>>101055875Some years ago, Oliver LaFarge published a short story about an ethnologist who, as a young man, financed his studies among American Indians by collecting their treasures for museums. Over the years, his love of subject deepened to the point of identity, and towards the end of his life, he devoted much cunning to removing these pieces from museum storage and sending them back to their heirs. His actions came to light after his death when the Indian heirs again offered these pieces for sale.
The story is true. I knew him well. The dilemma he faced, anthropologists are only beginning to acknowledge. The truth is, though native informants may have liked anthropologists personally, they often distrusted their motives. Some suspected profits from books; others noted it was a paid job.
But what disturbed most was the feeling that when their dances and tales were filmed, taped, and written down, they were stolen from them as surely as their lands and furs were taken away. When they saw their sacred treasures under glass, heard their songs on the radio, watched their dances on TV, they not only objected to errors they spotted, they felt robbed. None of this had anything to do with them. They felt used. And they were.
The world’s largest collection of primitive art was put together by a man of great wealth and acquisitiveness who personally inked catalogue numbers on every specimen he bought, then stored these treasures in an inaccessible warehouse. The moment he catalogued a piece, it became his.
Anthropology, as an offspring of colonialism, reflects what Lévi-Strauss calls ‘a state of affairs in which one part of mankind treats the other as object’. The search for self-knowledge, which Montaigne linked to the annihilation of prejudice, has never been a dominant theme in twentieth-century anthropology. Not really. The trend has been towards the manipulation of peoples in the very course of studying them.
I don’t refer to the close link between British anthropologists and the Colonial Office, or to the American anthropologists working on CIA counter-insurgency projects. That was mere Winnie-the-Pooh.
I refer to the anthropologist’s role as a translator. Humane translation preserves and presents. Paul Radin insisted that the only acceptable ethnology was the life history, self told by members of indigenous society. But those who undertook such effort found themselves far removed from the mainstream of anthropology.
Even the concept of relativism has become, in the words of Stanley Diamond, ‘a perspective congenial in an imperial civilization convinced of its power. Every primitive or archaic culture is conceived as a human possibility that can be “tasted”; it is, after all, harmless. We, at our leisure, convert the experience of other cultures into a kind of sport, just as Thorstein Veblen’s modern hunter mimics, and trivializes, what was once a way of life. Relativism is the bad faith of the conqueror, who has become secure enough to travel anywhere.’
Clothing themselves in liberal platitudes and employing what they called ‘scientific methodologies’, anthropologists translated other cultures into unreadable jargon and statistics, almost none of it translatable back into life energy. They erased cultures with irrelevancy and dullness. A few ended up talking to each other in a language known only to themselves, about subjects having no existence outside their closed circle. Little wonder informants felt shut out.
This was not true of a handful of reports published around the turn of the century. Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology contained detailed, matter-of-fact, accurate descriptions of Zuni ceremonies, Hopi pottery designs, etc. These are used today as reference works by the Zuni and Hopi in their efforts to keep alive their heritage.
Almost nothing published in the last fifty years could serve that end. These later reports aren’t repositories of knowledge; they’re graves. No retrieval from them is possible.
Between 1946 and 1965, a typical research project began with a government grant and the assembly of an interdisciplinary team. Ideally, this included a psychologist, economist, etc., that is, representatives of categories meaningful to our culture, though alien to the culture studied. Generally no one was invited to participate who had shown prior interest in the subject, say someone who had learned the language of the subject group. The thought of including someone from the subject group itself never occurred.
If it was American Indians, reservations were taken as geographical locales, though for many Indians, social drinking-dancing clubs, which cut across reservation lines and centered in cities, were primary. Time categories were based on government budgets, not indigenous calendars.
Every category came from the dominant culture. The indigenous culture wasn’t preserved and presented: it was swallowed.
>>101055891Look at it this way: it's like stealing our posts back from BVTM.
