Odyssey Enabled 5 TIN: 932434 ofa Journal Title: Third text Volume: 3 Issue: 6 Month/Year: 1989-03 Pages: 73-78 Article Title: The others: Beyond the ‘salvage’ paradigm Article Author: Clifford, James Imprint: tandt a 5 2 8 s 3 ' s 2 2 2 Document Delivery Call#: Lilly Library Periodicals nno.42+45(1998/99) c.1 Location: Date: Wednesday, October 01, 2014 CUSTOMER INFORMATION: Gustavo Furtado (gpf@duke.edu) email: gpf@duke.edu Phone: 919 923 4815 Ariel: 152.3.237.118 Perkins DDS NDD Box 90183 Durham, NC 27708 If there are problems with this document Missing Page(s): Edge(s) Cut Off: Unable/Difficult to Read: Please contact us. Phone: 919-660-5890 Fax: 919-660-5964 NOTICE: THIS MATERIAL MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT LAW (TITLE 17 U.S. CODE)‘The Tomb of Mahael & Alouae (South-East Madagaseat) (hot A. Mognin)THE OTHERS BEYOND THE ‘SALVAGE’ PARADIGM ‘The subtitle of this essay, Beyond the ‘Saeage Paradigm, may seem cryptic. To some of you it will recall early twentieth century anthropology, the “salvage ethnography’ of Franz Boas’ generation; A.L. Kroeber and his Berkeley colleagues recording the languages and lore of ‘disappearing’ California Indians, ‘or Bronislaw Malinowski suggesting. that authentic Trobriand Island culture (saved in his texts) was not long for this earth. In academic anthropology ‘the salvage paradigm’ has an old-fashioned ring about it Still, many ethnographies and travel accounts continue to be written in the style of aps moi Ie déluge, with the exotic culture in question inevitably undergoing ‘ata’ changes. We stil regularly encounter ‘the last traditional Indian ‘beadworker’, or the last ‘stone age people’. The salvage paradigm, reflecting a desie to rescue something ‘authentic’ out of destructive historical changes, isalive and wel. tis found in ethnographic writing in the connoisseurship and collections of the art world, in a range of familiae nostalgias My essay’s subtitle names a geo-political, historical paradigm that has organized Western practices I'd like to call ‘art — and culture ~ collecting’. Seen in this light, it denotes a pervasive ideological complex. Il sketch some of the paradigm’s underlying conceptions of history and authenticity, conceptions that need tobe cleared away if we are to account for the aultiple histories and inventions at work inthe late twentieth-century, What’s at issue is a JAMES CLIFFORD particular global arrangement of time ond space, TIME/space, The dominant temporal sense is historical, assumed to be linear and non: repeatable. There is no going back, no return, at least in the realm of the real, Endless imaginary redemptions — religious, pastoral, retrolnostalgic — are produced; archives, ‘museums and collections preserve (construct) {an authentic past; a selective domain of value is maintained in a present relentlessly careering forward, 'SPACE/tine, A dominant ‘theatre of memory’ ‘organizing the world’s diversities and destinies has been described in Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes is Object, 1984, Speaking very schematically, in the global vision of nineteenth-century evolutionism the world’s societies were ordered in linear sequence (the standard progression from savage to barbarian to civilized, with various, now arcane, complications). In the twentieth century, relativist anthropology — our current ‘common sense’ — emerged. Human differences would be redistributed as separate, functioning ‘cultures’. The most ‘primitive’ or ‘tsibal’ groups (the bottom rungs of the evolutionary ladder) could now be given a special, ambiguous, temporal status: call it the ‘ethnographic present’ In Western taxonomy and memory the various non-Western ‘ethnographic presents” are actually pasts, They represent culturally distinct times (‘tradition’) always about to"4 ‘undergo the impact of disruptive changes associated with the influence of trade, media, missionaries, commodities, ethnographers, tourists, the exotic art market, the ‘world system’, etc. A relatively recent period of authenticity is repeatedly followed by a deluge ‘of corruption, transformation, modernization. This historical scenario, replayed with local variations, generally falls within the ‘pastoral’ structure anatomized by Raymond Williams in The Country and the City. A ‘good country’ is perpetually ruined and lamented by each successive period, producing an unbroken chain of losses leading ultimately to...Eden. In a salvagepastoral set-up, most ron- ‘Western peoples are marginal to the advancing world-system. Authenticity in culture or art ‘exists just prior fo the present (but not so distant or eroded as to make collection or salvage impossible). Marginal, non-Western ‘groups constantly, as the saying goes, ‘enter the modern world’. And whether this entry is celebrated or lamented, the price is always that local, distinctive paths through modernity vanish. These historicities are swept up in a destiny dominated by the capitalist West and by various technologically-advanced socialisms, What's diferent about peoples seen to be moving out of ‘tradition’ into ‘the modern world’ remains tied to inherited structures that either resist or yield to the new but cannot produce i. In American anthropology a growing body of recent work has begun to unravel the assumptions about tradition, history, and authenticity that underlie ‘the salvage paradigm’. The result has been to displace global dichotomies long ‘orienting’ g political visions in the Occident. One of these dichotomies sorts the world’s societies into people ‘ith or zithout history, The inheritors of Thucydides, Gibbon, Marx, Darwin, etc are endowed with ‘historical consciousness, others have ‘mythic consciousness’ This dichotomy is reinforced by other oppositions: literate/nonslterate; developed! underdeveloped; hotcold, The last pair, coined by Levi-Strauss, assumed that, for good or ill, Western societies are dynamic and oriented toward change, whereas non-Western societies seek equilibrium and the reproduction of inherited forms. Whatever truth this sort of ‘general contrast may contain, it becomes rigid and oppressive when ranges of difference — both within and between societies ~ become frozen as essential oppositions. The history of anthropology is littered with such oppositions: ‘we’ have history, ‘they’ have myth, ete. Anthropologists now challenge the assumption that non-Westem (even small-scale “ribal’) peoples are without historical consciousness, that their cultures have scant resources for processing and innovating historical change. I'll quickly list a few important recent works. In longot Headhunting, 1883-1974, Renato Rosaldo, 1980, discovers a distinctive historical idiom among nonliterate Philippine highlanders, a concrete way of narrating real past events and of using the landscape as a kind of archive. Richard Price's First Time: the Historical Vision of an Afro- Americon People, 1983, probes an elaborate local historical memory and discourse among the descendents of escaped slaves in Surinam. A strong historical sense is crucial to the group's identity and its continuing resistance to outside powers. In Islands of History, 1985, Marshall Sablins argues that 18th century Hawaiian mythic and ritual structures, far from being timeless and unchanging, were concrete forms through which forces of historical change (like the arrival of Captain Cook) could be locally processed. Work by sociologists like Anthony. Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu has introduced an increased awareness of process and inventive agency into formerly synchronic and holistic theories of culture. A seminal work of mid-1970s by Roy Wagner, a work deeply influenced by Melanesian processual styles, gives its title to a whole new perspective: The Invention of Culture. Of course, I'm painting with a broom here, iglossing over a number of important debates. Suffice it to say that, for me, the importance of the new anthropological attention to historical process has been to reconceive ‘cultures’ as arenas not merely of structural order and symbolic pattern but also of conflict, disorder and emergence. Several of the essentializing, global dichotomies I’ve mentioned are complicated. For example, Sahlins has spoken of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ sectors, within specific societies: people may, in fact, be willing rapidly to discard or change wholeareas of traditional life, wile guarding and reproducing ober. ‘Another dichotomy is displced by Trinh 7 Minka in the special iseue ofthe review Discourse she has edited (No. 8, Fall Winer 1867: She, the Inappropriate Othe). She writes in her introduction: "There Third World in every Fat Word and vce vers. (A walk in many neighbourhoods of Greats New York easily confirms the fist part of her statement) Old geopolitical oppostions are eanformed into sectors within Westen and non-Western societies, Hoticold, historialimythi, moderation, iterateorl, county iy, centrelperiphery, fistfnird, are subject (6 local mix and match, contextual/actcal shiting, syneretic recombination, import export Culture is migration as well as rooting aMrithin and between groups, within and between individual persons ‘A significant provocation for these changes of orientation has clearly been the emergence of nonrWester and feminist subjects whose ‘works and dscouses ate diferent, 00g, ad Complex, ut clealy not “authenti in Conventional ways. These emergent subjects Cannolonger be marginalized, They spent only for endangered traditions’, but also for rial human futures, New definkions of futhentcty (ultirl, personal, ats) are naling themselves felt definitions no longer centred on a salvaged past, Rather, authentic is reconcelved as hybrid, creative activity in a ioe presen-becomingture, Non-Western cultural and artistic works are implicated by an interconnected world cultural system without necessary being. swamped by ft Local Structures produce histori ater than simply yielding to History, What kinds of cultural and artistic histories are being produced? TH end. with a few examples dean from the ongoing invention Of Native American cltore and at. Anne Vier Faoulis, arto a the Musée de'THomme, recertly publshed a sensitive secountf the aesthetig, stoi acta Giscourses routinely used #0 explicate individual museum cbjects. (See the new journal Gath, No.3, 1986, published by the [Archives Division of the Muse del'Homme.) VitertFardoulis discusses afrnus,iticately painted animal sin Gls present name: ME 34.33.5), probably originating, among, the Fin. Indians of North America. The ski turned up in Western collecting systems some time ago in a Cabinet of Curiosities; it was used to ‘educate aristocratic children and was nusel admired for its aesthetic qualities. Vitor Fardoulis (ells us that now the shin can be decoded ethnographically in terms of its combined ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ graphic styles and understood in the context of a probable role in specific ceremonies. But the meaningful contexts are not exhausted, The story takes a new turn: The grandson of one ofthe Indians hi onset ois ssh Buffalo Bil was searching forthe painted skin tonic his Grandfather hod been forced t sell to ay his way back tothe United States when the cinus collapsed. I showed him all the tons in ir collection, and Ie paused before ane of them Controling his emotion he spoke, He told the rearing of this fockof hat of hat design, why this Color had been used, the meaning of that feather...And this garment, formerly beautiful and inetesting but passive and indufferent, itl By ite ‘became meaningful, active testimony to a living ‘moment through the mediation of someone who did fot obeerve and analyze but who ved the abject and for whom the object ived.Itscarcely maters whether the tani is really his grandfather's don’t know what's going on inthis encounter. But I'm pretty sure two things are not happening: 1) The grandson is not replacing, the object in its original or ‘authentic’ cultural context, That is long past. His encounter with the painted skin is part of a modern te- collection, 2) The painted tunic is not being appreciated as art, an aesthetic object. The encounter is too specific, too enmeshed in family history and ethnic memory. Some aspects of ‘cultural’ and ‘aesthetic’ appropriation are certainly at work. But they ‘occur within a current tribal history, a different temporality (and authencity) from that governed by ‘the salvage paradigm’. The old painted tunic becomes newly, traditionally, meaningful in the context of a present- Decoming-future. “This currency of ‘tribal’ artifacts is becoming, increasingly visible to non-Indians. Many new tribal recognition claims are pending at the Bureau of the Interior. And whether or not they are formally successful matters less than what they make manifest: the historical and political76 reality of Indian survival and resurgence, a force that impinges on Western art-and-culture collections. The ‘proper’ place of many objects in museums is now subject to contest, The Zuni who prevented the loan of a War God from Berlin to the Museum of Modern Artin 1984 were challenging the dominant art-culture system. For in traditional Zuni belief, War God figures are sacred and dangerous. They are not ethnographic artifacts, and they are certainly not ‘art’. Zuni claims on these objects specifically reject their ‘promotion’ (in all senses of the term) to the slatus of aesthetic o scientific treasures. Tm not arguing that the only true home for the objects in question isin “the tribe’ — a location that, in many cases, is far from obvious. My point is only that the dominant, interlocking contexts of art and anthropology are no longer self-evident and uncontested ‘There are other content, histories, and futures in which non-Western objects and cultural records may ‘belong’. The rare Maori artifacts that recently toured museums in the United States normally reside in New Zealand Museums. But they are controlled by the traditional Maox authorities whose permission was requited for them to leave the country. Here and elsewhere the circulation of museum collections is significantly influenced by resurgent indigenous communities This current disturbance of Western collecting systems i reflected in a new book by Ralph Coe, Lost and Faund Traditions, Native ‘American Art: 1965-1985, 198. It isa coftee-table book: we have not transcended collecting or appropriation. And once again, a White authority ‘discovers’ true tribal art — but this time with significant differences. The hundreds ‘of photographs in Coe’s collection document recent works, some made for local use, some for sale to Indians or White outsiders. Beautiful objects ~ many formerly classified as ‘curios’, ‘folk art’ or ‘tourist art” — are located in ongoing, iaventive traditions. Coe effectively {questions the widespread assumption that fine tribal work is disappearing. And he throws doubt on common evteria for judging purty and authenticity. In his collection, among recognizably traditional kachinas, totem poles, blankets, and plated baskets we find skillfully beaded tennis shoes and baseball caps, articles developed for the curio trade, quilts, and decorated leather cases (peyote kits modeled on old-fashioned toolboxes). Since the Native American Church, in whose ceremonies the peyote kits are used, did not exist in the nineteenth-century, their claim to traditional status cannot be based on age. A stronger historical claim can, in fact, be made for many productions of the ‘curio trade’, for the beaded ‘fancys’ (hanging birds, mirror fames) made by Matilda Hill, a Tuscarora who sells at Niagara Falls “Just try telling Matilda Hill that her ‘fancies’ are tourist curios,”"said Mohawk Rick Hil, author of an unpublished paper on the subject. “The Tuscarora hhave been able to trade pieces lke that bird or beaded. frame at Niagara since the end of the war of 1812, when they were granted exclusive rights, and she Wouldn't take kindly to anyone slighting her clture!” “Surely,” Coe adds, ‘a trade privilege established at Niagara Falls in 1816 should be acceptable as tradition by now.”” Coe dovs not hesitate to commission new ‘aditional’ works. And he spends considerable time eliciting the specific meaning, of objects, as individual possessions and as tribal art. We see and hear particular artists; the coexistence of spiritual, aesthetic, and commercial forces is always visible, Overall, Coe’s collecting project represents and advocates ongoing art forms that are both related to and separate from dominant systems of aesthetic-ethnographic value. In Lost and Found Traditions authenticity is something produced not salvaged. Coe’s collection, for all its love of the past, gathers future, ‘A long chapter on ‘tradition’ resists summary. For the diverse statements quoted from practicing Native American artists, old and young, do not reproduce prevailing Western definitions. Let me end with a few quotations, They suggest to me a concrete, nonlinear sense of history — forms of memory and invention, re-collection and emergence, that offer a different temporality for art — and cultural collecting, ‘Whites think of our experience as the past. We know itis right here with us. We always begin our summer dances with a song thatrepeats only four words, over and over. They don’t ‘mean much of anything in English, "yous chiels stand up.” To us those words demonstrate our pride jn our lineage and our happiness. in altays remembering i. Itis a happy song. Tradition is not something you gab abouts in the doing, Your tradition is ‘there’ always. You'te flexible {enough to make oft what you want. I's avays with you. | pray to the old pots atthe ruins and dream About making pottery. fell them I want to lear i ‘We live for today, but never forget the past A slightly longer version of this article was published in English in Discussions it Conte 7 (Our jab as artists is to go boyd, shich implies 3 Jove change, alvaysaccomplisied with rations in mind, by taking to the elders ofthe trike and by being with your grandparents. The stories Tey tll are just amaving, When you bxvume exptsed them, everything bvcomes 2 rtlcton ot those events There's pica deal of sailaction beng an nist of traditions, We've always had chacms; everything that’s ew is sold ith ws nporary Culture, No. 1, Ed, Hal Foster, Dia Att Foundation, Bay Press, New York & Seattle, 1987,| 8 ANNETTE MESSAGER From the Series My Smal Efi, 1988 Installstion detail: PELUCHE