2009 Workshop: Empires: Science, Travel, Art

Our seminar this year picks up where we left off last year with our work on Empires and Science: Contact, Authority, Collaboration. The aim of last year’s workshop was to alert teachers to possibilities for incorporating the history of science into world history and world studies courses. Sciences that were touched upon included the exact sciences (mathematics), navigation, material medica, ornithology and botany. This year we focus on anthropology, the social science most relevant for thinking about representations of the world. Following the inclinations of several of our participants in the 2008 workshop, we locate our interest in anthropology in Melanesia, that part of the world that some of its students see as the most anthropologized place on earth.

A trip to the Bishop Museum and the Honolulu Academy of Arts,
February 25, 2009
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READING ASSIGNMENTS

JANUARY

James Clifford, “Museums as Contact Zones,” Routes: Travel and Translation in the
Late Twentieth Century, (Cambridge: Harvard: University Press, 1997), pp. 188-219,
360-363

Greg Dening, “A Poetic for Histories: Transformations that Present the Past,” Aletta
Biersack, ed., Clio in Oceania: Toward a Historical Anthropology, (Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp. 347-380

Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, (London:
Routledge, 1992), pp. 1-37, 228-230.

As many of you know already, the place to start for reading about empires and travel is with Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. If you read the book when it first came out in 1992, you won’t be disappointed in a second read. Go for the new edition or dust off your old copy. We recommend learning the concepts Pratt introduces in Chapter 1:

1. Contact zone: “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (4)

2. Transculturaltion: “how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture” (6)

3. Strategies of anti-conquest: “whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony” (7)

4. Autoethnography: “instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms” (7)

In our discussions we also paid attention to Chapter 8: “Reinventing America/Reinventing Europe: Creole Self-fashioning,” and read it together with President Obama’s Inaugural Address. We asked: how is our new president reinventing America after the last 8 years? Where the Creoles Pratt wrote about eliminated native populations from consideration through aestheticizing the landscape, privileging science, and encouraging capitalism, President Obama has called for inclusion: U.S. citizens come from every country in the world; it is a “patchwork” citizenry made up of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, unbelievers.

Historian of anthropology James Clifford published an important article in 1997, in which he extended Pratt’s concept of the contact zone to the museum, and it is well worth reading again or for the first time in our context. In the era of European imperial expansion museums in the West become places for representing the world.

Any chance for reading Greg Dening is a chance not to be missed, so if this self-styled ethnohistorian of the Pacific is new to you, you are in for a treat, especially if you were raised as a Catholic; and if the Pacific is a new subject for you and you are daunted by the thought of all you might have to read, take heart. In this essay on the fit or lack of fit between history and anthropology, Dening writes: “It is an old joke that the world will not end with either a bang or a whimper. It will simply sink under the weight of old National Geographic magazines.” The ethnographers who interpreted the Pacific for us were legion, continues Dening: “One lifetime would not be enough to read all the interpretations that were the product of ethnographic moments in Polynesia alone.” (357)

FEBRUARY

Herle, Anita, and Sandra Rouse, eds., Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary essays
on the 1898 anthropological expedition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998)

O’Hanlon, Michael, and Robert Welsch, eds., Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic
Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s – 1930s, (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2000)

The twenty-one essays in these books focus on the history of ethnographic collecting in Melanesia. In Herle and Rouse we learn about Alfred Cort Haddon, who led an expedition to the Torres Strait (between the northern tip of Australia and Papua New Guinea) in 1898. Haddon was trained as a natural scientist but on his first trip to the Torres Strait to study fish his interests turned to anthropology. He planned the expedition that finally materialized ten years later to study the customs of the people before it was too late. Like other anthropologists at the time, Haddon thought contact between Melanesians and Europeans would lead to the death of Melanesian culture.

O’Hanlon and Welsch provide a rich and complex historical context for understanding ethnographic collecting in Melanesia in the early decades of the 20th century.

Anthropologists had their way made easy for them by the many Europeans already in the area, even when interests sometimes clashed: the collectors who were sent out by museums competed with traders, missionaries, settlers, and colonial officials for objects of Melanesian material culture. Where ethnographic collectors differed from the others, though, was in their prior training; like Haddon, the people presented in the O’Hanlon and Welsch collection had studied natural science and then turned to the study of humankind. They understood that what they were doing was science.

Read as much as you like of these essays until you get a feel for what these early anthropologists thought they were doing. If you want to broaden your knowledge of the early history of anthropology we recommend taking a look at the following:

Kuklick, Henrietta, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology,
1885-1945, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Stocking, George, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888-1951, (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995)

Stocking, George, ed., Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology,
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1888)

Urry, James, Before Social Anthropology: Essays on the History of British Anthropology,
(Philadelphia: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993)

MARCH

Peers, Laura and Alison K. Brown, eds. Museums and Source Communities, (London:
Routledge, 2003)

Stanley, Nick, ed., The Future of Indigenous Museums: Perspectives from the Southwest
Pacific, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007)

These collections introduce you to the rich literature on the status of ethnographic art and the museums that house it today.