Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Museums

Art

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 01:17:38 +0000

South African artist Ester Mahlangu signing a painting. Photo: LubabaloD

Universitat de Barcelona

Initially published 22 Sep 2022

Abstract:

The definition of ‘art’ is extremely complicated. Its meaning has shifted radically, in particular in the last century. Originally, in Latin, it meant ‘craft’, but then for the last few centuries, the fine arts (such as painting, sculpture, or poetry) were defined in contraposition to craft. In the last century, the rejection of conventional artistic standards has resulted in the paradoxical definition of contemporary art as ‘anti-art’. These changing definitions have been difficult to track for anthropologists. In the nineteenth century, art was not a central focus for anthropology, since it was identified with the fine arts of Western civilisation, and the task of anthropology was to study supposedly ‘primitive peoples’. In the twentieth century, anthropologists rejected evolutionary theory and the idea that only Western civilisation had art, and some anthropological studies of art in non-Western cultures emerged. These studies showed how art objects revealed the complexity of the symbolic worlds of non-Western cultures. In the last few decades, a growing interest in material culture and in experimental research and writing led anthropologists to engage more closely with contemporary art. This work has reflected upon how art work can be seen as a form of social research, and how social research can be transformed by artistic practice and theory.

Introduction

The definition of ‘art’ has changed radically in the last few centuries. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘art’, and particularly the ‘fine arts’ of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, theatre, dance, and poetry, were often hailed as the highest achievements of Western civilisation. For the French philosopher Voltaire, all other peoples but Europeans were barbarians and children in terms of fine arts (Voltaire [1756] 2013). In the European narrative of progress and evolution, the peoples of earth were classified in a single line from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilised’, and the fine arts were one of the essential markers of Europe’s higher civilisation. Anthropology was born in the nineteenth century, as the social science that studied assumedly ‘primitive’ peoples, i.e. those who, by definition, would not have fine arts. In consequence, ‘art’ was not the central focus of anthropological research at its origins.

However, in the twentieth century, the definition of art changed radically. The revolutionary artist movement, the avant-gardes, questioned the elitism of the fine arts, proposing instead to reunite art and everyday life. Marcel Duchamp and Dadaism proposed that any object of everyday life could be seen as an art object. Modern anthropology also went through a radical upheaval at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rejecting the evolutionism and racism of the previous century, a new generation of anthropologists defended that different cultures were not more or less evolved, ‘high’ or ‘low’. Instead, anthropology showed that all cultures have their own forms of art, even if they don’t take the form of Western fine arts (Boas 1955, Coote and Shelton 1992, Forge 1972, Lévi-Strauss 1982). It could be argued that both art and anthropology in the twentieth century engaged in a cultural critique of Western civilisation (Marcus and Myers 1995, 94), as both did not take the West’s normative and societal standards at face value anymore. However, the relation between these two forms of cultural critique has been quite complicated, and art was still quite marginal as an object of study in anthropology for most of the twentieth century. Only in the last few decades have anthropologists developed a growing relationship with contemporary art practice and theory. This shift is the result of two combined factors: on the one hand, a renewed interest in material culture: objects, artefacts, technologies, and art. On the other hand, the call for a renewed, experimental anthropology. Both interests inevitably drive anthropology to contemporary art practice and theory, which is by definition experimental, and has had a long-standing critical interest in objects. This emerging body of work has highlighted the potential of art practice as a form of social research, as well as proposed experimental ways of rethinking anthropology through art (Garcia Canclini 2014, Elhaik 2016, Ingold 2013, Sansi 2014, Ssorin- Chaikov 2013, Strohm 2012).

Changing definitions of Western art

Knowing how Western definitions of art have changed helps us understand anthropology’s initially complicated relation with it. The Latin word ars, in the plural, means crafts. The crafts were manual labour, and hence markers of a lower social status in ancient Greek and Roman societies. However, in the Middle Ages, Europe’s ‘liberal arts’, the arts of language, music, and mathematics, were defined in clear distinction to the utilitarian crafts of artisans. Such liberal arts were the skills essential precisely to be a free man, not an artisan bound to manual work. Today’s notion of obtaining a Bachelor or Master’s degree in ‘Arts’ is founded in this idea of liberal arts (Shiner 2001).

In the Italian Renaissance, some crafts were re-defined as arts of drawing (arti del disegno) (Blunt 1940): painting, sculpture, and architecture were revaluated as intellectual endeavours, like poetry, with higher status than manual work. By the Enlightenment, the ‘fine arts’ were clearly separated from the crafts (Shiner 2001). The fine arts combined technical skill with humanistic Western culture, and they were taught in academies. They were often arts of representation, imitating nature. Western thinkers considered them to be exclusive of Western civilisation, and to be one of the institutions that marked the West’s global superiority.

An interesting counterpoint to this Western-centric history is Chinese art, not least because China has historically also been a major imperial force. The Chinese had institutions and theories that can be considered equivalent to European fine arts, notably a tradition of scholar or literati painting that favoured subjective expression. Early modern Chinese art critics therefore concluded that European painting was not really fine art, as it lacked expressive depth. Instead they considered European painting to be just very skilful illustration, or craft (Lynn 2017). At the same time, Chinese arts, in particular porcelains and silks, had been highly valuable luxury imports in Europe, where a taste for chinoiserie, i.e. for Chinese-looking art objects, had developed in the eighteenth century. Europeans also did not consider Chinese art to be fine art, but rather mere ‘decorative art’, a very skilful and beautiful craft. For Europeans, Chinese painting had not achieved the level of realism of European painting, which imitated reality almost to fool the eye (Lynn 2017).

In the nineteenth century, Western ideals of the artist would move even further away from craftsmanship. Artistic practice was free and self-motivated rather than commissioned: artists made art because they wanted to, because they need to express themselves. They were not artists simply because it was their job; they were not just skilful producers of fine objects for sale. Art was not just technique. The notion of artist as genius, a unique self-driven individual above the others, emerged in the Renaissance, but was consolidated in Romanticism.

But if art was different from technique and craft, it risked the reverse accusation from being menial work: that of not being useful, of being superficial and redundant. In the nineteenth century, as bourgeois values came to prominence in the West, aristocratic ideals of the fine arts were met with ‘philistinism’, the rejection of fine art in favour of utility, which was particularly popular in the English-speaking world (Arnold 1993). At the same time, in reaction to philistinism, the anti-utilitarian ideals of art were radicalised in theories of art for arts' sake, and the emergence of the bohemian, anti-bourgeois artist. For example, Baudelaire’s ‘painter of the modern life’ was not a professional producer of paintings working in his studio, but an idler who immersed himself in the city crowd walking, sitting in cafés, and wasting his time, in direct contraposition to the ethics of the bourgeoisie, which valued hard work and saving time (Baudelaire 1995). Modern art would not be a specialised form of work, or a profession, but a nonconformist, utopian form of life. The big work of art of the bohemian artist was now his own life. As contemporary French curator Nicolas Bourriaud put it, ‘Modern art rejects to separate the finished product from existence […] The act of creation is to create oneself’ (Bourriaud 1999, 13). This ideal of the modern artist is deeply connected to revolutionary ideals: in the German ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proposed that work and life, production and creation, should be one thing: in opposition to capitalist alienation, the communist mode of production would be based on the identity of work and art, as a unified form of life (1970). Paradoxically, elitist ideals of fine art, originally meant to grant a better social position to the fine artist above the craftsman, were now, in their radicalisation, throwing the new bohemian artist to the margin of bourgeois society. This margin itself was also paradoxical in various ways: it raised questions as to whether artists were impostors or prophets, decadent or revolutionary, idlers or merely self-absorbed. Not to mention that the figure of the bohemian ‘artist’ was, by definition, a man: women in the nineteenth century could not afford to behave as bohemians as, like in previous centuries, they were not recognised as professionals.

The utopian drive of modern art was radicalised even further by early twentieth century avant-gardes. Dadaism did not simply reject academic styles of artistic production to propose new styles, but rejected fine art altogether, and the ‘civilisation’ that sustained it. Dadaist art was meant to be an ‘anti-art’ (Richter 1965) that simply rejected art as skill, technique, and academic profession, and replaced careful production with encounter, chance, appropriation, performance, research, and experimentation. Dadaism meant to abolish the separation between art and everyday life, and the anti-artist actively unlearned the fine arts by encountering and experimenting with what the art world had previously despised: industry and technology, so-called ‘primitive’ colonial cultures, and marginal, outsider forms of art practice (Foster 2004). Undoing art also meant undoing artists as agents of production, either as geniuses or skilled artisans, and as an empowered subject; anti-artists are rather mediators that withdraw their agency (Kester 2011) and they are driven by chance and experimentation. Just like the utopian objective of the avant-garde was to dissolve art in everyday life, so did ‘anti-artists’ have to disappear into common people and the claim that everybody should be an artist.

Contemporary art since the second-half of the twentieth century has preserved the ideas and practices of anti-art but has changed its utopian horizon. It tends to focus on modest ‘micro-utopias’ achievable today rather than in the future (Bourriaud 2002, Sansi 2014, Blanes et al. 2016). Contemporary art practices have become more site-specific, collaborative, and participatory, delegating agency to local communities. In contemporary anti-art practices, artists are much more than mere producers of art objects. They often act as something else: as activists, historians, even anthropologists (Garcia Canclini 2014). They may serve as mediators in general terms, as those that help mobilise a multitude of agents around a particular project. However, this new role for artists poses a clear contradiction: differently from the utopian avant-garde, contemporary artists do not withdraw from art as a profession and institution but instead stick to it. The projects they mediate, even if they are participatory, experimental, and utopian, are still art projects, financed by art institutions, and projected by artists. The fine arts, an institution defined by museums, academies, galleries, artists, thus still exist today, even if contemporary art practice is not constrained to traditional techniques like painting or sculpture. The extent to which it is even possible to be an artist doing anti-art has been the subject of heated discussions for many decades (Sansi 2014) and conditions the relation between art and anthropology, as we will see.

Art and anthropology

What is art, then, for anthropology? Craft? Fine arts? Anti-art? The radical changes in the definition, theory, and practice of art have been difficult to track for anthropologists. In the nineteenth century, anthropology was mostly practiced in museums of arts and technologies, where the frame of reference was evolutionary theory: anthropologists collected and compared axes, sails, pots, and idols, and established the position of their corresponding culture in the pyramid of human progress. More advanced arts and technologies were held to be proof of superior civilisation. But the arts that anthropology museums collected were classified as crafts: useful, practical artefacts. Even if they were figurative and symbolic, ethnographic artefacts were defined as having specific uses, for example, ‘magico-religious’ ones (Morphy and Perkins 2009). The fine arts—art for arts’ sake—barely figured in most of these museums, because they were seen as an exclusively Western institution.

In the twentieth century, however, new schools of anthropology rejected evolutionism, and the idea that some cultures were more civilised than others. Art was not an exclusive property of Western civilisation; when looking closely, all cultures turned out to have art. Anthropologist Franz Boas, for example, drawing mostly on his fieldwork amongst Native Americans, applied the methods and theories of art history to study the symbolism and style of totem poles, baskets, and masks as works of art (Boas 1955). Boas argues that artistic creation is part of a universal pursuit of aesthetic values, one that leads artists in different parts of the world to develop specific standards of beauty by developing artistic technique. Boas’ case for the universality of art discredits racist ideas of immutable ethnic difference, by showing that the mental processes of all peoples are fundamentally the same.

However, Boas’ interest in art didn’t have many followers, in part because of anthropology’s changing methods and focus. The collection of objects for museums of arts and technologies gave way to direct field research. The task of the anthropologist became to describe cultures in their whole complexity, through written ethnographies. Thereby, ethnographers often focused on the immaterial aspects of the cultures they studied, like their kinship systems, social structure, or mythology, rather than their material culture. This is in part because the material culture and technology of many of the peoples initially studied by anthropologists seemed poor, or at least less ostentatious than that of modern industrial civilisation. The default belief in technological evolution was not fully discarded for most of the twentieth century, and ‘art’ was likely still associated with Western fine arts for most anthropologists. Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins (2006, 8) argued, quite convincingly, that the uneasiness with art in anthropology is the result of a ‘professional philistinism’, a rejection of art because of prejudices regarding the perceived elitism of the fine arts in the West.

This professional philistinism was probably more accentuated in Anglo-American academia than in continental Europe (Clifford 1988). In France, the new discipline of ethnology had very close links to the artistic avant-gardes in the 1920s and 1930s, notably surrealism. Surrealist writers like Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille studied with anthropologist Marcel Mauss, and together with another anthropologist Marcel Giraule published the journal Documents. What brought them together? If the task of the anthropologist was to describe the ‘exotic’, (or today the ‘strange’) as familiar, then the objective of the surrealist was in many ways the diametrical opposite: to render evident how Western culture can be incredibly strange (Clifford 1988). This inversion of positions, from the strange to the familiar and the familiar to the strange, makes both processes complementary. In fact, the ultimate aim of anthropology, like surrealism, was not just to describe other cultures, but also to put them in comparison with Western culture. Both tried to develop a critical attitude towards what Western culture takes for granted, making Westerners aware that what they take as ‘natural’, like the family or the market economy, may not be so ‘natural’ after all.

We can find an excellent example thereof in a short article by Griaule, entitled ‘Gunshot’ (in Bataille 1995). The article was based on a picture of an African drum with a carving representing a man with a gun. This representation was shocking to a European public looking for ‘authentic’ African art. But Griaule argued that for many Africans, European guns were what African masks were for Europeans: exotic and interesting objects.

If a black [man] cannot without debasing himself use an exotic element, namely a European one familiar to him, what is one to make of our blind borrowings from an exotic world one of colour about which we must in self-defence declare to know nothing? (Griaule in Bataille 1995, 65).

Griaule was proposing to take the inverse position: to look at things from an African perspective, as if the French were exotic themselves.

The open exchange between surrealism and ethnology had an enduring influence on the next generation of anthropologists, like Jean Rouch and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Jean Rouch was inspired by surrealist experimental cinema in his ethnographic films, for example, Les maitres fous (Henley 2020). Lévi-Strauss integrated surrealist ideas of ‘objective chance’ into his theory of the ‘savage mind’, or more properly, the ‘everyday mind’: for Lévi-Strauss, our understanding of the world is constantly being transformed by events that are the result of chance; but, we give them meaning by putting them in relation to previous events (1966). Lévi-Strauss worked on art, partially reprising the work of Boas, in the book The way of the masks (1982). He compared the masks of different Native American peoples, showing how they not only reflected their mythologies, but also how these mythologies were related and had meaning in relation to each other. The masks were studied as a vehicle of meaning, complementing Lévi-Strauss’ main interest, which were mythologies. Lévi- Strauss’s approach was massively influential in anthropology, and studies of art that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s often followed his perspective, investigating the meaning of works of art (see for example, Forge 1973).

For the performative arts, Victor Turner’s work on ritual was very influential in the 1960s and 1970s as well. Turner was interested in the symbolism of rituals, rather than myths. In a broadly comparative analysis of symbolic action across time and place, he suggested that ritual myth, tragedy, and comedy had become mostly conservative art forms in industrialised societies. Modern arts and sciences, on the other hand, had the potential to change social relationships, as they largely developed apart from mainstream society (Turner 1973). Turner’s work emphasised human creativity in symbolic expression, arguing that social change is not path dependent on social structure. His work resulted in a growing interest and interconnection with studies of performance and theatre.

Renewed interest in material culture

In the 1980s, the relation between art and anthropology changed radically. This was driven by two important factors, namely anthropologists’ renewed interest in objects and material culture, and by calls for a new experimental ethnography.

The new interest in material culture was partially the result of debates about appropriation and institutional critique in art. Landmark exhibitions like MOMA’s ‘Primitivism in 20^th century art (1984)’ improved the cultural status of ‘primitive’ ethnographic artefacts in the public eye by arguing that some of these artefacts were in fact fine art and should be displayed as such (Rubin 1984). This argument has been very influential in the following decades, with the reorganisation of ethnographic collections into fine art collections, in new museums like Paris’ Quai Branly. Nevertheless, it was also extremely polemical, since it enshrined a classical European concept of fine art that had played down the cultural specificity of these artifacts and their historical provenance: mostly, they were colonial plunder. Anthropologists have since debated the contextual and institutional values that transform objects into art (Price 1988, Myers 2001), produced ethnographies about the trade and circulation of ‘primitive’ and ‘tourist’ arts (Steiner 1994, Phillips & Steiner 1999), and investigated the transformation, circulation, and traffic in art and culture in general (Marcus and Myers 1995, Thomas 1991), including the emergence of contemporary art worlds in postcolonial settings (Myers 2002, Fillitz 2018). The debate on colonial collections has intensified in the last decade, with calls for decolonisation and the restitution of colonial collections (Hicks 2020, Oswald & Tinius 2020).

These debates resulted in wider discussion on the power of art. One central contribution was made by Alfred Gell (1998). He argued that material things such as traps or artworks are best understood with reference to their potential social and material effects, rather than their meaning. Gell highlighted that human agency does not end with the human body, but that it is in fact distributed via people’s material culture. Art would be a paradigmatic example of such ‘distributed agency’, since it is purposefully imbued with the agency of the artist. Gell’s notion of art was substantially different to what had been discussed in anthropology up to then, for Gell did not approach art objects first and foremost as vehicles of meaning, like Boas, Lévi-Strauss or Turner did. As such, Gell’s approach to art was finally catching up to modern and contemporary art, where works of art are not necessarily a means of conveying meaning or ‘representing’ something else. Instead, modern and contemporary art can simply be agents performing actions on those who engage with them. Thus, Gell gave anthropology a theory to engage with contemporary art and he questioned the division between art and artefact in non-modern societies. His theory considers art to be as ‘useful’ as artefacts are and it questions the very notion of ‘utility’, and of useful ‘work’ (as opposed to useless play or art) upon which much bourgeois philistinism and modern utopian thought had been premised (Sansi 2014). As mentioned before, the utopian ideal of Europe’s early twentieth century art avant-gardes was to dissolve art and the artist into everyday life. This dissolution of the artist as an agent in art goes much further for them than Gell’s still quite human-centric notion of distributed agency presupposes. Ultimately, however, Gell’s focus on distributed agency makes it easier to question the notion of the artist as an individual genius, unique author, and uniquely powerful agent.

Experimental ethnography

A second key factor that transformed the relation between art and anthropology in the 1980s was the growing interest in experimental ethnography. The ‘writing culture’ movement (Clifford & Marcus 1986) gave equal relevance to the form in which ethnography was presented to its content: Ethnography was not only a scientific task but also an art form, in the most classical sense, a technique that uses rhetoric to seduce and convince. In anthropology as elsewhere there was no politics without poetics, and claims for an ‘experimental’ ethnography emerged. Such calls for experimental writing met many detractors who levelled criticisms not very dissimilar to the attacks on ‘art for art's sake’ in the nineteenth century (Scholte 1987). In the long run, the claim to rethink the ‘poetics and politics’ of ethnography seems to have emphasised the second rather than the first term; the need to justify the ‘politics’ of anthropological practice is still a central concern today, while the need to justify the discipline’s poetics seems less relevant for most anthropologists. One question that still needs to be assessed is if one can really distinguish one from the other.

Fighting back against this reluctance of ‘poetics’, new proposals of experimental ethnography emerged, introducing ethnographic methods ‘beyond text’ (Cox, Irving and Wright 2016). ‘Visual anthropology’ proposes an anthropology not only with images, but also of images, inspired by the growing interdisciplinary field of visual studies (Mitchell 2005, Belting 2011, Pinney 2011). Besides film, and photography, other forms of practice, like sound walks and art installations, have also been used as methods of experimental ethnography. These developments show that anthropology’s dual goal of describing the world and rethinking it may well be achieved with the help of art. The ‘ethnographic turn’ in late twentieth century art (Foster 1995), in which many artists were interested in working with anthropology, has been reciprocal, and some anthropologists have actively engaged with artistic practice. Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright have offered several examples of this growing field of exchanges (2005, 2010, 2013), focusing on the collaboration between artists and anthropologists at the level of practice, and confronting artistic and anthropological methodologies. One example would be George Marcus’s collaboration with artists Fernando Calzadilla and Abdel Herández, that made a scenography or mise-en-scène of a Venezuelan market at Rice University in Texas, entitled The market from here (1997). This scenography, for Marcus, offers possibilities of study that go beyond conventional ethnographic description in a text. It recreates an ethnographic scene and forces us to reflect on its constitutive parts, turning a social setting into an artifact and enactment (Marcus in Schneider and Wright 2005). In these terms, artistic installations and performances can be seen as devices through which a field of study is recreated (Sansi 2014, Estalella and Sanchez Criado 2018).

In the last few years, the multiplication of new digital media has promoted a shift from ‘visual anthropology’ to ‘multimodal anthropology’, which uses various different media like photography, design, sound, games, etc. (Collins, Durington and Gill 2017; Dattatreyan and Marrerro 2019). One fundamental question that these experimental approaches raise is that of authorship. Changing the form and method of ethnography changes the agency of the ethnographer. The ‘writing culture’ movement, and the ‘crisis of representation’ that it signified (Marcus and Fischer 1986), asked what authority anthropologists have to represent another culture and what agency other voices should have in anthropological narratives. It was a crisis in authority and authorship. Artistic avant-gardes had already proposed to question the agency of the artist as an author in much more radical ways. Experimental art in the twentieth century starts from the withdrawal of agency, and unlearning technique, not simply from the experimentation with new media. At its best, then, experimental and multimodal ethnography can learn from artistic practice to further question ethnographic authority, rather than simply propose new media for the expression of the ‘creative’ anthropologist as author. Art and anthropology still have more to teach to one another about authority and agency.

Rethinking art and anthropology

The on-going crisis of ethnographic authority is central to contemporary anthropology (Rabinow et al. 2008). George Marcus (2000) identified fundamental shifts in the conditions of contemporary ethnographic practice: the radical difference in background and hierarchy between anthropologists and 'natives' of colonial ethnography has given way to studying people of the same or superior social status than the anthropologists themselves. Sometimes these people are ‘experts’ in neighbouring fields whom the anthropologist cannot simply work on, but whom she must work with. Moreover, ethnography is no longer an arcane method owned by anthropologists, but an experimental elaboration of everyday experience that has been used not only by anthropologists, but also by other social scientists, artists, and designers, for example. Lastly, the sites of anthropological research have become plural in a globalised world: the connection between ‘native’ and site is not a given, as any informant or collaborator may also be from somewhere else. Field sites become a particular configuration or assemblage of collaborators with different backgrounds and origins, a sometimes-virtual working space; what Marcus names a ‘para-site’, a laboratory for collective work and experimentation where the anthropologist is no longer an individual author (2000). In this contemporary situation, fieldwork can simply mean creating new assemblages of knowledge and practice, a practice in which anthropologists and artists can collaborate more than ever before. Art occupies a particular space in this contemporary world. Collaboration, participation, and relation have become central to artistic practice in the last decades and the debates around the possibilities and limitations thereof have been intense (Bourriaud 2002, Bishop 2012, Kester 2011). It seems both art and anthropology can now be rethought of in light of one another.

A number of authors have looked at these questions from different perspectives. Tarek Elhaik (2016) has proposed that art curation can offer an alternative approach to classical ethnographic methods. In contrast to the classical ethnographic method, understood as a direct representation of a single ‘field’, curation as an assemblage of differences can be seen as a method that corresponds to the new kinds of sites that anthropologists work with, characterised by multiplicity, excess, and ambiguity between the object and the subject of representation and collaboration. The anthropologist as curator would have the role of mediator in these assemblages. For example, Rafael Schacter (Schacter 2018, Sansi 2019) has worked as a curator of grafitti and street art, bringing together not just artists from radically different backgrounds in a single exhibition space, but also confronting the radical difference between conventional art exhibition spaces and street art that by definition is outside of a gallery space. His experience as a curator has also been constitutive of his understanding of this field in its transformations as an anthropologist.

Tim Ingold has proposed that artists, similar to anthropologists, study the world, which is marked by flux and constant change. Anthropology can learn from contemporary art practices as both sets of activities are embodied processes geared at awakening our senses so as to better correspond with the world around us (2013). Ingold thus suggests that engaging with artistic practice, such as drawing, basket weaving, or pottery, can teach students to become better anthropologists.

Analysing past collaborations between anthropologists and artists, Kiven Strohm (2012) picks up Schneider and Wright’s arguments that both art and anthropology deal in representation. Yet, contemporary art, Strohm argues, celebrates ambiguity and free play between text, image, discourse, and figure and much of it is open-ended and inherently incomplete. ‘Collaboration’ between art and anthropology, he argues, should start from an acknowledgement of basic equality between anthropologist and research subject. This equality questions the division of labour between different ‘experts’ in collaborative work and requires us to unlearn our own points of view.

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (2013) equally highlights similarities between art and anthropology. He holds that artistic practice is an appropriate anthropological research tool, and that anthropology itself can be considered an artistic method. Ssorin-Chaikov specifically draws on conceptual art, which he argues is concerned less with aesthetics and beauty, and more with analysing and manufacturing social realities and concepts. He holds conceptual art and anthropology to be similar in that both construct the realities that they study, both are largely conceptual in nature, and both highlight what is unknown in the world. This view of anthropological and artistic practice is a far cry from merely trying to represent a given reality. For example, Felix Ringel, doing fieldwork in Hoyerswerda, a German city in an accelerated process of urban decay, organised an ‘Anthrocamp’ for the local youth, in which they were encouraged to explore their hometown and generate images and artwork. The results were displayed in an ephemeral installation in an abandoned block that was going to be demolished (Ringel 2013). These practices, partially borrowed from collaborative art, do not just provide data to ethnographers but also highlight their performative role in intervening and transforming their field of study.

For all these authors, contemporary art appears as a model for unlearning anthropology, its practices and institutions. And yet, it is a contradictory model, because as we have seen, in spite of all the utopian and revolutionary ideas and practices of art in the last century, the institutions of classical fine arts, the museum, the art work, the artist, the curator, etc. are still very much in place. Modern and contemporary art has led the way into a revolutionary, utopian form of life, but the outcomes of this revolution have been mixed so far. The current dissatisfaction of many anthropologists is not just grounded on the limitations of existing methods and theories, but more generally in their working conditions, the increasing bureaucratisation of academic life, and the productivity requirements that render academic work increasingly difficult. They share this alienated feeling with work in contemporary capitalism more broadly. In this sense, rather than seeking inspiration in art and artists to become more creative and inventive, anthropologists may consider artists, art workers, and other members of the culture and knowledge sector as possible allies with whom to rethink, and perhaps undo, their institutions (Sansi and Strathern 2016).

Conclusion: The complicated object of art

The relation between art and anthropology is complicated. This is partially because ‘art’ can mean very different things: from craft to fine art to anti-art. In consequence, an anthropology of art can address different kinds of objects and ask radically different questions, studying artistic technique and style, its symbolism and meaning and learning about its agency. Moreover, the radically different definitions of art are not mutually exclusive, although we have described them in a historical sequence and different definitions co-exist. After a century of anti-art theories and practices, the dominant institutions and in fact, the dominant form of art in many contemporary societies, are still the fine arts, while true anti-art mostly remains a utopia. Perhaps the complicated nature of art is also what makes art so ‘good to think with’. More than merely an object of study, art can be a model of how to rethink, experiment, and undo anthropological practice itself. Rather than merely representing individual cultures or features of social life, art may inspire us to define our own utopian horizons.

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———. 2004. Prosthetic gods. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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———. 1998. Art and agency. London: Clarendon Press.

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——— and M. Strathern. 2016. “Art and anthropology after relations.” HAU 6, no. 2. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.14318/hau6.2.023.

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Note on contributor

Roger Sansi is a professor in Social Anthropology at Universitat de Barcelona. He has worked on Afro-Brazilian art and contemporary art in Barcelona. He is the author of Fetishes and monuments (2007, Berghahn), Art, anthropology and the gift (2014, Routledge), and editor of The Anthropologist as curator (2020, Routledge).

Dr Roger Sansi, Department of Social Anthropology, Facultat de Geografia i Història, Universitat de Barcelona, Carrer Montalegre 6-8, Barcelona 08001, SPAIN.

Anthropology museums and museum anthropology

Felix Stein — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 09:19:16 +0000

Anita Herle

University of Cambridge

Initially published 6 Oct 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16museums

Abstract:

This entry provides an overview of the history, politics and changing roles of anthropology museums. It explores the developing field of museum anthropology, which encompasses the work that anthropologists do within museums and the anthropological study of museums. Museum anthropology is situated within recent theoretical frameworks that underpin the study of objects and the relation between people and things. A central concern is the changing relationship between the museum, the people from whom museum collections originated, and diverse audiences. Recent work in museum anthropology has highlighted the far-reaching potential of the museum for interdisciplinary research, experimentation, and community engagement.

Introduction

Anthropology museums are often defined by their collections, which typically originate from non-Western and often small-scale communities from around the world. Their approach tends to prioritise objects’ cultural and historical contexts. Museum anthropology refers to the work that anthropologists do within museums as well as the anthropological study of museums as important institutions within modern society. It encompasses a broad range of academic and professional concerns. In both theory and practice, museum anthropology straddles overlapping interests in field research and public outreach, metropolitan centres and (post) colonial peripheries, diverse international communities and local audiences, material culture studies and artistic sensibilities.

From the late nineteenth century, museums with ethnographic collections, particularly those based in universities, were core institutions in the development of anthropology as a specialist discipline. While anthropological interests in museums and material culture studies waned from the 1920s, over the last few decades there has been a remarkable revitalization. On-going changes have been prompted by new approaches to museum theory and practice: the development of an anthropology of museums; a renewed academic concern with objects, materiality, and the relations between persons and things; the interests of ‘source’ communities; and a growing recognition of the potential of museums as central institutions in universities and civil society.

History of anthropology museums

Principles of collection, classification, and exhibition have long influenced the ways that knowledge of human beings is formed. From the sixteenth century, European explorers collected natural and ‘artificial’ curiosities as a means of trying to understand the diversity of the world and its peoples. Objects were also collected as trophies of far-flung adventures and conquests. Originally displayed in palaces and then arranged in gentlemen’s cabinets of curiosities, this juxtaposition of diverse materials was intended to provide insights into the godlike ordering of the natural and human world. Collecting was propelled by curiosity and a growing scientific interest in classification. The idea that Europeans had the right to collect and classify the world was also part of a nascent imperialism, which was often justified by ethnocentric claims of superiority. From the beginnings of public museums in the eighteenth century to the great age of museum collecting in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ethnographic objects and their associated information were accumulated in museums where they were used to consolidate forms of knowledge that underpinned scientific, institutional and colonial authority. (Bennett 1995). The material culture of non-Western peoples was often classified and displayed in ways that positioned non-Western peoples as less-developed in a fictitious hierarchy which privileged Euro-Americans. Objects assembled and used for colonial agendas were transferred to museums, at times providing the foundation for the creation of new museums. The Museé National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie began as the 1931 Paris colonial exposition, which featured material from Africa and Oceania gathered to celebrate the achievements of French colonial regimes. These objects later comprised one of the founding collections for the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, when it opened in 2007 (Price 2007: 98-101).

Anthropology museums as distinct institutions or separate departments within larger civic and national museums were developed during the rapid expansion of public museums in the late nineteenth century. The boundaries and affiliations with what counted as ‘anthropology’, or more frequently ‘ethnography’, varied over time and in different places, resulting in the designation of certain types of people (historically defined as ‘primitive’ or ‘exotic’) as ethnographic subjects. While the terms ‘anthropology’ and ‘ethnography’ are often used interchangeably, the former implies a more analytical and often comparative approach, whereas the latter tends to be primarily descriptive. The positioning of ethnography within museums reveals changing and at times prejudicial attitudes. Ethnographic collections were often displayed alongside European archaeology, implying a similarity between people from the distant past and the contemporary lives of non-western peoples. At the British Museum, ethnography moved between the divisions of Pre-history, Medieval, and later Oriental Antiquities until a separate Ethnology department was established in 1946 (Wilson 2002: 279). Elsewhere, as is common in the United States, anthropology was included within natural history museums where systems of classification developed for the study of plants and animals were then applied to artefacts and sometimes people. In institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Native Americans and other indigenous groups were often presented in dioramas that firmly placed them within a fabricated ‘natural’ environment.

There are numerous overlapping and often contradictory historical contexts and trajectories through which objects entered museum collections and were put on public display. Artefacts were acquired from many different sources – explorers, traders, colonial officials, missionaries, artists, and anthropologists – and resulted from different kinds of engagements. While much material was collected in circumstances of great inequality, at times stolen or seized as part of colonial loot, many objects were readily exchanged, sold, or gifted. An attention to the particularities of objects – their materiality, originating contexts, and histories of collection, circulation, and interpretation – provides unique insights into larger issues of sociality, history, politics, art, and environment.

In addition to providing a wealth of information about the people from whom the collections originated, research on ethnographic collections provides a richer understanding of the development of the anthropological field and the history of the discipline. Much of the material in anthropology museums, particularly in university or national institutions, was systematically assembled during the course of intensive fieldwork and is greatly enhanced by corresponding photographs and detailed associated documentation. Intensive fieldwork typically involves a close engagement between anthropologists and local hosts and assistants, who are often actively involved in processes of documentation and collecting. Many of the objects in anthropology collections were selectively exchanged or given to researchers by their producers and owners. Some of the materials collected during fieldwork, such as models, commissioned pieces, tourist art, and photographs, were themselves produced by the interactions between fieldworkers and local assistants. Considering the processes of collecting often highlights indigenous agency in the co-production of anthropological knowledge. A salient example is the extensive collection of objects, photographs, drawings, audio recordings, film, and documents made by Alfred Haddon and the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait and now in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) at the University of Cambridge (Herle 2012). At the time of Haddon’s fieldwork, many Torres Strait Islander elders were concerned about the rapid changes in the region and the potential loss of customary knowledge as a result of the influence of traders, missionaries, and colonial officials. Islanders actively assisted Haddon and the Expedition members in the project to document aspects of their culture while still withholding information and objects that were deemed secret or private. Much of the knowledge that was recorded and the materials that were collected were attributed to named Islanders and their families. Today, these collections are seen as a crucial resource for Islander knowledge about the past and a source of inspiration for younger generations. The importance of the Haddon collection has been reinforced by recent political events, in which the materials collected by the Expedition have been used as crucial evidence in the success of recent land and sea claims. Over the last twenty years, museum staff have been involved in numerous collaborative projects with Islanders, both in Cambridge and in the Torres Strait (Herle 2003).

The interest in assembling large collections during field research was influenced by practices developed in the natural sciences. Comprehensive collections were initially understood as providing the basis for compiling comparative ethnographic information and developing anthropological theories of evolution and diffusion. Evolution aimed to explain how different kinds of living organisms (including people) developed and diversified, while diffusion focused on the dissemination of physical and cultural traits between different groups, typically through a comparative examination of material culture, language, and human physical characteristics. With the development of social anthropology in the 1920s, these paradigms were no longer considered valid or adequate. Academic interests in objects and museums declined, yet many leading social anthropologists, from Reginald Radcliffe Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski to Marilyn Strathern, made significant collections during their fieldwork which were used to illustrate the special characteristics of particular cultural groups. At MAA and elsewhere, the tradition of staff and graduate students assembling well-documented field-based collections has continued to the present day, supplemented by donations and commissions from artists and local producers. The historic collections retain wide-ranging value for researchers and cultural descendants, and alongside newer acquisitions are mediators in developing and maintaining productive relations between museums, producers, source communities, and diverse audiences.

As with contemporary social anthropology, today anthropology museums – frequently re-branded as institutions of ‘world cultures’ – research and present a wide variety of topics, incorporating Euro-American traditions, science, and contemporary art. While museums retain responsibility for the legacies of the collections under their care, today this material is not only understood as representative of the beliefs and practices of the people from whom it originated. Collections from around the world also provide insights into the complexity and nuances of local and global histories of encounter, exchange, empire, migration, and disciplinary formation.

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Artwork by Maori artist Lisa Reihana, he tautoko (2006)[1]

Theoretical and methodological frameworks

Innovative work by curators and museum anthropologists has been informed by and has in turn influenced underlying shifts in the discipline of anthropology as well as in museum theory and practice. The post-modern turn foregrounded the literary and political aspects of ethnographic writing and challenged the authority of anthropologists who, largely for their own intellectual purposes, were charged with documenting and analyzing the beliefs and practices of typically remote groups of people (Clifford & Marcus 1986). Anthropology museums were criticised for the colonial contexts of many of their collections as well as for ethno-centric presentations that implicitly asserted the authority of the museum over the peoples it represented (Clifford 1988; Price 1989; Karp & Levine 1991). While many of these critiques failed to recognise the collaborative nature of much fieldwork, they drew attention to the politics and poetics of museum display, and encouraged a more self-aware approach to the production and dissemination of anthropological knowledge. The concurrent development of an anthropology of museums took the museum itself as an artefact of society and as a subject for sustained analysis, highlighting the challenges and renewed potential of museums for both anthropology and community engagement (Ames 1986). A new ‘museology’ emerged that was reflexive and primarily concerned with epistemology, the recognition that every aspect of museum work – collecting, documentation, research, and display – was both informed by and perpetuated particular ways of knowing (Vergo 1989). Different kinds of museums, from prominent Euro-American institutions of history, science, and art to indigenous cultural centres, have become field sites. Influential examples include Sharon MacDonald’s analysis of the complex political and institutional negotiations in the production of public culture ‘behind the scenes’ at the Science Museum in London (2002), James Clifford’s reflections on ethnographic museums as highly charged ‘contact zones’ for interactions between museum staff and members of the numerous ‘source’ communities from which museum collections originated (Clifford 1997) and Jennifer Shannon’s ethnography of the ‘Our Lives’ inaugural exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington (2014). While central museum activities continue to focus on the collection, preservation, interpretation, and display of valued objects, professional practice has been influenced by an increased self-awareness of the knowledge, assumptions, and political relations that inform routine museum work as well as by the recognition of numerous stake-holders in museum collections.

The contemporary field of museum anthropology draws on a number of theoretical premises that underpin the study of objects and assemblages. Tracking the social life of things – the distinct biographies of particular objects from their creation to their use and circulation – illuminates their personal and social contexts by revealing complex and changing meanings that are attached to objects as they move between people and places over time (Appadurai 1986). The development of relational models within anthropology shifted the focus away from objectified and fixed entities exclusively owned by individuals and institutions to a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic links between people and things. A central premise is that entities (both people and objects) are given substance, meaning, and value through the relations in which they are enmeshed. Rather than simply being seen as static items of material culture, objects can be understood and analyzed as materializations of social relations, a dynamic process that involves the interweaving of human actions, beliefs, skills, and materials to create physical objects (Bell & Geismar 2009). A close analysis of processes such as basket weaving reveals the maker’s sensuous and skilled engagement with the inherent properties of the fibrous material used in its construction, challenging the common distinction between form and substance (Ingold 2000). Concerns with agency have moved attention away from what objects mean to the effects they have on people as part of a system of social relations involving various kinds of human intentions and activities (Gell 1998). Perspectives from actor-network-theory position artefacts, alongside technologies and people, as ‘actants’ or active entities in complex and intersecting networks (Latour 2005). Objects that are devised to guide human actions, such as a Berlin key that is designed to replace a human caretaker by making its user lock the door at night in order to retrieve their key from the lock, demonstrate the interpenetration of the sociological and technological in their creation and use (Latour 2000). Relational models have been productively applied to the museum itself, which can be analysed as a multi-layered and dynamic transcultural artefact composed of historic and on-going relations between objects, producers, source communities, collectors, anthropologists, donors, and museum staff (Gosden & Larson 2007). This type of analysis highlights the complexity and nuances of museum histories, and provides insights into the different types of agencies that resulted in the formation and interpretation of museum collections. Ultimately the aim is to activate the potential of the collections for research and community engagement.

Museum theory informs practice in the development of methodologies to identify, care for, and interpret collections. A close examination of the physical characteristics of objects and the materials and skills they embody has been enhanced by combining anthropological and historical expertise with new technologies for scientific investigation, such as radiocarbon dating, intra-red spectroscopy, and 3-D scanning. The methodological potency of the apparently routine activities involved in curation has been aptly described as ‘the museum as method’ (Thomas 2010), an approach which draws on open-ended discovery and multiple levels of contextualization and connection. Exhibition projects have developed a range of creative approaches, moving from the didactic to the inquisitive and dialogical, incorporating multiple perspectives and enabling others – outside specialists, artists, and community groups – to tell their own stories (Raymond & Salmon 2006).

Curating exhibitions is not simply an opportunity to display knowledge generated elsewhere through fieldwork, texts, and liaisons with various specialists. The very creation of exhibitions, involving processes of assembly and juxtaposition, can itself be part of a research process that generates new ideas and understandings (Herle 2013). For example, Malangan funerary effigies from New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, are one of the most prevalent types of ethnographic objects found in museum collections. Originally intended to be destroyed after ritual use, they continue to be produced by specialist carvers to commemorate the recently deceased and represent salient aspects of their life, including their clan relations (Strathern 2001). A Malangan sculpture can be imagined as a second skin, a porous membrane that first contains and then releases the life force of the deceased after a period of mourning. Like any object, a Malangan sculpture can be presented in innumerable ways, each presentation providing the opportunity for different kinds of associations. Positioning a Malangan sculpture alongside a double helix model of DNA, for example, draws attention to the different ways that the particular characteristics of individuals are understood, represented, and passed on to descendants. In this sense the Malangan sculpture and the double helix can both be understood as formidable technologies for the transmission of knowledge, bodily substance, sociality, and property between generations.

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Malangan effigy alongside a model of the DNA double helix[2]

Museums and source communities

While museums are often criticised as sites of appropriation, their trajectory over the last few centuries can also be understood as part of a democratising process, with access to highly valued collections gradually opening up for broader publics. A shift of focus to actively nourishing productive relations between museums and various kinds of communities is part of a wider trend for museums to be more responsive to the varied concerns held by multiple stakeholders in their collections. Over the last few decades, the special and enduring interests of lineal or cultural descendants of the people from whom specific collections originated have been widely acknowledged. The term ‘source communities’ (Peers & Brown 2003) has gained parlance in the context of museums with ethnographic collections originating from self-identifying indigenous or ethnic groups, including people living on ancestral lands, diasporic populations, and immigrants. Its use highlights the overlapping histories embodied in collections and the responsibilities that museums have to the people they represent.

The developing relations between museums and source communities over the last three decades have ranged from indifference and confrontation to remarkable exchanges of knowledge, innovative collaborations, and multi-vocal exhibitions, which highlight different perspectives on the material on display. Many people retain strong emotional and political attachments to objects associated with their ancestors and linked to land and custom. These attachments are often amplified by specific collection, settler, and colonial histories. Objects such as Maori Tāonga (ancestral treasures) and Blackfoot shirts are seen by cultural descendants as living entities that embody the spirits of their ancestors (Peers & Brown 2016). Reconnecting with objects from the past can be a crucial aspect of knowledge sharing, cultural healing, revitalization, artistic inspiration, and political redress (Krmpotich & Peers 2013). Objects may also be mobilised as ambassadors, providing opportunities for source communities to assert their presence in museums around the world. Groups such as the Maori are routinely involved in the presentation of materials originating from their homelands, actively contributing to the interpretation of the material on display and conducting ceremonies to mark the opening of exhibitions.

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UK based Fijian dancers with nineteenth century club[3]

While acknowledging the heartfelt connections that many source community members have to objects in museum collections, there is not necessarily a direct or an inevitable relationship between contemporary peoples and material that originated from their homelands. Attention to object biographies reveals that in many instances objects cannot be linked to a singular point of production or use. Even when there is a clear historical connection, people may express disinterest or ambivalence towards the material culture of previous generations. Some may actively chose to distance themselves from things associated with a remote or pre-Christian past. Evangelical converts are likely to disdain or even fear objects originally associated with ancestor cults, divination, or sorcery. For example, many Christian Fijians believe that historic objects in the National Museum’s collections contain spirits that could adversely affect their well-being and they avoid being near certain objects and are reluctant to visit the Museum. Between 2003 and 2005, some Protestant churches encouraged their members to burn heirlooms, including clubs and tabua (presentation whale’s teeth), in order to protect themselves from danger and strengthen their faith. In response, the Fiji Museum advertised in local newspapers to encourage people to deposit their heirlooms in the storerooms of the Museum rather than destroy them. Museum staff have encountered the spiritual aspects of these objects on various levels. As devout Christians themselves, responsible for protecting the nation’s cultural heritage, many have sought help from church members to pray for their protection and the well-being of the Museum and its collections (Buadromo & Igglesden 2015).

The diverse relations between museums and source communities reflect the nuances of entangled histories, from encounter and colonialization to fieldwork and friendship. Museum visitors and researchers increasingly include members of source communities, with many travelling great distances to engage with objects associated with their past. Many museums now proactively share information about the material in their collections, provide direct and indirect access to objects and associated documentation, and collaborate with cultural experts in the development of research projects and exhibitions. It is now common practice for curators, academic researchers, and graduate students to visit communities around the world with details and photographs of related museum collections as a means of sharing and eliciting information as well as opening up relationships for future collaboration. New digital technologies also provide opportunities for sharing information about museum collections and developing online research environments. Numerous collaborative websites have been developed worldwide, some providing privileged access to members of source communities. Outstanding examples include the Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) based at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, which was co-developed in partnership with four Northwest Coast First Nations groups and includes catalogue information of Northwest Coast collections from museums in Canada, the United States and the UK (Rowley 2013), and the website ‘Returning Photos: Australian Aboriginal Photographs from European Collections’.

Providing access to collections may include using artefacts, both within and outside the museum, in culturally appropriate ways, at times challenging conventional conservation standards. In order to connect with the ancestral past and the spiritual presence of sacred objects, it may be important to touch fragile materials and use museum artefacts in rituals and performances. Acknowledging the authority of source community representatives may occasionally restrict access to others. Culturally sensitive material, including some secret-sacred objects or those containing human remains, may be deemed inappropriate for public display in galleries or on the Internet. Some objects may require special storage conditions or ritual protocols, or be the subject of claims for return. Despite the popular focus on repatriation, often fuelled by ill-informed media accounts, claims for return are relatively few and successful cases demonstrate that repatriation often strengthens relationships within communities and between communities and the museum, prompting new exchanges and collaborative projects. While mainstream museums still maintain positions of relative authority, the impact of source communities on traditional museum goals and practices has been far-reaching. In settler societies such as Australia and Canada, museums are key sites for the re-articulation of political relationships between indigenous communities and civil society, resulting in a growing indigenization of museums (Phillips 2011). Many Aboriginal and First Nations groups have also developed their own museums and cultural centres. For mainstream museums, developing productive relations with source communities and indigenous cultural centres opens up new areas for research and also affords privileged opportunities for curators and researchers to work within host communities, often providing access to people, places, and knowledge from which they would otherwise be excluded.

Museum anthropology, research and civil society

Changes in museology and museum anthropology have greatly strengthened the position and potential of museums for sustained research, experimentation and engagement with a wide variety of communities, variously defined. Museums are not simply about objects; rather, they prompt scholarship on complex relations among people and things. Innovative museum-based projects, exhibitions, and activities have become more inclusive and receptive, attracting increasing numbers of visitors and targeting diverse audiences. In addition to the long-standing role of museums in public education, new perceptions among policy makers and funding bodies increasingly expect museums to act as political agents by actively contributing to agendas for social inclusion, community regeneration, and responsive citizenship. While the museum’s potential for research, teaching, and engagement goes far beyond these direct and immediate political goals, museums have become much more audience-centred and have worked to develop new collaborative paradigms which acknowledge the special needs and interests of marginalised groups (Golding & Modest 2013).

Within academia, university museums are re-gaining central positions as institutions which bring together interdisciplinary research in the social sciences, arts and humanities, and the sciences. In addition to contributing to specialist research, museums provide a public face for the broader work of the university and contribute to government-sponsored impact agendas. Drawing on the wealth of their collections and the general ethos of the academy, university museums tend to provide more opportunities for experimentation, risk-taking and debate. Anthropology museums are centrally involved in these challenging and rewarding revitalization processes. Perspectives from museum anthropology, both within and outside the museum, offer a well-positioned critique of the wide-ranging implications of these transformations.

References

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Appadurai, A. (ed.) 1986. The social life of things. Cambridge: University Press.

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Bennett, T. 1995. The birth of the museum: history, theory, politics. London: Routledge.

Buadromo, S. & K.T. Igglesden 2015. Thomas Baker’s Shoes, Fiji. In Trophies, Relics and Curios? Missionary Heritage from Africa and the Pacific (eds) K. Jacobs, C. Knowles & C. Wingfield, 103-10. Leiden: Sidestone Press.

Clifford, J. & G. Marcus (eds) 1986. Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 1988. On collecting art and culture. The predicament of culture: twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

——— 1997. Museums as contact zones, four Northwest Coast museums: travel reflections. In Routes: travel and translation in the late twentieth century, 188-219, 212-54. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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——— 2013. Exhibitions as research: displaying the technologies that make bodies visible. In Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 5 (eds) S. Dudley & C. McCarthy, 113-35. Oxford: Berghahn.

——— 2013. Objects, agency and museums: continuing dialogues between Torres Strait and Cambridge. In Museums and source communities: a Routledge reader (eds) L. Peers & A.K. Brown. London: Routledge.

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Macdonald, S. 2002. Behind the scenes at the science museum (materializing culture). Oxford: Berg.

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——— (eds) 2016. Visiting with the ancestors: Blackfoot shirts in museum spaces. Athabaska: University Press.

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——— 2007. Paris primitive: Jacques Chirac’s museum on the Quai Branly. Chicago: University Press.

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Rowley, S. 2013. The reciprocal research network: the development process. Museum Anthropology Review 7, 1-2.

Shannon, J. 2014. Our lives: collaboration, native voice, and the making of the National Museum of the American Indian. Santa Fe, N.M.: SAR Press.

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Vergo, P. 1989. The new museology. London: Reaktion Books.

Note on contributor

Anita Herle is Senior Curator for Anthropology and Reader in Museum Anthropology at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA). She has regional interests in Torres Strait, Fiji, Vanuatu, and Canada. Her research topics include museum anthropology, the early history of British anthropology, art and aesthetic, and visual histories. She has developed and participated in numerous collaborative projects with descendants and communities represented by MAA's collections.

Dr Anita Herle, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. ach13@cam.ac.uk

[1] The installation repositions a carved wooden ancestral figure, tetoteko (MAA 1939.70), originally attached to a house gable in the Bay of Islands, the homeland of the artist’s father. The carving was collected in the 1830’s by Karl von Hügel and donated by his son Anatole von Hügel, MAA’s founding Curator. The figure is wearing headphone plugged into a listening post and positioned in front of a video screen, which references landscape, Maori tāonga (ancestral treasures), and the artist’s movement between Aerotea New Zealand and Cambridge. The visuals, songs and stories animate the figure, highlighting its continued ancestral presence and ongoing connections to past and contemporary events.

[2] This picture shows a funerary effigy from New Ireland, Papua New Guinea (MAA 1890.177) alongside a replica of Crick and Watson’s model of the Double Helix from the Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology Images from the introductory section of the exhibition ‘Assembling Bodies: Art Science and Imagination’ (MAA 2009 – 2010; MAA 1890.177). The juxtaposition stimulated discussions about the ways that the distinctive characteristics of individuals are represented, contained, and distributed.

[3] Picture taken on 6 June 2013 during the opening of the MAA exhibition ‘Chiefs & Governors: Art and Power in Fiji’. The dancer at the back holds a nineteenth century Fijian club from MAA’s collections borrowed for the event. There are over 10,000 Fijians living in the UK, many of whom are attached to the British army. Photograph courtesy of Gordon Brown.