperately until the chief gave in and opened the second chest, which included the moon. However, the boy did not stop crying until the chief revealed the content of the third chest and thus the sun returned to the sky. But Raven grew bored of being the chief’s favorite grandson and transformed back into a bird. In a furious chase he managed to escape through the chimney. As a result his feathers were coated in black. The light, however, remained in the world.6

Interestingly, this narrative is similar to the Bible, featuring a character that brings light to the world, so the alternative Universes (philosophies) follow the common recipe of similar but different. However, the object as such, the sculpture Raven, comes without voids. The artist has been commissioned to create the work for the museum. In a video, he explains the creation process and the Raven story. The object is no basic commodity, and yet does not feature as contemporary art in the sense of being exhibited as such. The object has no pre-museum life, no ownership mysteries or obscure archival secrets. Supposedly, there are no spectres. In the exhibition, Raven suggests the beginning of the world as well as the vastness of the universe, but he is also a collectable (trickster) character with continuous reference to an origin myth that becomes valuable and antiquated (while insistently contemporary) by being exhibited in a museum as part of an artefact. Raven is a curiosity, an

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extraordinary specimen. On the museum stage (the exhibition), he cannot be anything else but a revenant. In Spectres de Marx, Jacques Derrida conceptualizes the revenant as the spectre (not a ghost but a pattern) returning. The moment of recognition causes the uncanny (and necessarily emotional and subjective) sensation of being haunted. The revenant is an inescapable familiar re-enactment the spectator is reluctantly a (pre)defined part of. To Derrida, the revenant is a sensational disturbance that ideally leads to critical reflection. 7 In the museum, this agency of objects can be located in the affective potential of the category of the curio. However, since the curio is perceived to be an aesthetic and entirely non-political category its disturbing nature is hardly ever explored.8 The revenant becomes a reassurance of the category’s fascination instead of an uncanny experience. Thus, the spectre of curiosity remains invisible—or becomes invisible by its visibility—because it has always been a crucial part of the museum experience. As such, Singletary’s Raven re-enacts the cabinets of curiosities of Renaissance Europe in a non-disturbing and familiar manner—a strange encounter indeed. In avoiding the questions we do not avoid the spectres. In avoiding the questions we create a void.

Notes 1

The lecture was held on October 30, 2008 in London. The transcription I use here was published in 2010. 2 Shortly before the acquisition of the statue, the French law was changed to allow donors to benefit from tax credits of up to 90 per cent in the case of national treasures (Price 2010, 180). 3 In her book Paris Primitive, Price gives a set of examples that illustrate such unethical acquisitions (see page 123 for a case that involves human remains). 4 See page 181 (2010) where she asks: “How (when and by whom) was it originally discovered? Who had possessed it in Mali? When (and under what circumstances) was it exported to Europe?” 5 In his observations about the exhibition of Maori artefacts in a New Zealand context, Conal McCarthy names five object-categories: “curio—specimen—art— artifact—taonga” (2005, 1). 6 This is my version of the story of “How Raven Stole the Sun”.

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In their Spectralities Reader, Esther Peeren and María del Pilar Blanco approach Derrida’s hauntology critically, discussing its limited perspective (the one of the haunted) and its epistemological challenge of a gap between two ontologies (2013, 70-73). 8 Scholars informed by postcolonial theory and concepts of decolonization have highly politicized the category of the curio (see for example Spitta 2009 and Delbourgo 2013). But in museum environments the political element of this category remains absent.

CHAPTER SIX VOICES

Roundtable Discussion with Courtney M. Leonard, Beatriz Caballero, and Tobias Sperlich Ethnographic museums attempt to include a variety of voices and perspectives to highlight the complexity of their material. To be consistent in discussing museum issues, I invited three people who have their own deep connection to the topic to share their thoughts with me. Courtney Leonard is a Shinnecock ceramics artist and painter based in Santa Fe, New Mexico whose work often deals with the local and cultural history of particular geographical spaces. Beatriz Caballero comes from the field of Sociology and is currently completing her PhD on “The spectacle of the appropriation. The uses of Latin American cultural heritage in the construction of modern identities” at Birkbeck University in London. Tobias Sperlich is head of the department of anthropology and assistant professor at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. His work focuses on the material culture produced in Samoa and collected by German colonials in the early 1900s as well as local collections of First Nation material and their histories. I first asked the three to share a recent museum experience with me before I started with the questions: Beatriz Caballero: To be honest with you, I haven’t been thinking about ethnographic museums much recently. My research explores the construction and experience of heritage and landscape. However, in two chapters of my thesis, I also examine the display of pre-Columbian collections in museums in the U.S. Often, these objects’ meanings change depending on the context in which they are exhibited, whether they are portrayed as art or ethnographic object, whether they are displayed in Natural History museums or elsewhere. The meaning they convey is always a different one. In 2013, I went to Washington D.C. for four months to do research at the Library of Congress and at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and

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its pre-Columbian collection. I had the opportunity to interview and talk to some of the curatorial staff there and also at the Smithsonian Institution, including the curator of the Latin American collection at the National Museum of the American Indian, who was really helpful. These conversations provided me with a different insight to the politics involved in the display and exhibit of ethnographic objects and the different types of pressures these collections and displays are often under. I realized that museums are not just spaces to store and preserve artefacts; they also play an important role as learning sites, in fulfilling public expectation, and in the imagination. Tobias Sperlich: I am very interested in the stories and connections that run through objects and ethnographic collections. I can tell you a story about the research I have done in a local museum in a little town about an hour away from Regina, a little town called Fort Qu’Appelle. There is a local museum in which I did research together with a colleague. We wanted to catalogue all their First Nations’ material. That’s how it started and as we were doing this, we came across a number of objects that had written on them with a marker “F. N. Dunk.” So we were trying to figure out what that was all about and it turned out that this person, Fred Dunk, was the pharmacist in that little town in the early twentieth century. And he or his descendants, I think, donated these objects to the museum. As we were inquiring about this, everybody that we spoke to happened to know stories about this individual. So put together, there is this interesting story about Fred Dunk who was living in Fort Qu’Appelle in the early 1900s, was a pharmacist and collected objects. He was closely connected to the First Nations community, was invited to a Powwow and engaged with them apparently quite regularly. And he was willing, so the story goes…well, we don’t have any proof of that but everybody we spoke to seemed to suggest that…so he was willing to accept objects as payment for medication when First Nations people came to him and didn’t have money to pay for the medication. And that is apparently how part of his collection was put together. And people started talking about this individual which opened up very interesting conversations. To me it was particularly interesting because these stories in these local museums, the local history, suddenly becomes so personal. Objects are associated with individuals and the objects show the interactions of these local individuals with other people in that region at a very personal and unique level that goes against stereotypes. So we don’t have the bad colonial settler. We have those, too, but we also find these people who aren’t the bad colonial settler, or they are not only the bad colonial settler, they are also

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something else. That I find very interesting because people cling to these stories and tell these stories. Courtney Leonard: I am a citizen of the Shinnecock Nation of Long Island, New York. The name Shinnecock, in our indigenous language, translates in English to “people of the level land,” or “people of the shore.” As an artist, I want to demonstrate meaning from my indigenous heritage. I am currently exploring the idea of “of” as it is defined in the translation of our indigenous culture being from a specific landscape. I have travelled extensively and currently reside in Santa Fe, New Mexico; in a desert and a place, which used to be an ocean. For the past few years, I have created bodies of work entitled, BREACH. I embarked on this work as a visual expansion of its definition: “to breach the surface” and “a breach of contract.” BREACH has become an exploration of past, present, and current cultural significance to and of the whale, the water, and issues of sustainability. Everything that ties our “people of the shore” to the cultural landscape becomes a metaphorical piece that breaches off the wall or an abundance of sperm whale tooth forms that are slip-casted, and piled on top of a shipping pallet or indigenous fish baskets that are coiled out of clay. I am questioning these concepts by using both a familiar process and accessible material. What happens when a culture known to be “of” a place, no longer has access to the local materials that strongly define their cultural ways, either due to environmental issues or imposed law? In attempt to research answers, I will often include visits to museums as a part of my studio practice. I am concerned at the lack of progress our global society has made in attempting to teach about our past and present indigenous communities and the issues that they face today. For example, there are so many Natural History museums in America where the viewer is directed to walk through an exhibit timeline. First taking you all the way through how the landscape has changed, especially the geology of the land. Particularly in the Southwest, which used to be an ocean filled with creatures and where dinosaurs roamed and which is now reflected in fossils. Next comes the exhibition that includes Native people. The museums will often follow up with a curatorial attempt to show the Native People of today, the roles they have in their communities and often place an emphasis on the ideas that these communities are keeping their cultural ways in terms of beading, making pottery, and traditional clothing. It’s an attempt at the 1990s museum conversation that “We Are Still Here” and WE ARE, but why was it ever considered okay to acknowledge our presence in this manner? Why is an acknowledgement of a people and

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community displayed next to creatures of extinction and faded fossils? Why? When I see these exhibits, I think of the studio art students that I had the honour of teaching over the past few years at the Institute of American Indian Arts (Santa Fe, New Mexico). These students, who are also indigenous from different communities, read contemporary art magazines, Pop Culture Zines and continue to create current conversations relevant to their personal work that I do not see in these exhibits. During the 1990s, many museums tried to add a contemporary component to the Native People section but they haven’t updated it to include who we are as indigenous people today and that we are all over the place and that THAT is indigenous, too. I feel uncomfortable in these museums. As an indigenous viewer, I am walking in a museum where there are dinosaurs and labels that make me feel like our current global culture is sedated, that all audiences need things to entice them, and that ultimately rather than educate about current cultures, it is more beneficial to the museum to succumb to a kind of marketing ploy, no different from the history of travelling “oddity” shows. As an indigenous person, I continuously come across things that feel wrong to me, but I try to take a step back and question our need as a culture, to stuff animals like pillows and put them up for decoration. As an artist, these questions sometimes become part of the content of my work. Right now, I am coiling indigenous fish basket forms from clay. They are non-functional metaphors, symbolic of abundance. The idea is that you could maybe go and get an abundance of clams; similar to how I remember doing on Shinnecock when I was young but they aren’t there now like they used to be. Algae blooms and environmental issues to our bay waters have caused our shellfish and fish to die off throughout the years. So I am making these baskets that reference use but can never actually be used. Instead, they are potential markers for wantonness of abundance or the potential to harvest abundance in our future. All of these things are part of that word “breach.”

What is your position concerning ethnographic objects in museum settings? Beatriz Caballero: When I did my fieldwork in Peru, I struggled with my position as a researcher from Europe and the power relations and asymmetry that this position involves. Why is it that ethnographic objects are more widely available in European and North American museums? In Peru, I visited a wide range of museums, but I could not find many

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ethnographic displays about other cultures. They exhibit objects from their own past and not so much from other pasts. My position is that more often than not the history and narratives attached to these collections are problematic. From my point of view, the term ethnographic museum should change, or maybe even disappear. Why are these museums still necessary? What is their role? When I was interviewing the people at the Smithsonian, they told me that these museums exist to cover public expectations and educate the public. Somehow, they do not want to confront the public with the uncomfortable context of the objects’ acquisition. In a way, and to be very general, ethnographic objects in museums still carry a very heavy controversial and problematic past in ways that are not clearly reflected in their displays. And even now that many museums have begun to promote multivocality in their displays and engage with indigenous and local communities, I still think that this is not enough. It seems like a performance to make the public/us feel more comfortable around the issues of ownership and knowledge production. Recently, I visited the exhibition Indigenous Australia at the British Museum, which was widely acclaimed as an exhibition that treated Aboriginal art as part of a living and enduring civilization and not a fixed culture…I felt this display was still missing a sort of dialogue and more contextual information about how and why these objects were acquired, which is always problematic. In addition, look at the irony of creating this amazing exhibition in the same space in which other material cultures currently on display have been strongly contested (i.e. Elgin Marbles). I have encountered research institutions and museums which have built most of their collections through private collectors and present themselves as open, accessible and committed to research collaboration. However, when you ask to see some letters and files on how these collectors acquired the objects, the price they paid for them, the information where the objects travelled from and so on, these institutions and museums don’t facilitate or even refuse to grant you access to that type of information. It seems a bit hypocritical really. On the one hand, these museums are portrayed as freely accessible and collaborative, but on the other hand, they really offer resistance and refuse to work through their own controversial history. In my opinion, ethnographic museums and collections actually talk more about ourselves (the West) than about “other” cultures. My opinion is that ethnographic museums shouldn’t exist in the same way they exist now. Why is it that we feel this interest for these objects from these regions of the world?

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Tobias Sperlich: These objects are in a very complicated situation. The easiest approach I see, and it is easy because it does not necessarily acknowledge a lot of problems, but it is an approach I use very often, it is very useful and a good starting point, is that the objects are ambassadors in museums, they are ambassadors for other people and other times. They can be an ambassador for a population, for a group of people elsewhere. It is not quite the same for First Nations objects in Southern Saskatchewan local museums because First Nations people live all around here all the time. But my other research has to do with objects from Samoa that are in museums in Europe. There you can look at them as objects that connect the museum with Samoa and to the colonial history of that museum, but also to individuals in Samoa or in Germany who were collecting them. So they are ambassadors for that, when Samoans come to Germany or to England or France they can connect with these objects and they are not just notable people like Prime Ministers, also artists and cultural practitioners and knowledge keepers can go there and can visit these objects and they can interact with people that keep these objects and care for these objects. So this is one way I approach these objects, it is a very useful and positive one but as I said, I am aware of the fact that it ignores some of the more complicated stories connected to these objects. I mean, they might not be supposed to be there because maybe they might have been taken illegitimately, they might have been stolen, they might have been taken under force or false pretence so they probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Whoever took them or was given them wasn’t supposed to take them away to a faraway place. The other thing is that some of the objects shouldn’t be on display because they contain secret or sacred information or knowledge or other important cultural aspects. So some of the objects should be taken off the display. That’s the other thing and if you think of them as ambassadors you might take these two important aspects away. At the same time, I find it very exciting to use objects and these stories in my class because you can use them as examples for very complicated socio-cultural situations and how different groups of people think differently about the world. So for example, to a European, having a pipe on display might be potentially even boring but to First Nations people, pipes are very powerful and sacred objects and you shouldn’t put them on display. To use this example is very helpful and direct for the students so if you go to a museum of a local community you probably won’t see them, but if you do see these pipes you should really talk to the people who run the museum and alert them to the fact that the people who created these pipes, First Nations from this region, do not want them to be on display even though in our

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mindset as white European Western people that might not make a lot of sense. So this is a good example to show how in a different context this is important. You can also talk about colonialism very well and power and domination and repatriation and how these objects got there in the first place and why are all these collections in most of the European Metropolitan centres and not in the Canadian Prairies or South Pacific Islands or somewhere in Africa? So you can connect these objects to very interesting larger aspects. Courtney Leonard: Cultural objects placed within an environment that they never initially existed in could never actually realize their full original context. However, if the audience was allowed to envision these cultural objects in their place of origin, that is, with the people themselves, it could provide a certain amount of information, but again it will never afford the entire context. This is because as humans our initial response to creating objects is for survival and communication with other humans. The object is only a marker for shared oral records. This communication is passed down with the people, the object merely acting as a visual conduit, and, therefore, the translation is altered when deciphered outside of its original environment and keepers of those records. To think that an object can communicate its original context, either on its own or deciphered from an external community, reminds me of a question posed by the colour theorist, artist, and educator, Josef Albers. He had asked his students to think of the colour red and to name an immediate object that came to mind. Some thought of an apple, others a coke bottle, others the fabric of a scarf, and so on. Each had their own translation of red and each red in their memory was uniquely different when asked to make that red with paint on a canvas. When we reference the colour, we each think of a different red and we think of a different red because we all have different backgrounds. We all have different cultural experiences. So when the museum tries to translate cultural objects by overlabelling—as an artist—I counter that action by providing a title using only one word and a label that only lists the definition(s) of that word. For example, the word breach (defined as conduct, law in terms of a contract, breach of a surface, breaking the surface, whale breaching), and then by doing so, allow for multiple connections, definitions and interpretations by the external audience. The idea of language and communication is falling very short in museums. Common translations either in conversation, label, or text exists only as “here is beadwork, notice its beauty; it was used in this_____ceremony.” But what about the math behind that beadwork, the patterning, the science in terms of the astrology and astronomy at the time

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connected to that pattern? There are many things that are being lost, which the audience might be able to reference if they learned from the people themselves but within museum settings, this cultural knowledge is lost.

What is your role in these museum settings? Beatriz Caballero: Do you mean as a visitor? I find it very true what the staff of the Smithsonian said to me: that they cater to the expectations of visitors. However, I find that as a visitor I come with a range of expectations, like getting to know not only the meaning or functionality of the objects. I am more interested in the ways the objects ended up in the museum. Why this museum? Who funded it? Why did someone think that object was relevant in the first place? I would like to know more about the context per se. Just recently, I visited the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. That museum is well known for keeping the display according to the typology suggested by the collector who ordered the objects by type. Therefore, it is a museum of a museum in a way because they still try to keep the display of the collection as it was. Still, you are provided with only a very short introduction about Pitt Rivers and how he acquired the objects. I feel there is still a glorification of the collector that I find in many other ethnographic museums, where most of their objects came from donations from collectors. It seems problematic as the museum cannot really criticize anything related to the collector, any type of moral judgment on the ways and circumstances these collectors acquired some of the objects. In a way, I would like the ethnographic museum to be a critical space in which people are confronted with the power imbalances and their entanglement with the colonial past. Instead, visiting ethnographic museums is still promoted as part of an educational and leisure activity. To go there and see these objects differing from the ones we are used to and leaving the museum thinking that we learned something about other cultures without any kind of…I don’t want to say responsibility, but it is not only part of our past, but also part of our present and on how we keep producing a particular type of knowledge. Tobias Sperlich: My role in ethnographic museums is certainly very indirect because I don’t work in a museum, I visit them, I do research in them but I’m always a guest there. I have no control of the display and the objects. This makes my role very easy because it is easy to criticize and to tell people that they did something wrong or very well or I can comment and question it and I can compare different museums to each other because

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I don’t have strong feelings about one museum or another. At the same time, it puts me in a somewhat difficult position especially in the case of the museums in Southern Saskatchewan which are largely the museums that I work in at the moment, and which are largely volunteer run. These are often very well educated people but they often don’t have a museum studies background. They are doing very well and getting support from the Museums Association of Saskatchewan and other institutions but they have very little money and these people have very little academic knowledge of what is going on in museums worldwide. I find it difficult to criticize them too harshly because I recognize the constrains they work under, it is not that they can’t or don’t want to do certain things but it is simply that they don’t know. It doesn’t mean that I don’t tell them but I have to be careful how I say things and certainly when it comes to publishing I feel I have to be a little sensitive. These volunteers are willing to give me access. Sometimes I feel a little conflicted about how I write about them or how I speak about them, their collecting policies and practices because these people have been willing to let me in, they have opened up everything to me, they have answered my questions truthfully. So I don’t want to mistreat them. They give me a lot of trust and I don’t want to disappoint them and lose that trust by being overly critical for the sake of being critical. These people are welcoming and give me access, you know, they don’t have to. So sometimes it creates a difficult position for me because I am not in the museum myself where I would feel much more confident criticizing my own institution. It creates a bit of a conflict. Courtney Leonard: Sometimes I feel like a fly on the wall. I can be there and watch how people interact with objects. For instance, when I was at the Natural History Museum in Salt Lake City, there were these very old moccasins displayed in different sizes. They were found in a cave and the labels focused on how the dryness of the Southwest was able to preserve the leather of the moccasins. I witnessed a mother pointing out the moccasins to her child and the child responded: “I would never wear those shoes” and that was the only interaction they had about this particular display. There was no exchange or thought about how these shoes feel, what it might be like to walk in these shoes, or why would one think these shoes would need to be wrapped higher so that the wearer would not get bitten by snakes in the region. There was no reference of these crumbled shoes that went beyond the climate of the cave. We aren’t speaking to the generation that is there. Curiosity is still human nature and especially that of children, but that’s not really being resolved. What is it that children take back home from the exhibits? At the end of the museum tour, what is

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it that you remember? What would you take and give to others? So what is the point of a museum really?

What is your vision for ethnographic objects in museums? Beatriz Caballero: It is a little bit related to what I said before. From my point of view, ethnographic museums shouldn’t exist as such. But I know that is not going to happen, I am well aware of that. I wish they could include or expand those contextual stories and uncomfortable truths. I think that ethnographic museums might be running to an end as they are right now. I cannot see the great educational benefits of keeping ethnographic objects on display. Why are ethnographic museums still so relevant for the West? What is their purpose nowadays? Are ethnographic museums the only way to preserve and conserve objects from other cultures? And why do we need to know so much about these particular cultures? It is still so much connected to imperial pasts and attitudes and to the colonialism of the West. It is attached to control and the control of knowledge and it is difficult to let go. Tobias Sperlich: I think my vision is working already very well in some of these museums. It is to use these objects to connect people on the local, regional and international level. So allowing people to get a glimpse of life, of reality, in different places and times. So in the context of Saskatchewan, I would like to see these objects have a role in connecting settler Canadians and aboriginal Canadians in discussing their histories and realities right now. I think they can do that very well, because you can touch objects, you can pass them around, you can talk about them, you can learn about them, and everyone has a perspective and knowledge not so much about the actual object but about people. So when you look at an object or talk about a specific object, people will quickly talk about who made the object, how they could have used it and how they feel about them using it in a certain way, and what that means about their perception of other groups and these groups’ perception of one’s own cultural group. So quickly, you talk about other things. It can work very well on a local level in a not quite postcolonial situation like Saskatchewan. But I also think it can work internationally where people in Rostock, Berlin, Cologne or London can engage with people from the source communities, connect with them through the object. The objects are just the starting point because people very quickly talk about life, histories and stories that may or may not have to do with the objects. But their dialogue begins by using

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the object and that’s the beauty of ethnographic objects, but not just ethnographic objects, that allow for cross-cultural connection or disconnection in different places. Courtney Leonard: Well, they were not supposed to be there in the first place, but now they are there. I don’t know, really. I have always maintained the idea that the objects could be ultimately returned to the people and that the people could offer the education they choose regarding their cultural items, what they are and where they come from. I have always envied Europe for youth travelling. I don’t think a lot of Americans travel at a young age. Maybe it would be a great opportunity to have people travel to the communities. But people seem to hold on to the idea that you can go to one place and get all your information from one place. I am not sure that this technique is still valuable now that we have so many virtual and visual opportunities. The objects could also go back and there would be more opportunities for collaborative engagement. If you cannot offer their due why then keep the objects? How can you tell “our” story better than we can? I am still confused by the notion of museums. The power of my current interests now lies in the consequences of climate change. That due to erosion we will soon no longer have access to our land as it will be covered by ocean and then where does that leave me and my daughter? Can you maintain a culture without having access to the cultural material anymore? My artistic response is the creation of these cultural items out of clay, fishing baskets and nets, coiled from the earth I have access to. I continue to explore the word breach as a visual log and then I wonder where my work is going to fit. Is it going to be in an ethnographic museum because they want to be hip and invite artists in? Or is it going to be exhibited in a contemporary art space based on the fact that climate change is a human issue or a Native contemporary art space? When people ask me for my cultural identity, I can refuse to answer but I cannot deny the fact that I am a woman and then where does that leave me as an artist? Where is the space for the people?

CHAPTER SEVEN MUSEUM TRAVELS: A CONCLUSION

Ethnographic museums are complexly entangled tourist destinations. While they promote a dialogue between communities, they in fact maintain a clear-cut division between self and other scholars and activists (and most other people on the planet) have criticized as unproductive and essentializing. As ethnographic museums face this criticism, they struggle to redefine themselves based on the collections they house that often have a controversial past. In most cases, the name changes from something that indicates a connection to anthropology (as the study of others) to a seemingly inclusive embrace of the world (Museum of World Cultures etc.) or something rather neutral (such as the name of the location or street). Exhibitions involve multiple perspectives, metahistorical approaches and in the best cases a critical self-exposure. Yet, by exoticizing, aestheticizing, and trivializing the material (and narratives) on display, the museums encourage the very activities upon which their collections are based or re-enact and thus re-place such activities for the contemporary visitor. In the shop, museums reveal their tourist past as they assemble material evidence of the collector’s travels but also provide material (often in souvenir form) to inspire new collections elsewhere. Thus, they become simulated tours around the world (or a specific region of the world), particularly since their arrangements of exhibited artefacts often reflect cartographic patterns. Indigenous America is a compulsory part of this map, as is Africa and Asia (without the focus on indigeneity) while Europe (and European influences) is traditionally missing. As ethnographic museums become condensed travels around the world, they also simulate travels in time not only concerning the age of their material but also the strategies of their displays. Being read as such, ethnographic museums provide a cultural history of the ethics of sightseeing when their display strategies often reflect the fantasies of the visited communities and sights.1

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By no longer differentiating between communities (collective human beings) and sights (material(ized) spectacles) museums become haunted places since the absence of differentiating is not reflected upon but repressed. The objects become charged with their history and are turned inevitably into revenants of troubling discourses about the other that originate in travel contexts. I would like to envision meta-strategies that make these various tourist approaches and activities evident and that analyse the necessary elements of ethnographic museums to eventually encourage reflections about the nature of travel and display when everything in viewing range of the traveller becomes an exhibited spectacle. My reflections take as their point of departure a small private museum that has ceased to exist at this point of time. In many ways this museum is symptomatic for “the widespread mania which remains its characteristic up to the present day, a fact which reflects both the Renaissance stress on the importance of the individual, and the development of contemporary early capitalism with which it went hand in hand” (Pearce 1999, 92). The moments of recognition, as common in discussions of better-known examples, will occur here to allow for a transnational formation of museum theory. While distinctions may be made between private and public institutions and various approaches to curatorship, the particular small and amateur example I chose for my conclusion will point to crucial strategies that are evident in all ethnographic displays.

Mapping the Museum Gehricke’s Indian Museum is situated in a small village in Germany and exhibits a private collection of American Indian artefacts with an ethnographic and historical claim. In Germany, there is a long-standing fascination with American Indians. Shortly after Christopher Columbus wrote about his cultural encounters with the population of the New World, his records were translated into German as were many following travel accounts and eventually also the adventure novels by James Fenimore Cooper. In the late nineteenth century, the German writer Karl May gained fame with his most prominent fictional character, the noble Apache Winnetou, probably one of the most persistent clichés in the reception of American Indian cultures on this side of the Atlantic. Due to the romanticized past that is so vividly described in the fictional texts as well as the travel accounts, many Germans are convinced that the “white man” has destroyed the reality of Indian life. However, nostalgia for “the noble warrior” has survived, and numerous Germans have devoted

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their lives to the promotion and re-enactment of a fictionalized indigenous American past. Among them was Karl-Heinrich Gehricke (1928-2010), who enthusiastically amassed a collection of what he believed to be remains of indigenous American cultures and exhibited them in his private museum. In his autobiographical book, Die Indianer Nordamerikas. Faszination eines Lebens (“American Indians. The Fascination of a Life,” 2004), he claims to own the “largest privately exhibited collection of Native American artefacts,” which consists of about 4,000 objects (240). In 2003, he opened his private museum in a spacious and elegant art nouveau mansion in the small village of Gevezin, a good two hours north of Berlin, Germany. The exhibition opens with a number of life-size and miniature dioramas including an American Indian on a horse, a teepee, a burial site and a buffalo hunt. The rooms that follow have each been devoted to geographical regions: the Arctic and the Sub-Arctic, the Northeast and the Southeast, the Southwest, the Plains, Plateau and Basin, California, the Northwest Coast, following the classic culture area concept established by the renowned anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. With the exception of one room entitled “Mystery Room,” they suggest a journey through space. A corridor connects the rooms and provides historical information in the form of archaeological artefacts and a discussion of the European invasion. While the corridor takes the visitor through time, it also quite literally forms a time bar presenting Native American history. The “Mystery Room,” eventually, is devoted to the sacred. By being set apart, the claim is made that its topic must be situated beyond time and space. Just like a trading post, Gehricke’s museum is guarded by a cigar store Indian, presumably a scout wearing a feather headdress and wrapped in an American flag. This clichéd representation of “the Indian” greets visitors to an exhibition of American Indian objects that are geographically as well as culturally maximally displaced and decontextualized from their geographical space of origin. But the collection is also removed in time: the exhibition rooms not only resemble the museums of the nineteenth century when institutionalized anthropology was still in its infancy, they also betray an older legacy, that of the Renaissance cabinets of curiosities when the New World was little more than a shape on a map. At the same time, the journey takes the visitors to fictionalized cultures that resist time and place—as already indicated by the wooden sculpture of the cigar store Indian (which is also a commercial icon). The dioramas indeed represent an affective stage, a fictional scene rather than an ethnographic reference to indigenous American communities. The equestrian, for example, wears a mix of clothing from geographically

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distant communities and paradigmatically represents Berkhofer’s “white man’s Indian” (1978). These scenes cast visitors back into the nineteenth century when these kinds of exhibition techniques were developed and became popular especially among collectors who fashioned themselves as adventurous heroes of fictional narratives. Accordingly, such representations necessarily refer to adventure tales like Fenimore Cooper’s or Karl May’s, which are simultaneously idealized travel accounts. Gehricke’s museum re-presents this particular vision of Native American life as much as it repeats nineteenth-century collecting and exhibition strategies and policies—based on a collection he assembled during his various travels to the United States between 1980 and 2000. The geographical focus of his trips and his objects of desire were inspired by Karl May’s novels, which he had read avidly ever since his youth. Karl May is the most prominent German author of adventure novels set in the “Wild West” of the United States written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also wrote novels set in the Orient and the Middle East, which were equally successful at the time, but today he is mainly remembered for his fiction that features American settings. His most famous novels, which prominently feature American Indians, revolve around the adventures of the young German explorer Karl, later called Old Shatterhand, who eventually befriends Winnetou, the son of a Mescalero Apache chief. May managed to market his novels as authentic accounts of life in the United States, particularly owing to their detailed descriptions of the scenery and because Karl May cast himself in the persona of the protagonist Old Shatterhand. While the author did not travel North America in person until 1908, he continuously claimed that his novels were travel accounts. Karl-Heinrich Gehricke declared it his mission to prove the fictional accounts as fact. Thus, he used the novels as travel guides and, adapting the attitude of the protagonist, enthusiastically identified with the indigenous population of North America. In keeping with the novels, he saw them as victims of white American policies and fashioned a dislike for Euro-Americans. The objects in the museum document his travels and serve as evidence to his adventures. At the same time, they serve to authenticate the fictional texts he enjoyed reading. As such, the objects gain an additional layer apart from those layers prominently discussed by Susan Stewart (1993). His souvenirs are not only metonymic in their reference to a distant place and moment in the past, they also refer to the imagination that pre-sets the journey and follows it ever after. In the museum narrative, the objects become the remains of cultures inevitably destroyed. As such, Gehricke enacts the nineteenth-century

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collector whose imperial attitude is poorly hidden under a paternal concern for preservation. Gehricke’s travel narrative, not only published in book form but also performed as part of the guided tour through the museum, even conjures the nineteenth century linguistically and stylistically. In 1980, during his second trip to the American West, Gehricke made his first purchase of American Indian artefacts, the basis of his collection, in Virginia City, Nevada. In his travel account, he narrates how after finding a boulder containing gold in one of the many old mines, he entered a “spooky and shabby house” (2004, 62, my translation) located next to the mine, which had ironically once been a museum. “Unexpectedly,” Gehricke recalls in his writings, “I happened to meet the owner [of the house] who lived in narrow circumstances. Reluctantly, but with a respectable financial fortune in prospect, he eventually sold me a very rare…tomahawk…as well as an old…pipe” (2004, 62).2 This commercial exchange is strikingly rich in its symbolism. Not only does it take place in a model town of the old West (Virginia City is part of the Virginia City Historic District, which entered the National Historic Landmark register in 1961), but the two items that Gehricke purchased inaugurated his collection of American Indian artefacts, which in turn eventually grew into his Indian Museum in Gevezin. Furthermore, he “found” the objects in a former museum that was in decline by the time of his visit and thus could salvage them for posteriority. The artefacts are therefore already antiquated by virtue of their setting, since the sale indeed appears to take place in the nineteenth century and not in 1980. This is further confirmed by the language Gehricke uses, which closely resembles the language of Karl May and his contemporaries, but also the language of amateur collectors such as George Gustav Heye. “The fire was sparked in me,” he writes. “Now I wanted to satisfy my ethnographic curiosity and develop a representative collection of indigenous artefacts” (2004, 65). 3 While these imperial attitudes adopted by collectors and ethnographers alike have been criticized severely since the 1980s, Gehricke clearly understands himself as “the white man” who has come not to intrude but to ask for friendship, a role that has often been explored in popular fiction (see, for example, the character of John Dunbar in Dances with Wolves, 1990). Whenever Gehricke fails in this purchase attempt, he expresses empathy with the Natives, attributing their non-cooperation to tragic historical encounters with other Europeans. He repeatedly emphasizes his surprise at being welcomed at powwows, even though the powwows of his travel narrative are clearly recognizable as popular events that also feature as tourist attractions (2004, 17). Although all powwows in his book are unspecific,

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not dated and no location given, the pictures always include powwow dancers as well as tourists. Here the tourist and the explorer overlap because to Gehricke and like-minded travellers a journey always already signifies discovery, which necessarily focuses on the exceptional and yet unknown (unseen) rather than the popular tourist track. The tourist needs to explore in person and thus discovers on an individual level. Each journey is originally imaginary and mostly confirms fantasies rather than disrupting them. This does not mean that the discovery has been previously unknown to others, but that it is staged as a novelty from the perception of its “discoverer.” Regarding his collecting policies (which mainly consisted of collecting anything that appeared to be antiquated from the indigenous peoples of North America), Gehricke tried to maintain respect for the pieces he encountered. His autobiographical travel account claims that he often acknowledged the historic and aesthetic value of the objects, but did not immediately show his interest in buying any of them. Nevertheless, in other parts of his travel account he describes the long and difficult negotiations that preceded the sale of an (often inherited) object. Before agreeing to sell the object, the seller needed to be persuaded by the increasing rise in the price Gehricke offered, to eventually part with it. Gehricke cannot escape the obvious contradiction between the life narrative he tries to construct for himself and the actual context of his experiences. The fictional account of his journey does not account for the economic interactions that leads him to the fulfilment of his dreams. Indeed, one has to read between the lines to understand that many of his purchases were made at trading posts on or near reservations and most of his “friends” were (indigenous) trading post owners. Thus, the objects he bought were souvenirs metonymic not for his travel experiences but for the fictional constructs that preceded his travels. They mark his journey through space—the geographical space of North America as well as the fictional space of the Wild West.

Time Travels While Gehricke went on his own time travels in the tracks of nineteenth-century fictional characters, visitors to his museum traverse centuries of museum display. As both Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Conal McCarthy argue, (ethnographic) objects have the potential to change categories in time, transforming from curio to specimen to artefact to art to cultural treasure although not unidirectional and necessarily in that order (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, 25 and McCarthy 2007, 1).

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Gehricke’s museum collects these categories like layers of dust on the objects. A critical perspective must strive to recover the object’s complexity within the historical discourses that have enabled its being-inplace at the museum in Gevezin. Inside the glass cabinets, the attributes of curio, specimen and cultural treasure coexist, overlap and attach themselves selectively to the objects, depending on the position of their observer. Contemporary public museums often favour a conscious (and directed) dialogue with their past, but Gehricke’s collection, by virtue of being private, is situated outside these discourses. Its patchwork of outmoded display techniques visualizes the troubling history of cultures on display. As it strives to recreate an idealized, idiosyncratic past (of Gehricke as traveller-explorer/latter-day Karl May), it gains meta-museum qualities. As a private collection, Gehricke’s museum stands in the tradition of the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities. Characteristically, his objects were not accompanied by explanatory texts, but depended on (his) oral narratives. While the collection refers back to its owner, Gehricke stages himself by adapting to a canon of objects that illustrate the Wild West in his case. Gehricke’s exhibition cases are filled to exhaustion with artefacts. He clearly intends to show as much as possible to present the collector through the wealth of his collection. None of the objects has been labelled sufficiently; their origin, maker and/or cultural context remain obscure. Visitors depend on the guide (the collector) for clues about the objects. Gehricke himself used to show them around and told anecdotes related to the artefacts. Through them, he fashioned himself. The narrative of objects begins with the moment they changed their owner and they make sense at Gevezin only in the owner’s perception of cultures. During the moment of exchange, Gehricke becomes a trickster driven by the urge to possess. These moments become little conquests and are haunted by the history of dispossession that precedes them. While posing as the understanding benefactor, Gehricke becomes a colonial agent, an explorer and adventurer at a time when every part of the narrative he subscribes to has been heavily mythologized. His approach turns the objects into curiosities as the example of the Kachina dolls illustrates. Several cabinets in the “remaining Southwest” section are filled with Kachina which merely bear name tags such as

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Sikya Heheya

He-e-e

The Kachina are not explicated at all; no reference to their place in mythology or their role in their culture of origin is made. Unless one takes the tour with the collector, “cultural (and historical) knowledge” is withheld from the visitors. This practice of an oral tour through a collection, often by its owner, was common in the cabinets of the Renaissance as was the amassed display of (exotic and rare) objects lacking textual companionship. The objects were the canonized exotic evidence of distant worlds and many objects are staged accordingly by Gehricke. Between the 1840s and the 1890s, museums formed the institutional body of anthropology and became so numerous that the Smithsonian anthropologist William Sturtevant identified the nineteenth century as the “museum age” (1969). With the expansionism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, ethnographic objects were no longer acquired to be integrated into a scheme of curiosity, but to deliberately show other cultures and places and to justify strategies of power and domination. Reassembled in museums, the artefacts became evidences of colonization and were turned into specimen (see Chapter Two). Whereas collections had been previously assembled in private, they became nationalized and governmental institutions were founded all over the colonial world to support the various sciences then forming in departments at universities. The transformation is indeed more complex, beginning already in the eighteenth century with certain museums no longer referring to collectors but collecting “universal knowledge” particularly in the form of natural history as in the case of Charles Willson Peale’s museum in Philadelphia. However, with expansionism increasingly the driving force, museums were shaped by a different strategy to eventually justify land claims and domination. Once the collections became publicly available or public property, they became larger and the classification of objects required different institutions to handle them. Whereas previously part of nature or within a category of the exotic, objects from indigenous communities suddenly supported the arising discipline of anthropology. No longer defined as

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curio, they were grouped as specimen intended to describe societies and cultures as observed by the anthropologist. The museum enabled its visitors to become travellers to remote regions of the world while at the same time suggesting a tour into the past. As Johannes Fabian has observed, “physical time is seldom used in its naked, chronological form” (1983, 30). By marking the exhibited societies as tribal, or primitive, a temporal distance is created which denies coevalness: Beneath their bewildering variety, the distancing devices that we can identify produce a global result. I will call it denial of coevalness. By that I mean a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse. (1983, 31, emphasis in original)

It was during the late nineteenth century that the museum became a monument to the past not only denying its subjects coevalness but being intentionally ignorant of the present. In fact, this was not only true for collections of anthropology. Museums of natural history also embraced extinct species and depicted flora and fauna resistant to change. Although understood as a window on the world, museums were mirrors of society’s utopias, of its desire for untouched paradises idealizing an imagined past not one’s own. As the salvaging impulse is institutionalized, imperialist nostalgia is given its intellectual and societal frame. The ethnographic collections of the nineteenth century took their visitors on a journey to different parts of the world. The rooms devoted to regions in Gehricke’s museum resemble that practice. The extensive use of mannequins and dioramas further distinguishes nineteenth-century exhibition techniques from their forerunners. Born in an age of commercialization, mannequins were used by both department stores and museums to visualize clothing and life style. Locked in glass cases, the wax Indians appear imprisoned in their past. They are people on display only labelled with an outdated version of their community affiliations (e.g. “Apache”), but not contextualized historically. Initially, these life-size casts were only used in museum contexts to present (traditional) costumes, but eventually they were arranged in groups to represent traditional activities (Oettermann 1997, 3). The earliest ethnological mannequins to be documented in the United States were “Eskimo Joe and his wife Hanna” at the United States National Museum in Washington, D.C., in 1873 (Cole 1985, 135). In Europe, they have a longer tradition in folklore exhibitions, seen as popular teasers to attract visitors in the hope they may also engage with the educational part of exhibitions (Jacknis 1985, 100-103). Gehricke’s life-size casts are not only

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haunted by the nineteenth-century obsession with entertainment, but by the general history of people on display. His casts recall cases like Ishi (1860-1916), “the last of Deer Creek Indians” who spent a significant amount of his life in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley (see Chapter Two). The casts are silent reminders of the tradition of human zoos and the tremendous efforts of physical anthropology to measure and classify race. It is the discourse of salvage anthropology, which dominated nineteenth-century displays, that can be rediscovered in the rooms of Gehricke’s museum. Whereas the cultures were perceived to be vanishing when anthropologists snatched all objects in their reach, Gehricke oddly exhibits cultural fantasies familiar from the adventurous stories of nineteenth-century writers—and his own travel narrative. Presently, many of the formerly amassed artefacts are involved in complicated negotiations concerning their return to their culture of origin. In 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed in Congress in the United States. It is considered a human right to allow the living to possess control over their dead. According to the act, museums received funding to identify all objects in their collections that were associated with burials and notify the communities. The indigenous agents were then allowed to choose if and what they claimed. By now, the concept of repatriation has expanded to include all sorts of objects defined as cultural treasures by their cultures of origin. Often illegally obtained in the first place, objects are now, more than a century later, requested to be returned also by museums in Europe. While Gehricke loses himself in recounting interesting anecdotes of his dashing travels, he also mystifies his cultural encounters. He repeatedly claims to possess secret knowledge about indigenous medical and religious practices and ceremonies. The effect of this withheld information is particularly obvious in the “Mystery Room,” which includes ceremonial items such as medicine bundles and pipes. By placing them in this room, separate from the objects located in the museum’s other spaces—rooms organized according to the scheme of geographical areas—Gehricke intends to show a particular kind of respect for the sacred. At the same time, it is not obvious where these objects belong in terms of time and space. Although the communities are indicated by labels, the artefacts appear to be similar, thereby linking the exhibit to antiquated museum methods of typification. While separating this particular display from the category of space, it is still embedded into a North American context and time-wise connected to previous display strategies as well as the New Age fascination with Native American spiritual practices.

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Meta-Museums Museums like Gehricke’s have been criticized for a number of reasons, including for failure to include indigenous perspectives, indulging in an imperial obsession with cultures thought to be subordinate and doomed to vanish, not respecting objects significant in, if not sacred to, these cultures. For locking objects and people in glass coffins. For being racist in the portrayal of other peoples. Ultimately, for not being conscious of any of the above. Private collections outside the public and/or academic discourse on museums are, however, particularly valuable as a meta-museum. They highlight the ways in which we have tried to gain and disseminate knowledge about the world we inhabit. Museums which adhere to a specific mentality remind us of past knowledge systems, for they resist change and, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett puts it: “[M]useums without the will to transform themselves became museums of museums,” (2006, 361). When they are contextualized within museum history, for example through “dilemma labels,” which comment on a particular exhibition and raise awareness of its outdatedness, their meta-museal qualities become obvious to the visitors. Instead, Gehricke’s museum is a time machine which takes visitors back to an earlier world, in which they experience older forms of exhibition and perception of the other and explore the longlived realm of the imagined Native American: Mannequins locked in glass cases, masses of objects thought to establish cultural contexts, sacred items on display, historical facts next to dioramas of Wild West scenes as found in popular nineteenth-century shows such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. A patchwork of outmoded display strategies deriving from the Renaissance cabinets of curiosities and nineteenth-century anthropological discourse. A collage of different approaches to cultures taken from ethnography, fiction, history, and tourist experience. Gehricke’s museum illuminates the fact that tourist experiences are highly symbolic, that imaginary journeys play as strongly into the perception of sights as the actual tourist experience and that museums and ethnographic objects continue to be a significant part of this.

Notes 1

An activity that has been excellently theorized by Dean MacCannell in his most recent work (2011). 2 My translation. The German original reads: “Unerwartet stieß ich dort auf den in ärmlichsten Verhältnissen lebenden alten Eigentümer der mir zögernd, aber in

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Anbetracht seiner Situation und der Aussicht auf eine größere Geldeinnahme schließlich einen äußerst seltenen…Tomahawk…sowie eine alte…Pfeife verkaufte.” 3 My translation. The German original reads: “Das Feuer war in mir entfacht. Jetzt mußte ich meinen ethnologischen Wissensdurst stillen und eine repräsentative Sammlung indigener Artefakte sollte entstehen.”

EPILOGUE THE VEIL

One day, a friend gave me a large piece of fabric for my new apartment and suggested I use it as a tablecloth. I thought the material was too thick and hard for that use. It had an intense and unpleasant smell and a dull blue chequered pattern with little contrast; in short, I found the cloth very unappealing. On the table its asymmetry disrupted the inner harmony of my new room and whichever way I pulled, it looked dirty, ugly, unkind and odd—a protest to the very idea of tablecloths. However, it was obvious to me that the object was dear to my friend and the gift a thoughtful sacrifice of some sort and before further thinking about possible uses, I washed my future tablecloth several times at the highest possible temperature with a good mixture of strong soap. It was drying in the fresh autumn sun, when I looked at it more closely. Definitely, it was not a tablecloth, not a curtain and not a blanket. It looked out of place, indefinable—like an accident of interior design. I continued to feel reluctant about putting the fabric on the table but I also did not want to upset my friend. At the next occasion, I casually inquired about the cloth trying to sound as neutral as possible. In the same casual and neutral tone, my friend replied that it was an old Egyptian veil. He had been living in Cairo for several years and shortly before his return, he felt the desire to own a veil. He had asked a befriended butcher in the hope of being referred to a good place and the old man, obviously amused, withdrew to the back of the shop that served as his apartment and returned with the old veil of his great-grandmother that he was quite happy to give away. For years, my friend had been using the veil as a curtain but after he moved, it had rested among old clothes in a box. My new apartment was a chance for the veil to shine again, at least that was what he had thought. I quickly calculated in my head. The butcher had been old a couple of years ago, a fact that made it easy to date the object back to the nineteenth century, mid-nineteenth century at least. I felt suddenly very bad for having dismissed the cloth, for having washed it, for having thought it was ugly. I had no idea! I needed to display it prominently in my apartment, possibly on the wall perhaps protected by glass. Maybe I could find a

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mannequin and dress it. The object gained value by the minute. It was the icing on the cake—the one element that made my new apartment interesting in original ways. Suddenly, the tablecloth had become an ethnographic object. I found a picture of my veil in Edward William Lane’s Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. Written in Egypt during the Years 1833-1835. On page 57, the book includes an illustration of “a woman clad in the Milayeh, etc.” The text also tells me that “…many women who are not of the very poor classes wear, as a covering, a kind of plaid, similar in form to the habarah, composed of two pieces of cotton, woven in small chequers of blue and white, or cross stripes, with a mixture of red at each end. It is called ‘miláyeh’” (57). There is probably much to be said about Lane’s over-attention to detail—he must have been stuck with the chequers instead of the people. I am surprised he did not count and compare the squares. The butcher’s grandmother is unknown to me. The veil does not tell me her story. I could measure it. It seems huge. I only have the story of its acquisition. An object of ethnography. It seems that we always just notice the veil and never lift it, perhaps never can, to look beyond.

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INDEX American Museum of Natural History 20, 24-25, 42 Animism 1-2, 64 Barnum, Phineas Taylor 2-3, 15 Baudrillard, Jean 58 Believe It or Not 15 Bella Coola People 28-32 Bible 9, 19, 66-67 Bird of Paradise 9-10, 14 Boas, Franz 23, 29, 67 Christianity 7, 13 see also Bible Clifford, James 33, 36, 42, 66 Collector 3, 11, 13, 26, 42, 47-48, 61, 74, 77, 81, 84-87 Colonialism 77, 80 Curiosity 7-8, 10-11, 14-16, 45, 4748, 50, 56-57, 68, 78, 85, 88 Darwin, Charles 19-22 Derrida, Jacques 2-4, 44, 68-69 Dogon People 61-62 Enlightenment 8, 14, 49 European People 4, 8, 12-13, 63, 75-76, 81, 83, 85 Evolution 19, 21, 22, 26, 42 Fabian, Johannes 25, 88 Fragments iv, 10, 27, 34, 37, 53, 63, 65 Freud, Sigmund 1-2 Gordon, Avery, 2-4, 64-66 Hagenbeck, Carl 28-31 Hauntology 2-4, 68n Heye, George Gustav 41-43, 85 Holocaust 64 Imperial Nostalgia 3 Ishi 32-40, 89 Jacobsen, Johann Adrian 28-32 Kroeber, Alfred 32-35, 83 Kwakwaka’wakw People 30-33 Laguna Pueblo People 11 Memory 22, 46, 48-50, 76 Meta-Museum 6, 15, 81-82, 87, 91

Musée du quai Branly 61-64 Museum Horror 2 Narrative i-ii, 8, 10-16, 21, 25, 27, 29, 33, 35, 43, 46-50, 52, 56, 59, 62-63, 66-67, 74, 81, 84, 86-87 National Museum of the American Indian 16, 26, 41, 43-44, 49-50, 67, 71 Natural History 18, 21, 26, 58, 8889 Peale, Charles Willson 18, 88 Performance 4-5, 26-8, 32, 74 Pitt Rivers 77 Postcolonialism 3, 14, 69n, 79 Pottery 37, 47, 49-50, 55, 72 Raven 49-50, 66-69 Royal Society 12 Salvage Anthropology i, 85, 90 Sami People 28 Scientific Racism 21, 27, 91 Shinnecock People 70-73 Silence 5, 35, 61-65 Spectres 1-5, 16, 21-22, 27-30, 45, 51, 66-68 Spider Web 10 Stewart, Susan 16n, 46-50, 84 Taylor, Diana 2-4, 15 Tlingit People 66 Tourist 48-50, 81-91 Trauma 4, 64 Travel 3, 10, 12, 19, 29-31, 46-48, 72, 73, 80, 81-91 Visitors 1, 5, 11, 15, 21, 22, 26, 28, 44, 47, 50, 56, 64-65, 67, 77, 83, 86-89, 91 Void 5, 14, 45, 61-68 Völkerschauen 28-33 Windows on Collections 16, 44-47 Winthrop, John Jr. 12 Wunderkammer 8, 14, 17n