Conference announcement and call for papers

David Wengrow and Andy Bevan, Archaeology, UCL

Commodity branding has come to occupy a central but paradoxical place in understandings of modernity and globalization, and is widely equated with an advanced phase in the development of capitalist societies. Mass consumption of branded goods—and of the images of personal transformation they project—has been linked to the disappearance of older forms of identity based on kinship, class and caste. Branded products inspire visions of progress but also networks of resistance, both arising from the view that brands are a recent and unprecedented phenomenon in human history, spreading from a core area in the post-industrial West to influence a wider economic and cultural periphery.

On May 10th and 11th, 2008 the Institute of Archaeology at University College London will be hosting an international conference that seeks to investigate and challenge these assumptions by approaching the production and consumption of branded goods on a comparative scale, across a wide variety of historical and cultural settings. In particular we seek to explore the contribution of archaeological and anthropological perspectives, thereby broadening the scope of current debate on the role of commodity branding in contemporary social life and in the long-term transformation of human societies.

What follows is a list of key themes that we hope to address. We are also open to contributions from colleagues in other fields such as history, art history, cultural studies, marketing, advertising and other areas of the social sciences:

Archaeology: How do different strategies of product identification (e.g. standardisation of form and packaging; application of labels, seals, and innovative surface designs) develop within contrasting frameworks of economic activity, from household exchange to sacred hierarchies, and from village communities to empires? How do they relate to economies of scale and patterns of cross-cultural trade? How far do ancient forms of quality control, authenticity and intellectual property resemble those of today's global economy? In what ways were they different?

Anthropology: How far does the availability of branded goods in contemporary societies really transform pre-existing hierarchies of value? To what extent are the material and cognitive strategies invested in their production translatable across cultural contexts and styles of consumption? What kind of comparisons can be drawn in terms of the web of agencies (real or imagined) through which homogeneous goods must be seen to pass in order to be consumed—be they the bodies of the ancestors, the gods, heads of state, secular business gurus, media celebrities, or consumer citizens?

If you feel that you have something to contribute, please send an abstract of around 500 words to d.wengrow@ucl.ac.uk and/or a.bevan@ucl.ac.uk by September 1st, 2007. Places are unfortunately limited: we will aim to finalise the programme by no later than the end of September 2007.

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Thursday June 7th 2007, 10 a.m.

Dr Ian Coates (Senior Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program, National Museum of Australia)

A collector’s life: Emile Clement
Emil Clement, an English-based collector, made important contributions to the British Museum’s collections during the second half of the nineteenth century. As well as selling large numbers of north-western Australian Aboriginal objects to a range of museums in Britain and Europe, Clement had earlier collected and sold Bronze Age pots and objects from Silesia. In this paper I review Clement’s collecting activities, and examine continuities in his sale techniques relating to both the ethnographic and bronze-age material.

Thursday June 14th 2007, 10 a.m.

Peter Mason (Rome)

Images of the ancestors: Aesthetics and moai being-in-the-world
Several expeditions to Easter Island, especially from the late 19th and early 20th century, provoked an interest in the carvings of the island among several Western artists, especially the Surrealists. Less well-explored is the subject of the aesthetics of how the well-known carved stones (moai) of the island have been and are physically presented: their being-in-the-world. Bypassing the enigmatic question of how the moai are to be interpreted, I explore the effects of different presentations or stagings of the moai, both on the island and elsewhere (including the British Museum).

Seminars usually start at 10.20 – tea and coffee provided from 10.00.

The British Museum Centre for Anthropology is located inside the north entrance to the museum on Montague Place.

For more information please contact: anthropology@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk

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Sandra Rozental, New York University

In 2003, Gil Cardinal directed Totem: The Return of the G’psgolox Pole, a film documenting the Haisla people’s pilgrimage to Stockholm to concretize negotiations for the return of an object that, despite its absence from the community since the nineteenth century when it was illegally sold to a collector, has remained present in the community through memory and stories. The film raises issues of ownership and meaning by showing, through interviews and other footage, the different points of view expressed both by community members, and the museum in Stockholm’s staff. However, the film ends with the Totem pole still on display in Sweden, after the community has made an exact replica for the museum. CLICK for Photos

There is little hope for the original's successful repatriation because of different ideas about the role of heritage and objects: for the museum, the issue at stake is preservation, whereas for the community, tradition and community norms need to be respected and the pole left to decay naturally according to custom. The film is slanted toward the community’s perspective, largely showing the museum in Stockholm as inflexible and bureaucratic, but also occasionally exploitative of native lore. Thus, Totem is above all else an advocacy film that denounces the complications of repatriation almost begging its viewers to do something about it. The film’s activism, however, goes beyond the actual message of the film itself: Totem has generated interesting effects that place the possibility of using film as a medium to change museum practice very much as a viable option.

The current Ethnografiska Museet was designed in 1980 specifically to house the nine-meter Totem Pole that was brought to Sweden in the 1920s, originally raised in the open, outside the museum’s first building in Wallingatan, and then horizontally in an unheated storeroom, until the new museum in Djurgarden opened. The new building was created around the Totem pole, giving it a central location, not just in the physical space of the museum, but also in the museum’s storyline. The museum produced postcards and other souvenir objects that carried the image of the Totem pole, making it almost like a trademark or logo that identified the museum.

In 1991, as documented in the film, the Xanaksiyala people, a part of the Haisla people, requested the return of the Totem Pole, and negotiated that a replacement pole would be carved and shipped to the museum in 2000 where it would be finished by master carvers as a gift from the Haisla to the people of Sweden. In 2003, given the complications described in Cardinal’s film, despite the arrival and completion of the new, the old pole was not returned. In 2006, however, a visit to the Ethnografiska Museum reveals a very different outcome. Neither the old nor the new pole can be found inside the museum, where a museum label placed where the old pole used to be displayed, ushers visitors to a screening room where Cardinal’s film runs continuously in a loop. In the back wall of the gallery, a series of photographs and documents detail the process of negotiation and repatriation of the pole, making the return of the pole very much an integral part of the museum’s narrative. If one entered the museum from its main entrance and wondered on its grounds, one would catch a glimpse of the replacement pole standing proudly in the open outside the museum where it has stood since March 2006, when 13 members of the Haisla Nation came to Stockholm to ceremoniously raise the new pole, and send off the original.

The Ethnografiska Museet has also generated a publication that is given to visitors free of charge entitled “The Haisla Pole at the Museum of Ethnography” where the story of the G’psgolox pole is told through text and photographs, both recent and archival. Interestingly, the film by Gil Cardinal is only mentioned at the back as a film that “exhaustively presents the totem pole’s remarkable story”, but the actual message of the film is never mentioned, nor are any stills from the film used to illustrate the texts. Through this publication, the use of the film and the repatriation process in its galleries, the museum plots itself as a benevolent entity that was responsibly concerned both with meeting Haisla requests, as well as heritage of humanity conservation. As the publication states, under a caption that reads “A symbol of Culture, Language, and Traditions”:

Today many Haisla strive to regain land and water rights, to prevent pollution and to rejuvenate their culture. The return of the G’psgolox’s totem pole is of great importance to the efforts to interest young people in culture, language and traditions. To the Museum of Ethnography, the totem pole project represents a new chapter in a unique cooperation with the Haisla and other first nations around the world.

This statement conceals the frustrating demands that the museum imposed on the Haisla, a main thread throughout Cardinal’s documentary, making the process of return a collaborative process, rather than a negotiation where the Haisla had to cede on many accounts.

The original G’psgolox pole was returned to Kitmaat Village on June 30th 2006. On July 1st, ceremonial dancing welcomed the pole back to its ancestral homeland. The event was crowned by a screening of Totem as part of its official welcome. Unfortunately, the Haisla were still unable to provide a space for the pole to remain in the community. One option was to have the pole remain in Vancouver at the UBC Museum where it had been taken in July 2006 to be displayed for a forum, until the community could gather enough funds to build a cultural center of its own (a project estimated to take about 3 to 5 years). However, the community members who had so arduously fought for the pole’s return were not satisfied with this option. An uneasy compromise was met through the Kitimat City Centre Mall, where the pole is currently on view until a better venue can be built. Gil Cardinal was present at the mall’s unveiling of the pole, and is making an updated version of his film.

Sources:

• Etnografiska Museet. The Haisla Totem Pole at the Museum of Ethnography. Stockholm, 2006.

• www.etnografiska.se

• www.nanakila.ca

• www.citycentremall.ca

• G’psgolox at the ma;l (Canada.travel)

  Posted by William Brian Thomson at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Objects and visual analyses

To mark Refugee Week here in London, seize the chance to visit 19 Princelet Street and explore issues of immigration, inclusion and identity in one of Europe's most extraordinary spaces. Tell your friends and colleagues, and please do help by forwarding this on.

An international historic site of civic engagement, the only one of its kind in Europe, 19 Princelet Street in London's Spitalfields will open FREE every day 17-24 June (and Sunday 27 May) from 12-5 pm.

'One of the most charismatic buildings in our city - it tells the tale of arrival, of moving in and moving on'
Robert Elms, BBC London

Discover shared human stories of incomers, over hundreds of years, who have shaped and continue to shape not only this city but our society.

Explore SUITCASES AND SANCTUARY, a 'hauntingly beautiful' show created by children, with powerful lessons for how we think about asylum seekers, for political debate, for community relations and human rights. Take a wry look at asylum in Britain today through LEAVE TO REMAIN, installed by three contemporary artists in exile.

'Goes right to the heart of who we are today'
The Guardian

Founded by refugees, the charity is run by volunteers of all ages, cultures, religions and backgrounds working together to preserve this special kind of museum as a place where cultures meet, and raising a target of £3 million so it can be open to everyone on a regular basis in future.

'Our visit to 19 Princelet Street was a revelation'
International Banker

Find more at www.19princeletstreet.org.uk

- Any one lucky enough to visit this remarkable house should please send in something to the blog, as readers would be keen to read this.

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Danny Miller, Anthropology, UCL

On 3rd to 5th May a workshop was held as part of the ESRC-AHRC funded programme Cultures of Consumption. The workshop was held in Florence and attended by around twenty academics mainly from sociology, but including anthropologists, historians and others. It was organised jointly by Frank Trentmann. Elizabeth Shove and Rick Wilk. The theme was routines and rhythms of consumption. My impression was that this forms part of a welcome larger movement to establish consumption processes as central to consumption studies and thereby complement the more traditional emphasis upon the study of things or persons. Of course this does not detract one iota from its interest to material culture given the materiality of such consumer processes.

There were a broad range of perspective presented on the theme of temporal orders, with many varied examples of both routines and rhythms of consumption. For example, Elizabeth Shove worked to interpret aggregate statistical data on temporal routines in the day in terms of more general cultural differences, such as meal times in France. Dale Southerton also discussed daily rhythms, but in his case using archival data from UK diaries kept in 1937 as compared to more recent diaries. The results challenged assumptions about increasing pressure on work and leisure.

A more philosophical dimension to the way certain routines of consumption `capture’ individuals was provided by Roberta Sassatelli using the examples of attendance at gyms or involvement in critical and ethical consumption. Orvar Löfgren emphasised the positive importance of routine in helping people deal with what otherwise might become the overwhelming possibilities of modern life, and this was neatly complemented by Tom O’Dell who looked at the more negative issues when such temporal routines are fetishised, for example, during commuting.

Inge Daniels demonstrated the continued importance of a wide range of seasonal markers in the Japanese home while noting the differences between those who held great store by such markers while others took a more token interest. Other papers dealt with shifts in the sense of time, for example Guliz Ger and Olga Kravets looked at `slow’ tea as in traditional tea drinking in Turkey as compared to the `fast’ tea of teabag drinking today. During the discussion there was a growing sense of the relative autonomy of routines and rhythms as the kinds of process that align people with time rather than simply expressing their agency. Another focus was on new technologies and the way these lead to either bifurcations or realignments of time practices, for example, mobile phones. Other papers were more concerned with the involvement of the market or state in co-opting or regulating such temporal rhythms. Overall participants were left with a strong sense of the way material culture acts as the infrastructure to routines and rhythms which organises the way people experience time to both constrain and enable.

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Students who came to several of the regular material culture seminars last year at the Department of Anthropology UCL were probably somewhat amazed that there, in the audience, was a slight woman, evidently in her eighties, who listened and questioned, and was still clearly an active participant, despite having become one of the world’s most renowned anthropologists long before they were born. After one of these seminars she came out with the rest of us to have a drink with the speaker. During which she beckoned me over. The conversation started in typical Mary Douglas style:-. `Aren’t you the person who is responsible for all this nonsense about materiality?’ We then had an entirely amicable conversation based on finding an academic whose influence we could both agree to heartily dislike, in this case, the psychoanalyst John Bowlby.

Her presence at these seminars was entirely appropriate because it is hard to imagine that they would have existed but for her influence on the department at which she was Professor for many years (1951-1977) and at which she wrote several of her best known works. In recent years there has almost always been one of the material culture PhD students working as her personal assistant in her continued writing – I believe she completed two further books this year. Its not that she ever associated herself with the term material culture, but rather that several of the many productive strands in her work were essential ingredients to what become the characteristic cuisine of UCL material culture. Even when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge it seemed almost impossible not to devote at least one essay to the application of Purity and Danger to almost any genre of objects that one chose. When you told people you were hoping to become an anthropologist it was the most common point of recognition. `Oh an anthropologist, you mean like Purity and Danger.’ For good reason; this was a book that simply changed the way people saw their world and made sense of every day distinctions that we observed but failed to understand. In my case the most important impact came with The World of Goods. Along with Bourdieu’s Distinction these were the two books that ensured that it was in some ways astonishingly anthropology, the discipline least associated with modern industrial society, that actually invented the modern study of consumption which was the path I took into material culture studies. Furthermore she established the essential grounds for those studies of consumption - the critique of economic assumptions as to why we desire goods and the critique of the consequences of those economic assumptions, for such fundamental issues as to what we mean by poverty.

More generally Mary Douglas became the conduit for the application of structuralist and semiotic studies to material culture. More immediately accessible, both in writing style, and in her choice of illustration than Levi-Strauss, it was her work, that at least in Britain, was the model for countless student essays. Applied to familiar terrain such as working class meals in Britain, comparative studies of drinking, or well known biblical texts, she showed how to see pattern and order in what previously had just appeared to be arbitrary behaviour, and then ground these in a Durkheimian perception of social order and social difference. I won’t pretend that I was equally enthralled by all her work. Some of her closest acolytes favoured her model of grid and group which always left me cold. On the other hand some of her most recent biblical studies such as Leviticus as Literature (1999) are to my mind quite brilliant and yet have been comparative neglected outside of biblical studies. But there is simply so much to her legacy. In my recent work with Heather Horst on the impact of the cell phone on poverty in Jamaica, the central point that we were trying to make had only ever to my knowledge been made clear by one academic - Mary Douglas. It was she who showed that previous studies only saw communication as a means to other ends and therefore failed to acknowledge its importance as a facility in its own right within modern development. In typically combative style she had written `a social being has one prime need – to communicate’. Something of an inspiration given the intentions behind our project.

When you then reflect on the extent of all her other work, on risk, on organisations, on culture more generally, it is a breathtaking landscape of intellectual argument and insightful interventions. Mary Douglas will leave a considerable and lasting legacy throughout the social sciences and humanities, and in her case this goes well beyond any narrow academic impact to have become part of the popular understanding of the world, something very few anthropologists have ever achieved. But I think that for material culture studies at UCL there was a more particular and more personal debt. It was her association with the department that prepared the local ground, the soil from within which what became our collective approach to material culture could take root and flourish.

Daniel Miller, UCL

Major Works

The Lele of the Kasai (1963)
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
(1966)
Pollution (1968)
Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1970)
Implicit Meanings (1975) essays
Evans-Pritchard (1980)
The World of Goods (1979) with Baron Isherwood
Risk and Culture (1980) with Aaron Wildavsky
In the Active Voice (1982)
How Institutions Think (1987)
Missing persons: a critique of the social sciences (1988) with
Steven Ney
Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (1992)
Thought styles: Critical essays on good taste (1996)
Leviticus as Literature (1999)
In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of
Numbers (2001)
Jacob's Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation (2004)
Thinking in Circles (2007)

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Fiona Parrott, Department of Anthropology, UCL

The Tea Caddy, Paris

Ever wondered how Englishness is portrayed in Paris? Visit The Tea Caddy on 14 rue Saint Julien-Le-Pauvre for Un buffet anglais where tiny scones and dainty cucumber sandwiches are served in a dark wood panelled room, surrounded by china and old maps. The occasion was in honour of the publication of a special issue on Grande-Bretagne: Anthropology at Home. This is the most recent special issue of Ethnologie Française (April 2007) to be part of a series of issues devoted to different countries written by scholars in those places, in short anthropologists doing anthropology at home. In this case the editors were Sophie Chevalier (Universite de Franche-Comte/Laios-MSH), Sharon MacDonald and Jeanette Edwards (University of Manchester). Curiously there was no tea, but there was plenty of French wine which was a fitting celebration for a beautifully presented journal.

Coming out of the tradition of European Ethnology, a journal such as Ethnologie Française will always have a closer relationship to material culture studies than a purely social anthropology journal such as L’Homme. Indeed, for this reason it has been easier for French scholars to view their research on France as a natural part of their work, while harder to get British anthropologists to frame their work as on Britain, as opposed to an aspect of Britain such as class or ethnicity.

The publication of the issue was marked by a workshop at Le Centre de recherches sur les îles britanniques et l’Europe de l’Université de Paris titled “Qu-est-ce-que la Britishness?” Sophie Chevalier opened with a brief historical comparison of the sociology and anthropology of Britain and France. Sharon MacDonald focused on the creation of the issue followed by papers and discussion from some of the contributors. The papers of most interest to material culture included Elizabeth Hart’s study of how former pottery workers explain the decline of the UK pottery industry. Globalisation and abstract market forces have little place in the narratives of workers for whom the decline rests with the decreasing quality of the hand painted images, the consistency of the slip and the ‘abuse’ of the clay by modern managers. And Catherine Degnen’s study of ‘Placing memory’ in a small Northern town focused on the way people and their relationships are embedded in places of which the material traces are long gone. Both papers presented a contemporary take upon the loss of community, a theme that has long concerned the study of Britain and work by scholars such as Frankenberg, Young and Wilmott. Not to mention the residents and politicians of Britain. By contrast my own paper drew upon a study of one hundred households on a London street that has little in common with village-orientated studies as few residents will ever get to know each other and there is a larger and more transient population.

My paper on the material condition of memory in modern urban households examined how interior décor, collections of clothing, books, music and photographs, differentially structure remembering and forgetting, from the intentional creation of memory to the incidence of utilitarian archives. Although genres of material culture may be studied as if they have certain capacities for memory, individuals and households develop their own habits of memory, selecting between the genres in which they invest memory in the long term and utilising them differently. Each household forms it’s own topography of memory. Also included in the issue is a paper on Cremation and the disposal of ashes by Jenny Hockey and David Prendergast, and a historical examination of the making of anatomical knowledge in Scotland through the materiality of dead bodies by Elizabeth Hallam. In one of the few papers which considered the explicit performance of Britishness, Emma Crewe examined the rites and symbols of the House of Lords.

Finally, Marilyn Strathern reminded the workshop of the importance of critical distance when doing anthropology at home. It is sometimes surprising to see Britain through others eyes. She recalled how visitors from PNG simply did not share our obsession with class and identity, for instance they saw the houses of Britain as all the same, rejecting the way British read differences of size and ornamentation as indexes of class and focusing on the blue print structure. Some of the counterpoints for comparison are closer to home however. Taken as a whole the workshop and the journal issue suggest just how much there is to gain from a rapprochement between British material culture studies in general, and the traditions of European Ethnology both in France and elsewhere in Europe, and I am very grateful to the editors for initiating this relationship.

For details of the journal issue see:

"Grande-Bretagne : anthropology at home", Ethnologie Française, n°2, tome XXXVII (2007)

Contents page:
http://www.puf.com/Book.aspx?book_id=025604&feature_id=map

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Dimitris Dalakoglou PhD candidate - UCL

A road in Albania, February 2006. The pavement and the roadbed are partly under construction, the yellow bulldozer in the front was going to the road-works. The local informant who was driving the car apologized: 'Excuse me but this road, here, is only for the [horse-drawn] cart of the uncle in front'.

When I first went to conduct fieldwork in Albania my idea was not to study roads but rather the things that travel on them. Especially my PhD was to be about the material culture of Albanian migration. The possessions people take back and forth between the location of their migratory destination, and the place of their birth. A major part of my thesis will still be concerned with the house and home as part of a larger study of transnationalism, migration and material culture. Yet as time went on, and in particular when I started to write up my field material I realized that actually what was just as interesting was the infrastructure behind this, more especially roads and highways. Roads are dynamic, both materially and culturally, and proved so fruitful analytically that it would probably now be possible to produce a doctoral thesis solely in reference to roads, traffic and their infrastructure, which cross the southern Albanian borders to Greece.

From Shkodra to Athens, more than 1,000 kilometres in a 12 hours trip, Winter 2005.

Although roads and arranged routes are very old and basic things, as old and basic as clothes, houses or tools and other material culture objects of study; anthropological discourse seems to neglect them. Even though there is a growing literature on the car and other vehicles, after long bibliographical research I have been disappointed to find that there are no more than three ethnographic books which seems to relate to roads per se, besides a fistful of (printed) articles or book chapters, written by anthropologists. This is striking for such a significant and so extremely regular object as roads. There is not a day that you leave your home and you do not come into direct visual or tangible contact with a type of road; you, or your shoes, or the vehicle that you ride.

Yet there are a number of specific issues regarding the roads which made those in Albania so interesting. Firstly, their usage, Albania is probably the country with the proportionally largest migratory population in Europe (approximately one third of Albanian passport holders lives abroad today), and migration means mobility, and mobility means mostly roads. Secondly, is the political and social biography of traffic infrastructure in Albania. Vehicular roads in Albania have a complex spatial production, initially introduced by foreign armies during First World War. They went through a period of 45 years when private vehicles were forbidden, while people had to build them with forced labour, and now are being constructed within international development programmes. Roads were important to the political economy, political ideology of socialism, but equally to the contemporary context of Albania, international aid and the EU. Thirdly, there is the inspiration that these ideologically and individually charged spaces of mobility offer to the imagination of the people, who live around them and use them every day. In particular there sense of welcome and threat as to what roads may bring and what may leave. Fourthly, there is the landscape per se where these roads lie and the transformations that land and territory are undergoing since the political transition started. Finally, roads connect with the history of the sealed state borders which opened in 1990, almost suddenly, which together with the cross-border roads brings and takes away human beings and objects.

For all these reasons I expect my work to be increasingly 'driven by roads'. I would be very interested to hear of others working on a similar topic or who can suggest any relevant and worthwhile literature.

Posted by William Brian Thomson at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Posted to Notes from the Field

On the 27th June 2007 IADT will open a three day international conference Global Photographies: Histories, Theories, Practices. 65 Speakers from over 20 different countries will participate in the conference programme, presenting papers on a range of themes from 9/11 and the war on terror, photography and the image content industry, documenting migrations and human rights, environmentalism and globalization, archives and contemporary photographic practices, Diaspora, communities and citizenship, the photographic image and cultural diplomacy, and the impact of digital culture on photojournalism.

Click below for details

The conference will also feature four keynote speakers including;

• Professor Ian Boal (University of California, Berkley and Retort Group) author of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in the New Age of War and editor of Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information

• Allan Sekula (CalArts, Photographer, artist, film-maker and theorist) author of Photography Against the Grain: Essays and PhotoWorks; Fish Story and Performance Under Working Conditions

• Dr. Steven Edwards (Open University) author of Photography: A Very Short Introduction; The Making of English Photography: Allegories and editor of Art and its Histories and Art of the Avant-Gardes

• Shahidul Allam (Drik Photo Agency, Bangladesh) Photo-journalist, founder of Drik Photo-Agency, director of Chobi Mela Photography Festival, Asia.

Further details on the conference including the full conference program and registration details are now available at www.globalphotographies.ie and www.globalphotographies.com

Queries can be forwarded to justin.carville@iadt.ie

Dr. Justin Carville
Historical & Theoretical Studies in Photography
School of Creative Arts
Institute of Art, Design & Technology
Kill Avenue
Dun Laoghaire
Co. Dublin
email: justin.carville@iadt.ie
phone: 01+2144937

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Ross Hemera Kaiwhakaahua & Patrick Laviolette, School of Visual & Material Culture, Massey University

http://www.maoriart.org.nz/

In carrying on with this blog’s recent theme of indigenous art, objects and display, we take you to Aotearoa. The end of April has just seen an exhibition of world class contemporary jade and wood carvings, jewellery, paintings, sculpture, silver and weaving by Maori artists. This was part of a Maori arts and cultural festival launched in the capital by the Minister of Māori Affairs whose inaugural speech is attached below.

Korotangi Series 5 by James F Ornsby

It has been some time, now, since such a significant event on the New Zealand art calendar last occurred. This exhibition of Maori art was especially successful in two aspects. First, as a showcase of, up to the minute work of, Maori artists the exhibition included a comprehensive ranch of the very highest quality – from tertiary students to emerging and mid career artists to our original trailblazers including Fred Graham and Para Matchitt. Secondly, for Maori an event such as this brings an extra special dimension – whanaungatanga. Artist, family and friends from all over the motu, arrived in support to provide the necessary human presence for the works in this exhibition. The occasion also being a time for reminiscing with old friends, networking and meeting new artists.

Māori MARKet Gala, Evening Launch at TSB Arena, Wellington, New Zealand, Thursday 26 April 2007

Speech on behalf of the New Zealand Government delivered by the Honourable Parekura Horomia, Minister of Māori Affairs. (Source of speech courtesy www.scoop.co.nz)

It is great to be here in amongst all of this Māori creativity and artistry and I want to thank the organisers for the opportunity to speak tonight.

Like me, you all must enjoy celebrating Māori achievement otherwise you wouldn’t be here to support this! This Māori MARKet builds on the highly successful 2005 Māori Art Meets America event in San Francisco. A stunning image from that event which stands out in my mind is that of the waka “Te Ika a Maui” and its paddlers gliding beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. That image evoked a very strong sense of pride and passion in me because it captured a moment when Māori proudly took centre-stage internationally. And the vehicle for that opportunity was our art.

From a full-day workshop on the making and playing of taonga puoro instruments, 2003

Māori make New Zealand unique in the world. Whenever we talk about our national identity, we cannot bypass this fact. Of course, all New Zealanders contribute to our national identity and I believe few New Zealanders would refute the statement that Māori provide the “X”-factor that makes our national identity unique in the world.

Tonight’s launch of the Māori MARKet is another step in a journey begun when Māori art met America two years ago. Māori Art Meets America was a distinctive and original promotion and celebration of New Zealand but especially of Māori art. More than fifty Māori artists and dignitaries travelled together to San Francisco to participate in the opening ceremonies and dynamic, interactive exhibition. From the time it was launched and available in San Francisco, Māori Art Meets America transformed the city of San Francisco. Americans were captivated by all that they experienced during the 10 day event including the magnificent performances by Te Puia.

Tonight I am delighted to see the Māori MARKet initiative building on that success and lifting the profile of Māori contemporary art even higher. The Māori MARKet represents another stage in our journey towards the realisation of Māori potential – an approach to Māori policy that this government champions because it has a simple but profound goal of raising the life quality of all Māori.

This event is exactly the kind of initiative that my ministry Te Puni Kōkiri supports as part of its Māori Potential Approach and I am pleased it was able to provide financial support to help ensure this event got off the ground. The world of art – whether it be performing and/or visual – gives us a clear focus because it is tangible. Contemporary art should challenge and stimulate us and those Māori artists featured during the Māori MARKet – do just that.

Māori art, like all things Māori, is unique to this country and deserves our full attention and support. Top New Zealand galleries will be exhibiting Māori art at the MARKet, several Māori art schools will have a presence and work by contemporary art graduates will be at the MARKet. So it will be a feast for the senses that you should support and encourage all your whānau and friends to support too.

But the MARKet is not just about the display and sale of art. It also offers a programme of artists at work, seminars, guest speakers; performances by musicians and storytellers; and clay, tā moko, carving, weaving and fashion displays. Some unique exhibits have been assembled for the Māori MARKet such as; Hinemoana, the contemporary ceremonial waka, built and launched for Waitangi Day this year. Hinemoa was built to a design by Hekenukumai Busby, and carved from a single kauri tree with components in tōtara and synthetic materials. Hinemoana was worked on by six master carvers and contemporary Maori artists from different tribes. Hinemoana carries a carved and painted eagle that was a gift from North American Native Indian artist Dempsey Bob.

The dolphin on the prow keeps an eye on the water ahead, the eagle watches overhead and the whale rider on the bow watches over the crew. The Māori MARKet is also about making international connections. There will be leading North American Indigenous artists, including a showcase of the styles of Canadian fashion designer Dorothy Grant (Haida) in association with Māori weavers.

Also featured are renowned artists Dempsey Bob (Tahltan/Tlingit sculptor), Lillian Pitt (Warm Springs mask maker/jeweller), Chuck Striplen (Ohlone weaver) and Denise Wallace (Aleut jeweller). We can all celebrate and enjoy Māori creativity and achievement that will be showcased over the next three days.

One aspect of the Māori MARKet initiative that I find very exciting is that it is an example of how more New Zealanders are realising that Māori potential deserves their support because Māori success is New Zealand’s success. Contemporary art should challenge and stimulate us but also move us at a deeper level. Those Māori artists featured during the Māori MARKet – achieve all these things. Māori art, like all things Māori, is unique to this country and deserves our full attention and support so don’t forget to tell your whānau and friends to come and visit the Māori MARKet!

Kia ora.

Posted by at 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

MIT Press has just released Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse, edited by Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine. Here is the publishing blurb:

"In Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage, experts offer a critical and theoretical appraisal of the uses of digital media by cultural heritage institutions. Previous discussions of cultural heritage and digital technology have left the subject largely unmapped in terms of critical theory; the essays in this volume offer this long-missing perspective on the challenges of using digital media in the research, preservation, management, interpretation, and representation of cultural heritage. The contributors--scholars and practitioners from a range of relevant disciplines--ground theory in practice, considering how digital technology might be used to transform institutional cultures, methods, and relationships with audiences.

The contributors examine the relationship between material and digital objects in collections of art and indigenous artifacts; the implications of digital technology for knowledge creation, documentation, and the concept of authority; and the possibilities for “virtual cultural heritage”--the preservation and interpretation of cultural and natural heritage through real-time, immersive, and interactive techniques.

The essays in Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage will serve as a resource for professionals, academics, and students in all fields of cultural heritage, including museums, libraries, galleries, archives, and archaeology, as well as those in education and information technology. The range of issues considered and the diverse disciplines and viewpoints represented point to new directions for an emerging field. "

The papers are on the whole shorter and accessible and this looks like a good resource to start thinking through the impact of digitisation on our apprehension of the object world, especially within Museums.

If anyone has read this book, and would like to comment/review it here, please comment below. Equally, what other text or digital resources are available as resources for thinking through the impact of the digital on our understanding of the material world?

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Book Reviews

Danny Miller, Anthropology, UCL

Indigo installation by Shihoko Fukumoto. The museum attendant informed me that they had all been asked to wear blue denim jeans for the duration of the exhibition.

A major exhibition on Indigo is coming to an end at the Whitworth gallery in Manchester on 15 April 2007 , but then moves to Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery 19 May - 1 September 2007 and then Brighton Museum & Art Gallery and Hove Museum & Art Gallery 29 September 2007 - 6 January 2008. The exhibition seemed to me to be clearly inspired by the classic text on Indigo by Jenny Balfour-Paul and published by the British Museum which I would strongly recommend to anyone with an interest in the topic. Indigo is not just any old dye. Its unique properties that mean it can be fixed to cloth without a mordant has made it perhaps the most significant dye in history ranging from the woad of ancient Europe to a major player in trade routes. This exhibition brings together fine examples of textiles from all over the world. Mostly these are historical but there is a small section on fashion denim and finally a room of contemporary art work based on denim cloth.

I confess I am becoming increasingly obsessed by the potential of denim as a topic for material culture studies and I have ambitions to develop an exhibition myself one day based on the wearing and significance of contemporary denim. This would have, however, very little in common with this current display which has other concerns. Firstly aesthetic. As someone not usually given to art exhibitions, I found the materials themselves ravishing and have already decided to go at least once more to feast on the visual display. Secondly there is a commitment to the survival and reconstruction of a craft that was so important historically and in many areas had almost disappeared after the development of industrial substitutes. The exhibition includes 50 minutes of film mainly based on documentaries about such restored local traditions of Indigo production and cloth dyeing in India, West Africa and elsewhere and is well worth watching in its own right. Mostly this is celebratory though there is some mention of the particularly exploitative conditions of South Asian colonial Indigo production. Unusually this is one exhibition which does not divide between Europe and the rest, since the reliance upon Indigo for blue was as important in ancient Britain and more recently for the likes of William Morris as it was for Japanese or for West African textiles. While it could be associated with elites it has also been seen as the egalitarian dye of Mao suits, and blue jeans. Overall the exhibition is an entrancing and enjoyable way to come to an understanding of one historical material whose significance is still rarely appreciated.

Posted by William Brian Thomson at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Just wanted to share with our readers a short piece about the use of blogs in universities, which includes a description of material world blog...

http://www.nyu.edu/its/pubs/connect/spring07/

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to From the news

Graeme Were, UCL Museums & Collections

Since its opening last year, critics have declared Chirac’s museum of ‘primitive art’ in Paris – better known as the Musée du Quai Branly – as ill-judged, neo-colonial, and racist to list just some of the negative terms deployed. If those weren’t strong enough, the new museum has even been dubbed the ‘Musée des bogus arts’ (Fiachra Gibbons, The Guardian, 3 July 2006) and less flattering still, France’s answer to the Millennium Dome, but even more of a folly. Oh dear – could it get any worse? Yet amid the jibes and controversy, art critic Jonathan Jones of The Guardian (The Guardian 1 Nov 2006) courageously breaks rank and hails the new ethnographic museum to be a thrilling spectacle that rekindles that ‘spirit of amazement’ that our Enlightenment ancestors would have marvelled at. In view of his wholehearted endorsement of the museum, perhaps all this commotion could be put down to another case of French bashing by disgruntled Brits. Having received several invites to visit the museum, I finally took up the offer and decided to find out once and for all what the fuss was all about.

The Musée du Quai Branly stands on the Left Bank of the Seine on the Quai Branly not far from the Eiffel Tower. The museum itself is striking, designed by Jean Nouvel the French architect responsible for the Institut du Monde Arabe among other places. Situated amid a garden with meandering pathways, the museum immediately imposes its presence on the visitor as you enter it beneath raised stilts holding above cube-like structures painted in earthy colours. I was pleasantly surprised to see, as Jonathan Jones points out, there are long queues of people avidly waiting to get in.

Once entering the main museum entrance foyer, you are greeted by an elevated glass structure inside which contains musical instruments on open storage. This is incredibly impressive. However, one is left wondering whether this is merely an aesthetic touch or that the storage feature has become integrated into the display as a functioning visitor / collections space in an attempt to salvage them from dusty store rooms. A temporary exhibition space is located to the right, currently housing an exciting installation by African artist Yinka Shonibare as well as a major collection of New Ireland art from Papua New Guinea.

The main displays are located on the first floor. To reach this space, you follow a circular ramp which gradually winds around the musical instrument storage area and climbs upwards. As you walk along the elevated ramp, your senses are immediately stimulated by moving film images beamed onto the floor in front of you depicting indigenous performances accompanied with sounds coming at you from many directions. I found this captivating but uneasy about the thought of people trampling over the film footage.

On reaching the main area, visitors enter Oceania, one of the four continental sub-spaces that the floor is divided into (each space was divided by earth coloured walls – note no Europe). Okay, this may be problematic in that it is inherently ethnocentric, but for many visitors this is very logical – the same spatial arrangement was deployed in Liverpool’s World Museum to good effect. The space itself was also very crowded, reminiscent of my visit to the Velasquez exhibition at the National Gallery. But what struck me most in the Quai Branly was how the displays were set up. I found that the entire space was badly lit – it was in fact deliberately dark with lit cases to draw the visitor to the object. Minimal labelling accompanied the objects on display – this exhibition certainly fell into the aesthetic mode of representation.

I spent some time in the Oceania area and the glass cases there displayed objects typologically: you could find outstanding examples of Papuan Gulf shields alongside those from various provenance of the Sepik; as well as a range of shell valuables side-by-side from across Melanesia. There was scarcely any attempt to provide interpretation and engage with the objects on display: little if any explanation as to why these objects were collected, when and how they relate to today; and certainly no photographic imagery to give historical depth or presence. Indigenous voices were muted except for the odd film of a performance which again remained unexplained. An amazing glass orb stood in the centre of Oceania showing moving images of distances between Europe and the Pacific Islands as well as the routes of famous European voyages of discovery – this Euro-centric perspective summed the museum up well. In effect, the visitor was treated to range of outstanding and exemplary objects from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas firmly looked at from a western viewpoint.

Although I totally disagree with Jonathan Jones’ review – since his opinion only reinforces critics’ concern of celebrating the western gaze – he does however raise one important point about the practice of exhibiting and representing culture. He believes the aesthetic approach succeeds because anthropological interpretations of ethnographic collections are watered down so much so that the explanations appear so rational that they are ‘woefully inadequate in looking at works of art from any culture’. Perhaps he has a point. Having worked with the curators and designers on the Centenary Gallery in the Horniman Museum in London – a reflexive display of ethnographic collecting over a century – the display cases that appear to hang from a gridlike structure from the ceiling are meant to evoke the Mondrian painting Broadway Boogie Woogie, an image that for the curator and designers, encapsulates western modernism’s desire to categorise. How that concept is conveyed to the public is sadly lost.

What then should the ethnographic museum of the 21st century look like? How are we to design displays that bring to the fore the issues that we explore in anthropology and material culture whilst allowing the public room to engage with our work? How are we to deal with open storage given the unnerving fact that most ethnographic collections continue to be housed in dusty storerooms never to be displayed? Why are we still susceptible to pressure from trustees and stakeholders that ensure that archetypal ‘treasures’ continue to reaffirm our notion of the Other? Perhaps there is more to be learned from the Quai Branly after all.

http://www.quaibranly.fr/

Posted by at 4:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | From the news

The Allied Tsimshiam Tribes of Lax Kw'alaams and Metlakatla are less than enthusiastic about the opening of an exhibition of objects from the Dundas Collection which was auctioned to much controversy at Sotheby's New York last Autumn. Fundraising efforts by Canadian Museums and Tribal groups failed to generate enough funds and the collection was eventually purchased by a Canadian Family in an attempt to 'repatriate' the artefacts. The Thompson family gathered together the other purchasers and arranged a national touring exhibition, but there is still a great deal of resentment at the fact that this valuable collection has been broken up into many parts and continue to circulate on the market.

The article from the Globe and Mail is reproduced in the continue reading section.

See also http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2006/10/06/dundas-collection-auction.html

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070430.wxdundas30/EmailBNStory/Entertainment/home

Saying art belongs to their people, chiefs snub new owners of famous artifacts at B.C. ceremony

ALEXANDRA GILL

From Monday's Globe and Mail

April 30, 2007 at 4:00 AM EDT

VICTORIA — Old grievances die hard.

That was the lesson to be learned at the Royal BC Museum this weekend, after a gala ceremony to celebrate the opening of Treasures of the Tsimshian from the Dundas Collection turned into a dour political snubbing.

"It belongs to us," James Bryant, a spokesman for the hereditary chiefs of the Allied Tsimshian Tribes of Lax Kw'alaams and Metlakatla, defiantly declared as the collection's new owners shifted uncomfortably in the audience.

"We cannot touch them ... we're still locked out," said Wayne Ryan, chief of the Xy'uup tribe, one of several elders who complained about the artifacts being encased under glass.
The Tsimshian Gwis’amiilhlgigohl dancers from the Tsimshian territory, perform during the opening of the Dundas Collection. Deddeda Stemler for The Globe and Mail
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The Tsimshian Gwis’amiilhlgigohl dancers from the Tsimshian territory, perform during the opening of the Dundas Collection. (Deddeda Stemler for The Globe and Mail)
The Globe and Mail

The 40 artifacts on display are the most significant items from the famed Dundas Collection. Of mostly Tsimshian origin, it is considered by many to be the finest collection of northwest coast native art in existence.

The collection's history dates back to its acquisition in 1863, at Old Metlakatla, near present-day Prince Rupert, where it was given up - or stolen, depending on your point of view - as part of the natives' conversion to Christianity to Rev. Robert James Dundas by Anglican missionary William Duncan.

Simon Carey, a London-based clinical psychologist and great-grandson of Dundas, took possession of the items in 1960. After decades of dispute with the collection's native claimants and unsuccessful negotiations with some of the world's top cultural institutions, he put the items up for auction at Sotheby's in New York last fall.

The record-setting auction, the first sale of so-called American Indian art to fetch more than $7-million (U.S.), attracted intense interest from bidders around the world.

At the eleventh hour, after a special grant request made by the Royal BC Museum was rejected by the province of B.C. and it appeared that this important cache of Canadian cultural history was going to be scattered to the four winds, members of the Thomson family suddenly stepped up to the plate, spending more than $5-million to repatriate the collection. "It was so sad," says Sherry Brydson, a niece of the late Ken Thomson and resident of Victoria, who purchased 19 of the 40 artifacts.

Brydson, whose family is sponsoring the exhibit's national tour through its private investment firm Westerkirk Capital, says she had never purchased an item at auction before reading about the Dundas Collection's plight in a Globe and Mail article written by Sarah Milroy, published the day before the auction.

"I fussed and fumed and stewed for several hours," she explains, before she called up her cousin, Toronto's David Thomson, whose father, Lord Thomson, was a high-profile collector and donor of artworks until his death last year.

Together, she and Thomson spent $5.7-million on 23 objects that include a magnificent Tsimshian wooden face mask purchased for $1.8-million,and a clan hat, purchased for $660,000.

Rather than hoarding the pieces, they went to the other nine owners and initiated a national tour, which is being co-ordinated by the Royal BC Museum in Victoria and Donald Ellis, the Ontario-based native artifacts dealer who represented Brydson, Thomson and several other owners at the Sotheby's auction.

The exhibit's organizers have gone to great lengths to include and respect the wishes of the collection's original owners. The tour, which moves to the Art Gallery of Ontario in July, was launched on March 1 at the Museum of Northern BC in Prince Rupert, in traditional Tsimshian territory, at the request of the chiefs and elders of the Allied Tsimshian Tribes.

But at Friday's opening ceremony at the Royal BC Museum, which featured a ceremonial dance by the Gwis'amiihlgigohl Performers and a speech from Lieutenant-Governor Iona Campagnolo, the Tsimshian chiefs who travelled to Victoria made it clear that they are still not happy.

"These treasures were intended to be passed from generation to generation," Bryant said. "The way they were taken was one of the biggest mistakes that was ever made, and has been repaid."

The chiefs thanked the Songhees and Esquimalt Peoples of the Coast Salish First Nation for allowing them into their traditional territories. They thanked the Lieutenant-Governor for attending. They thanked the museum for making it all possible. And they thanked the "white people" who appreciate their "little baubles and stuff."

But not one of the seven chiefs who spoke made any reference to the new owners, a snub that could only be interpreted as deliberate.

"I found it unfortunate that a group of Tsimshian elders chose to use a day that should have celebrated the artistic achievements of Tsimshian artists and the actions of a group of Canadian philanthropists as a platform to air old grievances," Ellis quietly fumed after the ceremony.

Willy White, director of the Museum of Northern British Columbia, shrugged off the slight, explaining that the feelings of resentment weren't necessarily reflective of his people.

"When we speak, we only speak the truth. The truth sometimes isn't nice to hear, but it's always going to be the truth."

White said the exhibit's opening in Prince Rupert was one of the most controversial he had witnessed.

"I couldn't even go out to get groceries without people coming up to me wanting to talk about it, whether their feelings were positive, negative or neutral. That's what true art does and I think it speaks volumes about this exhibit. Every one of those pieces is a masterpiece."

Among the many comments he heard, White says there was much praise for the new owners. "People said to me 'Thank God for them. If it weren't for them, we never would have seen it.' "

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to From the news

Erin Mell-Taylor, former UCL Material Culture postgraduate

Bob Haozous is famous person, or that’s how I’ve always looked at him. He is someone that I looked up to as an example of a Native American that has truly ‘made it’. While he works in the same discipline as his father Alan Houser, he has transformed the idea of art, and made it controversial and beautiful. “…His artwork is rooted in his strong communal and cultural identity. Haozous believes that the prestige he earns as an artist goes back to his people and, in a sense, he does not own himself.” (Eun-Hui An www.thephotographyinstitute.org) This is one of the reasons I found the statement that Bob Haozous wrote as apart of the accompanying text to his exhibition in the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art beautiful in a melancholy way, as well as very suggestive of what one would think Haozous would write as a precursor to his work.

Bob Haozous always struck me as someone who tried his utmost to accurately view people, society, and culture. His judgments seemed to be centuries old, but full of life and passion for change. He never wanted to put people in pretty boxes to define them. There was no justification in classifying people as white, black, red, or yellow, but just dealt with race, diversity, religion, and culture as fact; this is how it is for all different types of people. “He is concerned with the themes of man’s relationship to the environment and man’s relationship to his fellow man.” (www.haozousarts.com/artist.htm )

Upon one’s first read-through this statement; you would get an idea that this is a modern ‘Indian’, one that seems to struggle with his ideas of individuality and sense of community. The statement seems to read of someone who is questioning the “Indian” norms and way of life. Upon a second read-through, one can begin to see the struggle with aesthetics and what “modern concepts of individualism” have come to mean to someone who is representative of the mainstream native art community. We see conflicts of representation and modernism. “I do not believe non-tribal (emphasis is mine) people can honestly speak for indigenous people.” Haozous seeks to create a definition of who can accurately speak for an indigenous group. While I, as well as many museum curators, academics, and non-tribal (but indeed indigenous people), feel that representation can come with cooperation between community and academia, or research led by indigenous peoples, one has to appreciate Haozous’ candor and honesty in his opinions regarding native representation. The main problems or questions I would have with his representation ideal would be to question if he is suggesting that if one doesn’t grow up on, or end up on a reservation, can they truly understand what it is to be Indian? Or does this just suggest that if you are not affiliated with a tribe you do not understand? What if you belong to a tribe that is exceptionally inactive? Does that make you less of an Indian? What does it mean then to be Indian?

Haozous believes that Native American artists have aesthetic expectations put upon them, but they have brought these expectations on themselves because they have sold-out by selling art objects that romanticize the conceptions of Native American people and culture due to market demand. (www.thephotographyinstitute.org/journals/1998/bob_haozous.htm)

Bob Haozous explains that his art allows him to find what his cultural sensitivity is, yet it seems when other Indians (and I use that term only because he does) create art, albeit more traditional, or romanticized in the ‘white’ westernized fashion, it is no longer art, but the destruction of Native culture. In an interview from the magazine online, Haozous asks questions that do fit into the Anthropology of Art framework like: What is art? What is the value of art? What is the meaning of cultural art? He seems to be allowing himself more leniency in what he chooses to create, and chooses to see, than other native artists. So again, I would pose more questions to him: What makes an artist? Who defines who can be an artist and who cannot be? Are these social constructs? Can others find their cultural sensitivity in more romanticized, ‘traditional’, high art market demanded art?

I will continue to admire Bob Haozous as an exceptional artist, as an ‘Indian’ that made it. Yet while he is a strong example of a modern indigenous artist, his views on what other artists are trying to accomplish, why the native art market is how it is today, and where this will lead modern native artist’s and the communities they represent seems indicative of someone who is afraid they are becoming out of touch with the ‘modern generation’. Then again, a modern generation of Indians is no more, or no less than what they believe to be modern at the time. They believe they are progressing for the betterment of their community, and themselves. Therefore they should not have to feel hindered for choosing to work in turquoise, or carving, or metallurgy, even if it is to have a leg up in the art market.

Haozous has created a compelling statement. One that indeed sets our minds thinking of the indigenous art market, the aesthetic pressures that may be put on an indigenous artist, representation issues that are currently at the forefront of indigenous representation in museums, collections, schools, and art and anthropology journals. This statement is fresh, and at the same time, slightly retro in a 1960’s activism sort of way. It puts questions on the tongues of a generation of artists and anthropologists that did not see the same struggle of his generation. These new entries believe that they can claim that they are better represented in a more accurate manner and that the public actually wants to hear ‘their side’ of the story more than ever before. Haozous cautions this generation with this statement. Showing that representation is an issue that can never be underestimated, as there will always be misrepresentation, especially when communities, academics, and museum staff choose not to work together to create an accurate portrayal that is all inclusive. The identity and presence of the indigenous in multiple arenas is one that continues to need careful consideration and understanding in order to effectively show what it is to be indigenous, in any manner of the term.

• The statement can be found here: www.iaiacad.org/museum/Bob.php

Posted by at 4:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Topics for Discussion