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Unpacking Culture

University of California Press

Whereas in the Western ideal the artist is a fiercely independent, even rebellious, creator of art for art's sake, the African artist aims to please his public. This does not make all African artists crassly commercial, although that epithet can be justly applied to those who turn out knick-knacks for the tourist trade.
"AFRICAN ART BLACK MAGIC," ECONOMIST, DECEMBER 24, 1994

Throughout history, the evidence of objects has been central to the telling of cross-cultural encounters with distant worlds or remote Others. The materiality and physical presence of the object make it a uniquely persuasive witness to the existence of realities outside the compass of an individual's or a community's experience. The possession of an exotic object offers, too, an imagined access to a world of difference, often constituted as an enhancement of the new owner's knowledge, power, or wealth. Depending on the circumstances of their acquisition, such objects may evoke curiosity, awe, fear, admiration, contempt, or a combination of these responses. The exotic object may variously be labeled trophy or talisman, relic or specimen, rarity or trade sample, souvenir or kitsch, art or craft.

For the past century or so, the objects of cultural Others have been appropriated primarily into two of these categories: the artifact or ethnographic specimen and the work of art. They have, that is, been fitted into the scholarly domains defined in the late nineteenth century when anthropology and art history were formally established as academic disciplines. As a construction, however, this binary pair has almost always been unstable, for both classifications masked what had, by the late eighteenth century, become one of the most important features of objects: their operation as commodities circulating in the discursive space of an emergent capitalist economy. Although the growth of a consumer commodity culture in Europe and North America has undoubtedly been one of the most important organizing forces of social and economic life during the past two centuries, there has been a surprising silence about processes of commoditization in standard art histories and ethnographies.1 Scholars whose theories privileged this new reality?from Marx to Veblen, Baudrillard, and Bourdieu?were, until quite recently, marginalized within orthodox art history and anthropology.

The inscription of Western modes of commodity production has been one of the most important aspects of the global extension of Western colonial power. Moreover, the role of this process in transforming indigenous constructions of the object has intensified rather than diminished in many parts of the world since the formal demise of colonial rule. This volume explores instances of this inscription, together with other equally significant processes of mediation and negotiation engaged in by the inhabitants of colonial and postcolonial worlds. In every case, important consequences have flowed from innovations in the design, production, and marketing of objects, not only to those who consumed them but also to those who produced them. The makers of objects have frequently manipulated commodity production in order to serve economic needs as well as new demands for self-representation and self-identification made urgent by the establishment of colonial hegemonies.

The studies in this book range broadly both geographically and historically. The comparative perspective they offer reveals repeating patterns of imperialist encounter and capitalist exchange, as well as specific cultural and historical factors that give local productions their unique forms. Although the objects under discussion originated in such diverse times and places as mandarin China circa 1850, the American Plains circa 1880, and Kenya circa 1994, they are all equally difficult to contain within the binary schema of art and artifact. In some instances, where the fact of commoditization could be hidden, the objects have been accorded a place in one or the other category. In others, where their commoditized nature has been all too evident, they have most often fallen into the ontological abyss of the inauthentic, the fake, or the crassly commercial. A particularly dense aura of inauthenticity surrounds objects produced for the souvenir and tourist trades because they are most obviously located at the intersection of the discourses of art, artifact, and commodity. Many of the essays in this collection focus on "tourist arts" and offer particularly concentrated examples of the clash and resolution of culturally different ideas about the nature of authenticity.

Unpacking Culture is, in many ways, a successor to the groundbreaking anthology edited two decades ago by Nelson H. H. Graburn, Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World (1976). That volume was the first major publication to pay serious scholarly attention to the art commodities of marginalized and colonized peoples and to recognize their importance in the touristic production of ethnicity. In his introduction Graburn established a model that set the terms for the discussion of these arts. For the present volume, Graburn has provided a concluding essay, which discusses trends in the study of tourist art during the intervening years and therelationship of the individual essays in this volume to the current field of study.

Scholars today also build on recent discussions of primitivism and of the representation of non-Western arts, subjects that have achieved a new prominence in postcolonial art history and anthropology. For example, Arthur Danto et al. (1988), Sally Price (1989), Marianna Torgovnick (1990), Susan Hiller (1991), Thomas McEvilley (1992), Michael Hall and Eugene Metcalf (1994), Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (1995), George Marcus and Fred Myers (1995), and Deborah Root (1996) have investigated the appropriation of non-Western artists into Western aesthetic discourses. Graburn (1976a, 1984), Bennetta Jules-Rosette (1984), and more recently James Clifford (1985, 1988, 1997), Suzanne Blier (1989), Sidney Kasfir (1992), Shelly Errington (1994a), Barbara Babcock (1995), and Marta Weigle and Barbara Babcock (1996) have examined the circulation of objects among categories of scientific specimen, art, souvenir, and others. Arjun Appadurai (1986b) and Igor Kopytoff (1986) examine anthropological conceptualizations of commoditized exchange, and Nicholas Thomas (1991) and Ruth Phillips (1998) scrutinize specific historical negotiations of commoditization and art in the western Pacific and northeastern North America, respectively. Steiner's study of the contemporary West African art market (1994) focuses most closely on the mediation of knowledge that accompanies twentieth-century manifestations of art and artifact commerce, a complex network of cultural transactions similar to those addressed by many of the essays in this book.

Much of the literature on the reception of non-Western arts takes the dualistic art/artifact distinction as a given and focuses on its ambiguities and inadequacies. Confining the problem within these parameters, however, puts us in danger of validating the very terms that require deconstruction (see Faris 1988). Similar difficulties were articulated in the 1980s by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (1981) in relation to the feminist revision of...