Abstract
Falling under the curious, wooden gaze of the turn-of-the-century Yoruban sculpture strategically displayed in the front lobby of Berlin’s Ethnological Museum several years ago produces a rather uncanny sensation for the museum’s visitors. After all, museums are generally thought of as places for people to look at objects rather than for objects to look at, and appear to take notes on, people. Peering curiously from its glass display cabinet at the slightly self-conscious passerby, the sculpture, labeled Writing European (Figure 1), represents a moment at which the European observer has been observed; the ethnographer rendered ethnographically interesting. While mirroring the inquisitive looking enacted by the typical museum-goer – a kind of ethnographic observer, twice removed – this effigy of the ethnographer simultaneously encourages us to reflect on the practices of observing, writing, and collecting that shaped the nineteenth-century ethnological museum, the objects that entered its walls, and the discipline they helped to authorize. As you approach the cabinet, in order to gain a closer view, it occurs to you that you look not into a mirror but rather into a “split screen of the self and its doubling”: your reflection in the glass and the sculpture that returns your gaze.1
Was it a badge – an ornament – a charm – a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling in this black neck of the woods, this bit of white writing from beyond the seas. The Location of Culture, 113
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Notes
Bhabha’s reference to a “split screen” troubles the image of an ideal wholeness that Jacques Lacan associates with the mirror stage, the level of psychic development at which one begins to form a sense of coherent identity. For Lacan, all egos are fundamentally divided and thereby register the disjunction between one’s bodily sense of self and the ideal image (Ideal-I) with which one attempts to identify. For Bhabha, even this ideal image appears fractured in colonial contexts that discriminate between colonial and idealized imperial subjects during the process of ego formation. See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” 1949, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2006), 71–81.
Adolf Bastian, “Nachwort,” Original-Mittheilungen aus der Ethnologischen Abtheilung der Königlichen Museen zu Berlin 2/3 (Berlin: Verlag von W. Spemann, 1886), 166.
See Adolf Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte: zur Begründung einer psychologischen Weltanschauung (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1860).
Adolf Bastian, Die Vorgeschichte der Ethnologie (Berlin: Dümmler, 1881), 63. I have decided to translate this famous line literally, rather than figuratively, in order to accent the distinctive flavor of Bastian’s prose.
See Bastian, “Nachwort,” 166 and Edward Burnett Tylor, “Mythology” in Anthropological Institute and British Association for the Advancement of Science, Notes and Queries on Anthropology for the Use of Travellers and Residents in Uncivilized Lands, ed. Augustus Henry Lane Fox (Pitt Rivers) (London: Edward Stanford, 1874), 62.
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 4.
Fabian, in turn, borrows these phrases from Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1845), 2.
According to Pitt Rivers, “All the implements of primaeval man that were of decomposable materials have disappeared, and can be replaced only in imagination by studying those of his nearest congener, the modern savage.” Augustus Henry Lane Fox (Pitt Rivers), The Evolution of Culture, and Other Essays, ed. John Linton Myres (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 4. Bastian adopts a similar position in several contemporary texts, basing this method on the common “level of development” of both prehistoric and contemporary societies that supposedly preceded historical consideration: “Knowledge of the oldest conditions of humanity or of individual peoples cannot be obtained by the usual historical ways, since the history of a people first begins after they have reached a certain degree of organization.. If we ever obtain reliable knowledge of the primitive ancestral homes, … it can only be gained with the help of comparative ethnography.” See Adolf Bastian, Ethnologische Forschungen und Sammlung von Material für dieselben (Jena: Hermann Costenoble, 1871), xlviii. Bastian’s “comparative method,” influential for Tylor, involved gathering cultural forms from different small-scale societies in order to determine their common and presumably elementary or base forms. See, for example, Adolf Bastian, “Allgemeine Begriffe der Ethnologie," Anleitung zu wissenschaftlichen Beobachtungen auf Reisen, ed. Georg Balthasar von Neumayer (Berlin: Robert Oppenheim, 1875), 526. Given comparative ethnography’s emphasis on development, these earlier approaches as realized in practice generally did not result in the kind of relativity that Christopher Herbert associates with works like James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. See Christopher Herbert, Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Bastian describes the ethnographic object as “the sensually-perceivable manifestation of creations of the spirit, the embodiment of the idea in the products of art and industry.” See Adolf Bastian, ed., Museum Führer, Königliche Museen: Ethnographische Sammlung (Berlin, 1872). When describing the selection of objects in his collection, Pitt Rivers adopts a similar view: “[O]rdinary and typical specimens, rather than rare objects, have been selected and arranged in sequence, so as to trace, as far as practicable, the succession of ideas by which the minds of men in a primitive condition of culture have progressed from the simple to the complex, and from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous” (Evolution of Culture, 2).
According to Pitt Rivers: “[E]ach particular word bears the impress of human design as clearly as a weapon or a coin. A word may be said to be a tool for the communication of thought, just as a weapon is an implement of war.. Words. are the outward signs of ideas in the mind, and this is also the case with tools or weapons” (Evolution of Culture, 25). According to this functionalist scheme, the unadorned implement represented an originary stage of the arts. Bastian also stressed the collection of tools and implements, among other everyday objects that ethnology studied: “What could not be said in distinct words due to lack of writing and that lay symbolically expressed in tools and instruments and perhaps - if the evidence someday joins together in series requisite for statistical views - in the collections of ethnological museums, may divulge many a psychological secret.” See Adolf Bastian, “Ueber Ethnologische Sammlungen,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 17 (Berlin: 1885), 41.
Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Critical Theory Since 1965, eds Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986), 88.
George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987).
Johannes Fabian, Out of our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 206.
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 22.
I am certainly not the first to make this more general claim about anthropology’s methodological legacy. See, for example, George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology and “The Ethnographer’s Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski,” Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, ed. George W. Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 70–120;
James Urry, “Notes and Queries on Anthropology and the development of field methods in British Anthropology, 1870–1920,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Trübner and Co., 1973), 45–57.
Out of Our Minds, 10. For example, papers with titles like “Painting and Drawing taught by Natural Forms” were submitted to the Institute within the next few years. “Council Minutes,” 25 January 1876, A10:1: 224. Notes and Queries, moreover, influenced later guides to observation and collection published by Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde (now known as the Ethnologisches Museum). Similarly, the British Admiralty’s Manual for Scientific Enquiry (1849) was used in both England and Germany before the appearance of Georg Balthasar von Neumayer’s comparable Anleitung zu Wissenschaftlichen Beobachtung auf Reisen in 1875. See Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, A Manual of Scientific Enquiry: Prepared for the Use of Her Majesty’s Navy; and Adapted for Travellers in General, ed. John F. W. Herschel (London: John Murray, 1849).
Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 54. The first edition of Notes and Queries in 1874 was comprised of two main sections that roughly coincide with present-day divisions between biological and cultural anthropology: “The Constitution of Man,” renamed in the 1892 edition as “Anthropography,” and “Culture,” renamed in 1892 as “Ethnography.” Distinct from current uses of the term, which refer mainly to the participant-observer methods developed in the early twentieth century, ethnography was defined in the 1892 and 1899 guides as a branch of anthropology dealing with the social and intellectual aspects of human beings rather than the structural and functional ones. The desire to study human differentiation as an interrelated biological and cultural phenomenon also characterized foundational works like James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man (London: W. Phillips, 1813) and Edward Burnett Tylor, Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1881).
Augustus Henry Lane Fox (Pitt Rivers), “Report on the Anthropological Notes and Queries for the Use of Travellers Published by the Committee,” Report of the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London: J. Murray, 1875), 217.
Time and the Other, 85. Embedded quotation from Emile Benveniste, Problems of General Linguistics (1956; Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 198.
Augustus Henry Land Fox (Pitt Rivers), “Preface,” Notes and Queries on Anthropology 1874, iv.
Augustus Wollaston Franks, “Clothing,” Notes and Queries on Anthropology 1874, 100.
Augustus Henry Lane Fox (Pitt Rivers), “Natural Forms,” Notes and Queries on Anthropology 1874, 136.
Augustus Henry Lane Fox (Pitt Rivers), “Ornamentation,” Notes and Queries on Anthropology 1874, 136.
As Christopher Herbert observes, “Culture per se is not empirically observable, … but fieldwork anchored in the hypothesis of culture [“as a complex whole”] can amass large enough quantities of detailed ethnographic data and can deploy about this data enough rhetoric of strict scientific procedure to screen its underlying conceptual problems from view.” Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 150.
Harry H. Johnston, “Hints on Anthropology,” Hints to Travellers, 6th edn, eds Douglas W. Freshfield and Captain W. J. L. Wharton (London: Royal Geographical Society, 1889), 398.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966; New York: Random House, 1994), 282.
Charles Hercules Read, “Prefatory Note,” Notes and Queries on Anthropology 1892, 87.
Alfred Cort Haddon, “Taking Pictures,” Notes and Queries on Anthropology, 3rd edn, eds John George Garson and Charles Hercules Read (London: Anthropological Institute, 1899), 238.
See especially James Clifford’s Predicament of Culture and Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
As Achebe famously argues, Conrad’s Africa is “devoid of all recognizable humanity” and “reduc[ed] … to the role of props.” See Chinua Achebe, “An image of Africa,” Research in African Literatures 9, no. 1 (1978): 9.
As Geoffrey Galt Harpham has argued, the grotesque emerges precisely at the moment when metonyms transform into metaphors. See Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 71.
Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 155.
Ivan Kreilkamp, “A Voice without a Body: The Phonographic Logic of Heart of Darkness,” Victorian Studies 40, no. 2 (1997): 227–8.
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 63, fn. 8. As de Man suggests, “Tropes are transformational systems rather than grids” (Allegories of Reading, 63).
Indeed, Conrad’s contemporary reviewer H. L. Mencken famously identified him as skeptic. See Henry Louis Mencken, “Joseph Conrad,” A Book of Prefaces (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1917), 20.
William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (1985): 14.
These are some of the goods mentioned by Robert W. Harms in River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500–1891 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 40.
Herbert S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Felix von Luschan, Instruktion für ethnographische Beobachtungen und Sammlungen in Deutsch-Ostafrika (Berlin: E. S. Mittler und Sohn, 1896), 21.
Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom, vol. 2, 1871, 2nd American edn (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1877), 143.
William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 13 (1987): 37.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend (Burlington: Chauncey Goodrich, 1831), 454.
David Simpson comments extensively on the connection between ivory, bones, and death in the novella. See David Simpson, Fetishism and Imagination: Dickens, Melville, Conrad (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
John Hollingshead, “Fetishes at Home,” Household Words 17, no. 422 (1858): 445–7.
William Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx,” eds Emily Apter and William Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 119–51.
Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 56.
Herbert M. Cole and Chike C. Aniakor, Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos (Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, 1984), 24.
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© 2012 Deborah Shapple Spillman
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Spillman, D.S. (2012). Taking Objects for Origins: Victorian Ethnography and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . In: British Colonial Realism in Africa. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378018_2
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