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S O C I A L AG E N C Y A N D T H E C U LT U R A L VA L U E ( S ) O F T H E A RT O B J E C T ◆

FRED MYERS

New York University

In different, distinctive ways, the essays in this volume can be seen to combine two strands of recent work on the anthropology of art – with the category ‘art’ partially under erasure – as they survey the problem of indigenous art within settler states. We are, of course, indebted to Nelson Graburn for the first real move in this direction. In his original edited collection (Graburn, 1976), Graburn both drew attention to this category of material culture and also gave it theoretical significance as ‘Fourth World art’, insisting that some of its most salient characteristics were comprehensible only through exploration of the distinctive social contexts of its production and circulation. The thrust of these essays, in that tradition, lies with the potential of complex object forms (objects, art, performance) to address strategically the complex boundaries between indigenous and non-indigenous people and cultures within settler societies. The essays refer specifically to the circumstances of Canada, but their historical and geographical ramifications extend more broadly and their interest as instances of the analysis of Fourth World arts is great. The first strand of the current work in the anthropology of art – commemorated for me in the title of the collection’s original American Anthropological Association Panel ‘Beyond Art/Artifact/Tourist Art’ – evokes the Primitivism debates around and after the Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 exhibition. Responding to ”’Primitivism’ and 20thCentury Art’, these debates were cogently articulated in James Clifford’s well-known review (1985) and his subsequent essay ‘Collecting Art and Culture’ (Clifford 1988a). The second strand of current work Journal of Material Culture Vol. 9(2): 205–213 Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) [DOI: 10.1177/1359183504044373]www.sagepublications.com

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acknowledges the bouleversement offered by my late friend Alfred Gell in Art and Agency (1998), in his insistence on the agency of material culture. Gell notably argued that a specifically anthropological approach to art must take a philistine approach and consider primarily the work done by art objects as indices of agency and effective in mediating social relationships. The denaturalizing of the western category of ‘art’ – if not the recognition of art as a historically constituted and specific social formation – is a central feature of both interventions. Appropriately, then, the identification of art with aesthetics, or even ‘beauty’, is left behind in these articles and attention directed to the ironies, disjunctures and convergences put into motion by the intercultural circulation of indigenously produced objects. Here, the form of objects is addressed analytically not simply as an expression of a universal or even culturally specific aesthetics, but as situated in the mediation of complex intercultural and interpersonal political circumstances. As Kenneth Burke (1973) once aptly put it, ‘Symbols are strategies for encompassing situations.’ ‘Critical and imaginative works’, he wrote, ‘are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose . . . These strategies size up the situations, name their structure and outstanding ingredients, and name them in a way that contains an attitude towards them’ (Burke, 1973). Object form, similarly, may be regarded as a strategy for engaging the historically specific circumstances of intercultural circulation. Graburn’s essay looks to the history of Inuit art’s creation and development in the Canadian north. Far from a simple expression of indigenous aesthetic practices, Inuit art represents the hybrid collaboration of numerous agents, within and beyond the Native community, just the sort of interaction that raises the suspicions of collectors of an ahistorical ‘authentic Primitive art’. Ostensibly a consideration of the supports for Inuit art, the essay draws attention here to a range of external agents involved in its history, and especially to the role of the artist-entrepreneur James Houston in the formation of Inuit art. This is a role reminiscent of the activities of similar outside agents who sustained indigenous arts in Australia and elsewhere (see Myers, 2001, 2002). Graburn’s focus is not so much on the centrality of any particular agent or on the resulting authenticity or inauthenticity of Inuit sculpture, but rather with the different ideas of material and expressive culture that were available and deployed by these agents and their relevance to varying political (and cultural) policies. Interestingly, he portrays the shift in the Canadian government’s interest in Inuit artistic production from an initial interest in commodities providing economic support in place of direct welfare to a postSecond World War need to assert Canada’s status internationally as ‘a generous, tasteful, paternalistic modern territorial power’. This stance,

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articulated in support for the art and its use in gifts and exhibitions worldwide, addressed a rivalry with the US and a need to convince the major Cold War protagonists that Canada was a ‘true Northern power’. These constellations of interest define value in material objects, representing distinctive and changing regimes of value, but the essay addresses itself equally to Gell’s charge that analysts should look to agency in objects and their form. The essay directs us to Inuit art as a collaborative production, its existence a testimony to (and an objectification of) the participation of Inuit artists with outside agents. Concomitantly, the Inuit have gained income and self-confidence from running cooperatives, but their visibility as ‘artists’ (rather than mere commodity producers) has raised their standing within and outside Canada and has laid the basis for the credibility of forms of Inuit sovereignty within Canada. Surely, this perspective on the circulation of indigenous arts – moving significantly beyond the stale debates about authenticity and appropriation – suggests the productive potential of viewing these objects as distributed agency whose success is accorded back to those who made them. Graburn’s example illustrates the complex way in which indigenous art can simultaneously proclaim difference or distinctiveness from the surrounding nation-state and also express that nation’s identity within the world of nations. Objects, with their multivalent potentials, seem uniquely able to carry out such symbolic projects. Charlotte Townsend-Gault’s focus on the circulation of Northwest Coast aboriginality in evanescent form – crest designs on copper-colored tissue paper, stylized killer whales on canvas tote bags – makes the case that these are ‘declarations that are also disguises’. Withholding while giving (modifying Annette Weiner’s famous 1992 discussion of ‘keepingwhile-giving), these forms and their makers make tangible (i.e. they objectify) a recent shift in Native/non-Native relations and Canadian multiculturalism. The properties of glistening, copper-colored tissue, she argues, convey and transmute something about coppers (like crests, markers of social transactions on the Northwest Coast), and in this sense they are not simply a degradation of the emblematic idea of the copper for Northwest Coast people. These forms – the miniature, the mimetic, the mechanically reproduced – are not just the inauthentic; they are not simply commercial kitsch. In a brilliant and subtle analysis of the meanings embodied in the evanescent forms, Townsend-Gault explains the complicated stances performed in these extensions of indigenous presence. Against the sense that extreme circulation is the worst situation, they provide (1) an agency disturbing to the spectatorial regime intrinsic to ‘not-yet post-colonial relations’, a regime of display in which ‘conflicted political relations were subsumed into looking relations’. (2) Further, as a form of action, the visual deflects attention from or masks conflicts present. In this

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regard, her essay is similar to Jennifer Kramer’s concept of ‘figurative repatriation’ in this collection. This circulation is not just a mask, or should it be said that ‘masking’ is also a form of presentation, a form of being visible and therefore present? Indeed, the metaphor of the ‘mask’ surely resonates with traditions of masking in the Northwest Coast, of performing identities of power. It seems, however, that insisting on presence through the visual might not be adequate to reclaim indigenous presence and being. Townsend-Gault’s insight takes seriously the potentials that come from interrupting the dominance of the visual, and she stakes a particular claim for the indigenous value of the other sensuous modes deployed by the evanescent forms. If over-privileging of the visual is understood as constitutive of the reduction of indigenous peoples, then movements to the sensuous and immediate could provide an arena for the more confident expression or indication of indigenous identities and epistemologies. These forms also work against the domination of the visual, reinstating this sensorium, reprivileging touching, smell, and in this mode they reflect on the intensified circulation of forms of mechanical reproduction. The specific forms of objectifying Native presence imply a particular form of agency: not grand things, not public things. Aboriginality is being insinuated into private and public spaces through the very ordinariness of the support (T-shirts, business cards, flyers), denying ‘extraordinariness’ and radical difference. Townsend-Gault analyzes these forms as ‘defeating both the declaration of difference and the desire for it’. These forms circulate broadly across the boundaries of Native and non-Native, making ‘evident full native participation in the modes of display, promotion and marketing of late capitalist liberal democracy’. At the same time, its insubstantial and transmuted form maintains limits, protecting renewed definitions of aboriginality. This embodiment of an agency and of an enchantment suggests the complex field of cultural production in which the Native position is articulated, a Bourdieuian stance in which the magico-religious is held in reserve but its presence indicated. Unfortunately, Francesca Merlan’s essay could not be included in this collection. Its presence in the original panel was instructive about the contingencies of indigenous presence and provided an example outside the Canadian context. This paper was addressed to the tension evoked by the promotion of Aboriginal cultural production to the status of art, a subject I also made central to my own recent book (Myers, 2002). In this situation, the old category of ‘primitive art’ has broken down and many insist on Aboriginal art’s modernity and contemporaneity. But, Merlan asked, can this formulation work? Can Aboriginal art be simply another modern art in Australia? This is to ask in another way about the

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inclusion of indigenous people’s cultural forms within the settler nationstate. In answering this question, Merlan proposed the utility of the wellknown Durkheimian dichotomy of mechanical and organic solidarity (famously presented as modes of integrating similarity and difference) to capture tensions that coexist in the simultaneously familiar (art) and different (Aboriginal) imperatives of work like that of the artist Jimmy Pike. This move is reminiscent of James Clifford’s (1988b) own discussion of two tropes in ethnography – familiarization (humanism) and transgression (surrealism). The difficulty of placing Aboriginal art in western categories of recognition should not be underestimated, and in this sense the paper provided a parallel to Graburn’s. The key to Merlan’s paper is implicit – the placement of Aboriginal art is a placement (indexical, iconic) of indigenous people themselves. Merlan noted first a finding of commonality (they have art) across cultural difference, which she sees as a trope of mechanical solidarity, or integration through likeness. She writes that the explicit state recognition of Aboriginal people/art as part of a culturally appropriate indigenous economy has accompanied the advance of Aboriginal art to the center of Australian art (but I would assert further that the latter actually depended on the former). These are not mere categories, but they are related through distinctive properties of the art market and tourism. This mechanical solidarity coexists with an organically solidary role in which the difference between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal is preserved. The deployment of this Durkheimian scheme is very productive in demonstrating the problem. Put otherwise, the mechanical solidarity inclines towards an aesthetic recognition while organic solidarity implies non-Aboriginal recognition of the distinctive value these objects have within an Aboriginal social reality. This dichotomy, she shows, has implications for the way in which economic success is evaluated – as challenging the symbolic power of otherness, the co-presence of Aboriginal culture within modernity remains or becomes even more unsettling. In yet another parsing of intercultural space, Jennifer Kramer’s essay – aimed at repatriation and concerns about cultural property – seems to draw its inspiration from her reading of Robert Houle’s formulation of ‘artist-warriors’. The term refers to indigenous artists trained in the western traditions ‘who are brave enough to create art works which respond to and appropriate the language of the western art world’. Their work is displayed in western museums and art galleries, ‘hostile territory’ where they challenge the conceits and power structures that have long constrained indigenous culture. Kramer’s discussion sheds light on how this space of settler nations is actively engaged, although one cannot help noting how hybrid the

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solution is – so closely linked to notions of the historical avant-garde (see Burger, 1984) and transgression. Kramer presents First Nation artistwarriors who refuse the space of ‘primitive/traditional’ or nothing as engaged in ‘figurative repatriation’ in the artistic activity of constructing themselves and their work in relationship to masterpieces of the past – claiming these as theirs, even if their work is different – refusing to accept the difference imposed on their work by categories like ‘primitive’, ‘tourist’ and so on. For First Nations cultural producers, these categories have been a lived and constraining reality. In these terms, Kramer argues that physical repatriation is problematic, in accepting the terms of the colonial relationship. To this end, she cites Gloria Cranmer-Webster’s statement that ‘the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation does not need their cultural objects repatriated in order to dance them, since they have artists making new material for the spiritual health of the community’. Instead, they need objects repatriated ‘to rectify a terrible injustice which is part of our history’ (Cranmer-Webster, 1995: 141, quoted by Kramer in this volume). Genuine repatriation requires something more – a reconciliation, being heard by the non-Native community. The impasse is resolved through what she calls ‘figurative repatriation’. This is a move Gell would have appreciated, locating a form of agency in the shaping of objects and performances – indeed, in seeing objects as performative. This perspective helps to clarify the space and strategies of First Nation artists, and with an interesting twist. The twist is that First Nation artist-warriors expose themselves to the risk of negative non-Native reception, but they also engage these Others in their ‘performance’ of their identities. In this performance lies the potential of fostering intercultural relationships, rather than simply cleaving them through taking back objects. There is also, perhaps, a resonance with another genre of performance, the potlatch, which also required an audience to legitimate the performers’ claims to being. Kramer’s analysis relies heavily on the discursive and the trope of ‘warriors’ and ‘risk’. While this is no doubt the language of the participants, in light of Gell’s shift to agency, this border crossing of the artists has another aspect – less fully addressed by Kramer. As her invocation of Judith Butler suggests, perhaps there is another dimension of hybridity in these activities. It is not the self-work of the artist-hero that we regard here, but a production of identity through performance. We might look for a connection between Judith Butler’s and Marilyn Strathern’s sense of performativity and ask whether these art works are not performatives like the potlatch – or exchange more generally. Indeed, Aaron Glass’s essay in this collection points out that a principal feature of the potlatch has been the use of object circulation to negotiate political relations. Thus, as we have come to understand it in anthropology for exchange events, these works perform an identity and recognize an

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audience, and the maintenance of the relationship is vital to the performance. Figurative repatriation, then, recognizes and articulates – acts out – the new and complex reality of indigenous identity in a multi-cultural Canada. It is precisely to the discourses of translation, contextualization and recontextualization that Aaron Glass directs our attention, especially with the popular framework of cultural property – and its implications. Discourses surrounding cultural property constitute an emerging regime of value in which object circulation is constructed. In comparing the repatriation of cultural property to indigenous groups and the restitution of artworks taken from Jews by Nazis during the Second World War, Glass turns to the activity of claiming cultural property as itself a signifying practice, productive of new values, entities and situations. Glass’s essay begins with the recognition of the power of tangible objects to encapsulate meaning and value, ‘the capacity to “objectify” such transient notions as identity, ethnicity, and history’. But his analysis is directed towards ‘the language of claims’, to the discursive frameworks in which the claims over objects and their movements are made. This analysis recognizes the complex semiotic web in which – contra Gell’s claim (see Keane in press) – objects are embedded, so that repatriation might become a ‘symbol for the wider goal of [indigenous] self-determination’ or ‘restitution become a symbol for remembrance’. Indeed, Glass shows that requests for the return of cultural property almost invariably involve deployment of ‘a social narrative in which the movement of objects stands for the story of (a) people’. Careful analysis of the language of claims reveals a multitude of terms used in the discourses of object return, and thus a range of ways in which objects might be made to signify possibilities of redress in history. Clearly, the term ‘cultural property’ does not constitute a monolithic or unified category. Here the comparison of indigenous and Jewish claims is productive. Unexpected in some of their connections, the similarities and differences suggested in the metaphors of cultural property discourse work a very interesting deconstruction of some of the claims about cultural property. Indeed, the focus on the signifying practices around repatriation, restitution and loss opens up the space of claiming itself as a fundamental component of dispute formulation and resolution. The famous essay on ‘Naming, Blaming and Claiming’ (Felstiner et al., 1980) demonstrated the way in which cultural categories enter into claims of loss and restitution; Glass’s discussion of the language of claims reiterates their presentation of the necessity of finding legitimate frameworks for injurious experiences in order to articulate a culturally recognized loss against which a claim could be established. The objects provide a focus for disputes – differences, injuries – to be addressed. From an emphasis on the language of claims, Glass’s essay views cultural

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property claims as constructed within social fields; as with the Turnerian social drama (Turner, 1974), these normative or discursive frameworks are neither monolithic nor singular. Glass insists, thus, that ‘attention to the discourse surrounding claims for object return reveals how debates over cultural property involve common contests over the value of objects and ownership as well as the qualities and boundaries of social identity’. In this way, the essay breaks away productively from the essentializations of cultural property and moves towards an understanding of the practice of claiming and the process of returning as strategies to redress historical grievances. Here, Burke’s general discussion of symbols as strategies for encompassing situations is informative but reductive in not specifically addressing the semantic potential of objects to index agency, a property vital to the circumstances of indigenous people. Glass argues that the process of negotiating return of objects is particularly significant in that it involves ‘asserting control over the terms of their own history. Object circulation and ownership becomes an index of social agency, a focal point for asserting selfdetermination and self-control following moments in which identity was specifically attacked.’ That the claims about property are objectifications – or performances – of other concerns is deeply illuminated by this. This leads Glass to argue that we might ‘approach restitution claims as a process through which both physical objects and social subjects are discursively constituted, through which historical agency and identity are claimed and enforced, through which group boundaries are redrawn and power borrowed’ This is fundamentally part of the contextualization of cultural property as a site of action and potentially of restoration. Working through contrasting situations allows the reader to see that cultural property is at best a mediation of some very complex desires and agencies. Finally, the importance of metaphor (and language more generally) suggests the necessity of going beyond Gell’s rejection of the semiotic in embracing technology as more or less culturally unmediated. References Burger, Peter (1984) Theory of the Avant-Garde (trans. Michael Shaw). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Burke, Kenneth (1973) The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clifford, James (1985) ‘Histories of the Tribal and the Modern’, Art in America 73 (April): 164–77, 215. Clifford, James (1988a) ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’, in James Clifford The Predicament of Culture, pp. 215–51. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James (1988b) ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, in James Clifford The Predicament of Culture, pp. 21–54. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Cranmer-Webster, Gloria (1995) ‘The Potlatch Collection Repatriation’, University of British Columbia Law Review, Special Issue Material Culture in Flux: Law and Policy of Repatriation of Cultural Property: 137–41. Felstiner, William L.F., Abel, Richard L. and Sarat, Austin (1980) ‘The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming’, Law and Society Review 15(3–4): 631–54. Gell, Alfred (1998) Art and Agency. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Graburn, Nelson (1976) Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Keane, Webb (in press) ‘Signs are Not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things’, in Daniel Miller (ed.) Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Myers, Fred (2001) ‘The Wizards of Oz? Nation, State and the Making of Aboriginal Art’, in F. Myers (ed.) The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, pp. 165–206. Albuquerque, NM: School of American Research Press. Myers, Fred (2002) Painting Culture: the Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Turner, Victor (1974) Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ◆ F R E D M Y E R S is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at New York University. He is the author of Painting Culture: the Making of an Aboriginal High Art (Duke University Press, 2002) and editor of The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture (SAR Press, 2001). Address: Department of Anthropology, New York University, Rufus D. Smith Hall, 25 Waverly Place, New York, NY 10003. [email: [email protected]]

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