Читать книгу The Filipino Primitive - Sarita Echavez See - Страница 9
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Progress through the Museum
Knowledge Nullius and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History
The giant canoe stands still. The small child is shy. She approaches the canoe. Carved by Jim Pashegoba (Ojibwe) in the 1890s, the dugout canoe is landlocked on the floor of the anthropology gallery in the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History (UMMNH). Located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the museum is visited by about eighty thousand people every year, including twenty thousand schoolchildren.1 Pashegoba’s canoe stretches across the length of the museum’s anthropology gallery and divides the Native American display cases along one side of the room from the Philippine display cases along the other side. Nothing stops the child from walking up to the canoe. There is no glass partition. No rope-off stands. She knows she is not supposed to touch anything here. She knows she is not supposed to run or shout. This is a museum. But her arm cannot help stretching forth. Her fingers point at the boat that in turn points itself forward. The grownup standing beside her reads aloud from the sign posted high above her head: “Please sit carefully in the dugout canoe. Have fun!” The grownup nods, and the child clambers into the canoe. She runs her fingers wonderingly across the wood.
Figure 1.1. Dugout canoe carved by Jim Pashegoba (Ojibwe). University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.
Touch. Do Not Touch. Desire and prohibition. These are the two drives that confront and divide the school-age children who are the typical visitors along with their families to educational museums today like the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History. The first drive consists of a desire to touch what they see. The second drive consists of a prohibition against that desire. Children repeatedly are schooled in the lesson of not touching and of successfully suppressing their desires, especially in institutional spaces. But on the UMMNH’s fourth floor, in the anthropology room, Pashegoba’s dugout canoe provides children with a rare release from that prohibition. During my several visits to the museum, I have witnessed the sheer joy of children clambering into the deep canoe, momentarily freed from the rules and etiquette that typically govern the display of things, animals, and people in the natural history museum. The children’s delight stems from the absence of the glass screen that usually serves as partition, dividing them from objects in display cases.
Even as Pashegoba’s canoe offers to children a momentary freedom from the museum’s rules of exhibition, it embodies the museum’s crisis of representation about the politics of its collections and their display. Made over into a child’s plaything, the canoe becomes an example of how indigenous cultures or first nations are made to “last” for others, as Jean O’Brien has put it, an instance of what Gustavo Verdesio calls “epistemic violence.”2 The museum, moreover, provides little to no context—historical or otherwise—for the appearance of the Philippines in proximity with Native America. It has no narrative to account for the American conquest of the Philippines, let alone the university’s role in founding and administering the colony.3 The proximity between the Native and the Filipino is left entirely unexplained by the museum. But the spatial design of the exhibition speaks volumes. As it is experienced by the museum’s visitors, the canoe comes to mark the boundary and proximity between the Native and the Philippine and the Child. Sitting in the canoe, the child mediates between the Indian and the Filipino.4 If we understand the child as a kind of primitive within the family, as yet untutored in the mores of civilized behavior, she triangulates the primitives in the anthropology room. But if the child ever asked her grownup about the relationship between herself, the Ojibwe canoe, and the Visayan burial items, neither child nor grownup would receive help from the museum. The relationship between the museumgoer and the exhibitions that they have come to see and learn about is left unexplained. This lack of explanation indexes the museum’s larger crisis of representation about the politics of its collections, even as this lack also allows the racist and colonial ideology of the backward or disappeared primitive to occupy that space and thus become self-evident, a form of unquestioned common sense.
Figure 1.2. Sign posted in the anthropology room at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.
This chapter addresses the museum’s crisis of representation by addressing two questions: What is the nature of the relationship between these two instances of the racial primitive, the Native and the Filipino and, hence, between these two instances of primitive accumulation, the material, literal collecting of artifacts and the ideological collecting of knowledge? I propose that the university is an exemplary site for the investigation of the politics of knowledge production and that the literal and ideological foundations of knowledge production are most visible in the university’s museum. I focus on the collection and display of the Filipino in the university museum, and I take up this problematic of the proximity of the Filipino to the Native to show how these primitive proximities—and the distinct kinds of colonial and settler colonial structures of domination that they index—play a crucial role in facilitating how the university advances its commitment to knowledge. These kinds of primitive proximities are created by the university museum’s commitment to two processes of accumulation: the material and the epistemological. The material accumulation of the backward or disappeared primitive forms the epistemological foundation of Western knowledge production. In pedagogical spaces like the UMMNH’s anthropology exhibition, the collections of the “primitive” symbolize both the racial origins that (white European) Man has transcended and the ideological origins of the accumulative drive toward power/knowledge. In short, the literal accumulation of the primitive instantiates an accumulative epistemology, the endless and violent quest for accrued knowledge. As I elaborate toward the end of the chapter, the colonial fantasy of terra nullius—the creation of empty land by the genocidal emptying of land—is accompanied by what I call “knowledge nullius.” The university’s commitment to knowledge turns out to be rhetorical cover not only for the construction of accumulative epistemology as knowledge but also for the will to power.
Filipino Foundations
The contemporary display of Philippine things and peoples in the UMMNH serves as a powerful allegory and a “real” case of the primitive accumulation subtending imperial knowledge. The University of Michigan established its natural history and anthropology collections in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by sponsoring circumglobal zoological, archaeological, and ethnographic expeditions with a special focus on the Philippines. These collections formed the material and epistemological foundation of the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology as they emerged at Michigan’s flagship public university. According to Carla Sinopoli, the director of the Museum of Anthropology and the Museum Studies Program at the University of Michigan, there is “no denying that the anthropology museum and department are direct products of United States colonialism.”5 Three Michiganders are associated with these founding collections: the explorer Joseph Beale Steere (1842–1940), the anthropologist Carl Guthe (1893–1947), and the zoologist and colonial administrator Dean Conant Worcester (1866–1924). Their biographies provide us with the tale of how accumulation takes place.
A graduate of the University of Michigan’s law school, Joseph Beale Steere collected about sixty thousand specimens—botanical, zoological, and anthropological—during a circumglobal expedition that included the Philippines in the 1870s and then an expedition solely to the Philippines in the 1880s.6 These expeditions were sponsored by the University of Michigan, and they make up a significant part of the founding collection for the university’s natural history museum.7 In a 2012 lecture about Steere, the curator of the University of Michigan’s herbarium described the explorer as a “great old man, as it were, of the university museums.”8 Much of the museum’s rhetoric about Steere’s expedition follows a narrative of adventurous discovery and the accomplishment of firsts and foundations. Steere’s bronze bust stands in the entrance to the UMMNH, and the bust’s inscription and other informational posters about him note that Steere received the university’s first honorary doctorate and that his donation of over sixty-two thousand specimens “prompted U-M to build its first natural history museum in 1881.” Indeed, a display case about the museum building’s history informs us that the erection of the museum building was the “first for any public university in America.” The didactic—the museum label with historical, interpretive, and narratological material—about Steere adds that he collected “representatives of a multitude of plant and animal species and human cultural artifacts previously unknown to science” (emphasis added).9 Here we see the museum making an explicit connection between exploration, accumulation, discovery, and knowledge. Ironically, the proclamation constitutes a confession that what is being discovered is not so much the unknown non-Western world as the Western scientific way of knowing. Far from building knowledge about the Filipino, the accumulation of the Filipino enabled the American university to establish and legitimate its epistemology of science, or what Sylvia Wynter has called the “overrepresentation” of Man. The UMMNH founding collection exemplifies how, as Wynter phrases it, a “present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man … overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself” even as it also creates a “secular slot of Otherness as a replacement for the theocentric slot of Otherness.”10 Moreover, Steere’s achievement is not that the non-Western world becomes known to science, but rather that Western science no longer is “unknown to science.” Science can become known to itself. Science can discover itself, but only at the price of discounting non-Western epistemology and value systems.11
Figure 1.3. Bronze bust of Joseph Beal Steere by sculptor Carlton W. Angell, on display in the rotunda of the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.
One of Steere’s undergraduate students, Dean Conant Worcester would go on to establish himself as one of the few Philippine experts in the United States at the time, a reputation based on his publication of highly popular books about the Philippines.12 Worcester first traveled to the Philippines as a member of Steere’s second 1887 expedition, also sponsored by the University of Michigan. In the 1890s Worcester headed his own expedition to the Philippines, sponsored by the Minnesota Academy of Natural Sciences. Upon returning to the United States, he taught zoology at the University of Michigan and published a number of scholarly and popular books about the Philippines during the U.S. conquest. Worcester then transitioned to service as a colonial administrator in the Philippines with positions on the first and second Philippine Commissions and then, for over a decade starting in 1901, as secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which included governance over non-Christian tribes and peoples. After resigning from colonial governance, Worcester remained in the Philippines to pursue lucrative agribusiness interests, which included the development of large tracts of land he previously had acquired as secretary of the interior and investments in coconut products and cattle.
Worcester’s influence in the United States has lived on to the present moment because of the monumental size and controversial nature of his collection of photographs of the Philippines. Worcester was a zealous amateur photographer who also eventually turned to the movie camera. According to Mark Rice, during his years in the Philippines, Worcester took more than fifteen thousand photographs and more than two miles of film footage with the singular goal of authorizing and disseminating a particular “truth” about Philippine incapacity and the resulting need for a strong civilizing American presence.13 Nerissa Balce has argued that Worcester’s portraits of partially or entirely unclothed women in the Philippines established what she calls an “erotics of empire” that further reinforced the American perception of the Philippines as a fascinating and docile colony.14 Today the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology houses more than five thousand of Worcester’s original negatives and lantern slides, an archive that Rice calls “perhaps the largest collection of original negatives of officially sponsored colonial photography found in the United States.”15 Rice also points out that the distinctiveness of this archive lies in how much power was concentrated in and wielded by a single individual: “Despite the different photographers included, the collection of photographs that the archive represents was conceived, collected, and organized by Worcester.”16 A current-day special collections curator at the University of Michigan has said of Worcester’s pursuit of photography, “He was collecting. Forgive me for the metaphor but he was collecting humans.”17
Even as he transitioned from colonial administrator to businessman in the Philippines, Worcester continued to correspond with University of Michigan administrators. By the 1920s, several decades after Steere’s inaugural expeditions to the Philippines, Worcester had convinced the University of Michigan to sponsor a major archaeological expedition to the Philippines. By that time, the university had decided to create a separate anthropology museum, and it appointed the anthropologist Carl Guthe to direct the expedition. Guthe’s appointment shows how a network of midwestern academics became the basis for a network of colonial rule. Guthe had earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and his archaeology doctoral degree from Harvard. He had specialized in the archaeology of the Americas and had no expertise in Asian archaeology, but his name was “known to Worcester” because he also had attended the University of Michigan as an undergraduate.18 When Guthe arrived in the Philippines, Worcester loaned Guthe the use of his yacht. As manager of the Visayan Refining Company’s factory in Cebu, Worcester also created a “laboratory space” in the factory for Guthe’s use.19
Figure 1.4. Reconstructed burial cave with objects from a mortuary site in Bohol, Philippines, that Carl Guthe excavated in 1923–1924. University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.
With this support from Worcester and the university, Guthe oversaw the acquisition of thousands of objects from sites in the southern Philippines from 1922 to 1925. Guthe’s expedition yielded what became the founding collection of the Museum of Anthropology and what current-day scholars of the collection have called “arguably the most important collection of Philippine archaeological materials and Asian trade ceramics in the United States.”20 Carla Sinopoli also is the current-day curator of the Guthe collection, and she cites the collection’s size as the primary reason for its importance. The collection is “remarkable in the sheer number of sites explored” and “impressive in its breadth.”21 Sinopoli lists the data associated with Guthe’s fieldwork, and the numbers seem to speak for themselves. She notes that “materials from 485 sites were packed into 285 shipping crates” and sent to Ann Arbor; and “13,000 discrete objects [were] catalogued … under some 5300 catalog numbers.”22 Those objects included “3732 glass, shell, and stone beads … 76 iron implements, 83 shell bracelets … 8000 ceramic vessels … 500 skeletal elements [and] numerous human teeth.”23
Today, the university pays tribute to Guthe’s expedition with the display in the UMMNH’s anthropology room of the reconstruction of one of the burial caves that Guthe excavated. That is to say, this accumulated material is narratively spatialized in the museum’s Philippine exhibition. Any walking tour of any museum exhibition tells a story, and this exhibition tells a story of primitive accumulation. (I provide a more detailed tour, so to speak, of the exhibition later in the chapter.) Most of the objects in Guthe’s collection were offerings to the dead collected from mortuary sites. According to the accompanying didactic, the display includes “a range of materials common to mortuary sites throughout the Philippines” and “a page from one of Guthe’s field notebooks, dated February 1924.”24 But Guthe’s “period of gathering the material,” as he called it, also included the amassing of human remains.25 In a 1927 article about the expedition that he published in the journal American Anthropologist, which is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, Guthe wrote that “several old burial grounds were dug by the writer” and that his “tremendous collection of material” included ninety-five human skulls.26 All of this ceramic, shell, stone, metal, glass, textile, and skeletal material was packed into crates and shipped to Ann Arbor, where, upon his return to the United States, Guthe became the Museum of Anthropology’s first director. The university’s first attempt at anthropological knowledge was built upon a foundation, literally, of the dead, and, in undertaking the task of founding the university’s anthropology museum, Guthe configured himself as the author-cum-undertaker of knowledge.27 When it comes to the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan, the establishment of knowledge as an acquisitive and expansionist practice proceeds through the “dispossession by accumulation” of the exhumed Filipino. The university museum is a mass grave.28 The rational scientist—and not the savage Filipino—turns out to be the headhunter.
Guthe’s account of his fieldwork shows no self-conscious reflection about the routinization of the desecration of indigenous graves. Instead, Guthe was concerned about any damage to the sites that would hamper his collection and preservation of material for future research, and he literally and figuratively swept aside evidence of ongoing reverence for the dead. For example, he noted that, because flooding caused the “greatest destruction of evidence,” “repeatedly, masses of sherds, bones, and ornaments were found washed into a pocket, or into a depression in the floor, then partly covered with earth” (emphasis added).29 Guthe uses the passive voice here: the human remains and offerings are “then partly covered with earth.” Rendering invisible the grammatical subject of the sentence, Guthe’s elision leaves the indigenous or local people unmarked in a way that affirms their primitivism while it renders the American scientist unmarked in a way that affirms Guthe’s objectivity.
Guthe goes on to refer to “native shamans” and to blame them, along with animals and the weather, for the “havoc” he found at the sites: “Animals and native shamans added to the havoc created by the elements. Empty half shells of cocoanuts, remains of candles and palmleaf torches, and small offerings of money and ornaments gave ample evidence of the recent use of many caves.”30 Here Guthe documents evidence of what contemporary archaeologists have identified as ongoing indigenous traditions characterized by the open and collectivist nature of interment. Mortuary sites were used by “generations of native peoples to bury their dead.”31 The open-air graves and burial caves that Guthe excavated were “likely used and added to over multiple generations.”32 However, rather than honor or at least investigate the potentially sacred nature of these sites, Guthe relegated the presence of indigenous belief systems to the status of nature by cataloging indigenous shamans with animals and the climate, forces of nature that have no respect for or concept of preservation. Moreover, Guthe is implying that indigenous mortuary practices disrupt the study of those very same practices. Shaped by the idea of the Filipino as racial primitive, Guthe’s method is grounded in a fairly breathtaking series of logical fallacies that exemplify an American epistemology of primitive accumulation: Not only is the Filipino capable of being only the object and never the source of knowledge, Filipino practices hamper the study of those practices.
Guthe did note that “locals” expressed “fear” of the burial sites: “As a rule they stand in fear of the spirits of the dead, a fear which is occasionally strong enough to cause the abandonment of fertile farming land.”33 But he dismissed this evidence that the sites were sacrosanct by concluding that any pre-Christian traditions or beliefs had disappeared from memory: “The Filipinos have been under Christian influence for such a long period that all recollection of pre-Spanish inhumations has passed. They vaguely associate bones and vessels found in the course of plowing and excavating, with ancestors, but never in a personal sense.”34 Perceiving the primitive as outside time, Guthe feared that, “due to foreign influences, the data are gradually disappearing” and would “in a few years be entirely non-existent unless trained ethnologists do field work in this area.”35 He concluded that this “period of gathering the material” would yield “abundant opportunity” for future research, but during the expedition, “little more than keeping the field records in order could be accomplished.”36 This anxious rhetoric of loss and disappearance functions to justify the accumulative nature of the expedition.
What really was at stake for Guthe was the establishment of knowledge in the form of the museum and the academic department. Guthe stated that his research goal was “gathering additional data upon [sic] the commercial relations between the Filipinos and Asiatic civilizations.”37 But he imposed conditions on his agreement with the University of Michigan that make explicit the connection between primitive accumulation and the founding of American academic institutions like the museum, the department, and the journal. Guthe agreed to direct the expedition only if the University of Michigan promised to create an anthropology museum and an academic department of anthropology, promises that apparently “sustained Guthe throughout his fieldwork” and that were fulfilled upon his return to the United States.38 A decade later, in 1935, Guthe became one of the founders of the Society for American Archaeology and its flagship journal, American Antiquity.39 The Guthe collection exemplifies how the period of “gathering” material—again, what I am calling primitive accumulation—may announce itself in the language of research, but in fact functions to legitimate the founding of academic institutions. So while it is now commonplace to speak of discourse as constituting its objects, I instead am showing here how the discourse or the discipline literally has to accumulate its objects first, and then figure out how to order them discursively.
Moreover, the “establishment of the archive,” as Mark Rice puts it, instantiates an accumulative epistemology, an unceasing and foundationally violent quest for accrued knowledge that unceasingly disavows its foundational violence.40 The university’s Philippine archive exists as a result of a series of scientific conquests, so to speak, beginning with Steere’s 1870s expedition, that preceded the military conquest of the Philippines. In her work on the Smithsonian National Museum’s preservation and display of Native Americans as primitive and disappeared peoples, Jacqueline Fear-Segal argues that “these ‘memorials’ not only contributed to the sequence of the evolutionary narrative, but also to the creation of a system of knowledge that legitimated the national political structures on which the institution rested.”41 As I outlined in my introductory chapter, following Derrida’s reading of the Greek roots of the word “archive,” we see that the Guthe collection exemplifies how the archive stands for both commencement and commandment, the beginnings of the University of Michigan’s anthropology museum and department and the authorization of these institutional entities’ power to rule.
American academic institutions and scholars have shown little capacity for recognizing or reflecting upon the epistemological, political, or ethical ramifications of the process of establishing the archive. Any self-consciousness about the origins of the colonial archive is a fairly recent phenomenon. Historians and other scholars are “relative latecomers in questioning the objectivity of colonial archives,” as Mark Rice puts it.42 The Guthe collection proves no exception. As I already have noted, Guthe showed little capacity for self-reflection about his fieldwork methods and ethics, and this failure to interrogate the colonial origins of the archive continues to shape contemporary scholarship on the Guthe collection. For example, a 2013 special issue of the journal Asian Perspectives is devoted to the Guthe collection, including an introduction by Carla Sinopoli, who has been the curator of the Guthe collection since 1993. The issue’s goal was to “scrutinize old museum collections with new research questions.”43 Yet the colonial conditions that fundamentally shaped the establishment of the Guthe collection are, at best, briefly mentioned in passing. As I mentioned earlier in the chapter, on the first page of her introduction, Sinopoli writes that “like many early archaeological projects around the world, the history of the University of Michigan’s Philippine Expedition Collection is a part of the history of colonialism, specifically U.S. colonialism in the Philippines.”44 But this fundamental fact has no impact on the historical narrative or conceptual framework of the essay that follows. The only limitation to the Guthe collection that Sinopoli mentions has to do with how “cursory” Guthe’s agents’ fieldnotes were.45 Another scholar who studied the skeletal material in the Guthe collection admits that Guthe’s goal was the “recovery of exotic material” and that the “excavation techniques [Guthe] employed may not be entirely acceptable by today’s standards.”46 Again, this kind of brief reference to the highly problematic nature of Guthe’s methods and goals—not to mention the larger context of American colonialism—does not have any impact on the contemporary scholar’s research goals, methods, and findings.
In fact, both Guthe and the contemporary archaeologist come to the same tautological conclusion that the open and collectivist nature of indigenous burial practices constitutes an impediment to the study of those very practices. As I mentioned above, Guthe noted in the 1927 report that he published in American Anthropologist that “recent use” of the burial caves by “native shamans”—their open and collectivist burial practices—created “havoc” and interfered with his attempt to preserve and gather material for the future archive. Nearly ninety years later, in the aforementioned 2013 special issue of Asian Perspectives, two scholars agree with Guthe. One scholar notes that the “open nature of cave burials … poses a challenge for chronological control.”47 The other regretfully concludes, “The practice of collective burial often results in loss of information about the primary treatment of individual burials … as earlier remains are distributed by later burials and commemorative ritual acts.… As a result, it is not possible to ascribe particular goods to particular individuals.”48 For both Guthe and the contemporary archaeologist, the preservation of individual remains is crucial for their gathering and processing of information, and ongoing Filipino collectivist and open practices contribute to the scientists’ failure and the “loss of information.” Of course, one instead might think that the collectivist practices that Guthe inadvertently documents constitute the beginning of significant research findings. But neither “old” nor “new” research questions allow for deviation from the emphasis on the individual as the basis for accurate or complete preservation. Both old and new approaches to the burial material in the Guthe collection show how these scholars’ accumulative epistemology hampers rather than enables the acquisition of knowledge about the ostensible object of research. The object of American knowledge turns out to be not so much the Filipino as accumulation in and of itself. Sinopoli concludes that the contemporary scholarship affirms the “enduring value of old museum collections for shaping our understandings of ancient Southeast Asia.”49 With that conclusion, Sinopoli unwittingly underscores the epistemic conservation of power/knowledge that is part of the colonial project.
Both the “old” and the “new” research share an investment in the principle of preservation. At first glance the archaeologist’s goal of preservation is commendable: The scientist attempts to preserve everything before it all disappears. The act of preservation constitutes the scientist as a scientist and not a looter. Guthe was concerned about how forces of nature—including “native shamans”—were creating “chaos” at his chosen sites and disrupting the preservationist principle of his fieldwork. The contemporary archaeologist is concerned about time and the difficulty of establishing chronology. For both Guthe and the contemporary archaeologist, the implication is that local or indigenous peoples are incapable of appreciating what they have.
The scientist’s goal of material preservation turns out to be an alibi for accumulation, which in turn is a euphemism for looting and imperial adventure. Sinopoli explicitly if briefly refers to the history of “looting” in Southeast Asia in a very curious fashion. She argues that the Guthe collection is “remarkable … because it was made several decades before extensive looting of archaeological sites had become widespread across Southeast Asia.”50 Here, the curator at once confesses and denies that there is a fundamental problem with “looting.” On the one hand, Sinopoli acknowledges the massive problem of the “looting” of Southeast Asian archaeological sites. On the other hand, she does not seem able to grasp the possibility that archaeological fieldwork itself—and especially Guthe’s exhumation of mortuary sites that showed evidence of ongoing veneration by indigenous peoples—might be an act of looting. Accumulative epistemology shows itself and then conceals itself behind the alibi of archaeological discovery and preservation. In both Guthe’s and Sinopoli’s writings, the principle of preservation disguises what turns out to be an intersection between the idea of the racial primitive and accumulative epistemology.
Headhunters
Guthe and Sinopoli exemplify how an archaeologist writing in 1927 and a curator writing in 2013 can share a lack of awareness about the political and ethical ramifications of their research. What divides the civilized European from the “primitive” is this capacity or incapacity to produce self-reflective knowledge. The capacity for thought demarcates the boundary between the rational “heads” and the savage headhunters, and this division permeates the study of the social sciences and the arts in the West. In her capacious assessment of the rise of the social sciences in the West, Denise da Silva has argued that this racialized difference between mind and body must be understood as a spatialized organization of the human, rather than simply a question of biological racism, such that the world is mapped into zones occupied by what Silva calls the subject of transparency and the subject of affectability.51 David Lloyd focuses on the ramifications of this division in the arena of aesthetics, and he has distinguished between what he calls the “Subject without properties” and the racial, colonial subject.52
The UMMNH Philippine exhibit reinforces this boundary between the rational white American “head” and the Filipino headhunter, and visitors to the museum—children and adults—absorb and reiterate this difference. During one of my several visits to the Philippine exhibit, I was studying one of the display cases when a group of two men, one woman, and a child entered the gallery. Since it is a rather small space, I could not help overhearing their conversation. They probably were Michiganders visiting from out of town and apparently were white. Led by the boy’s curiosity, the group paused in front of a display case entitled “The Deadly Tools of a Warrior,” which includes several weapons from Mindanao and northern Luzon along with a “warrior’s necklace” made of boars’ teeth. The boy exclaimed, “Look at that cannibal necklace!” The adults murmured confusedly. Then the group shuffled along to the next gallery, with an exhibition entitled “Explore Evolution” that opened with placards explaining that humans and chimpanzees are “cousins in life’s family tree.” I do not think that anyone in the group had paused long enough to read the exhibit labels, which contain references to wartime practices of “headhunting.” For example, the “warrior’s necklace” is described as “worn by warriors in ceremonies that followed successful head-hunting raids,” while the label accompanying the display case’s main theme, “The Deadly Tools of a Warrior,” explains that “small groups of warriors” sometimes “took the heads of victims as trophies.”53 But they contain no reference to cannibalism.
Figure 1.5. Display cases E3–E8, Philippine exhibit at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.
Figure 1.6. “The Deadly Tools of a Warrior.” University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.
Figure 1.7. Detail of boars’ teeth necklace next to a photograph of Ibilao men. University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.
Nonetheless, the child visitor absorbed and voiced the message of cannibalism told by the exhibition’s juxtaposition of objects and images, which in turn affirm larger and pervasive myths of the savage cannibal. To child and adult visitor alike, the visual story unfolding before their eyes is that of nearly naked brown men wielding crude weapons and hunting other human beings for their flesh and teeth, the proof of which lies right in front of them. How so? The necklace is displayed at the bottom of the display case that reaches the lowest to the floor, and so it is perfectly positioned to capture the attention of shorter and presumably younger children. (In contrast, in each of the display cases, the text explaining the main theme is positioned at the eye-level height of a standing adult.) To the right of the boars’ teeth necklace is a photograph of Ibilao men with shields and spears; the accompanying caption explains, “Warfare was a part of most men’s lives.” An actual spear, shield, ax, and kris are displayed above the necklace, looming above the child’s head. To the left of the boars’ teeth necklace, in the adjacent display case labeled “The Body Adorned,” is a black box containing eight human teeth nestled in white padding.54 Along with photographs of a tattooed man and a grinning man showing decorated teeth, the eight teeth provide material evidence of the practice of cosmetic bodily ornamentation. There is, once again, no reference to cannibalism. But the juxtaposition of these images and objects conveys to the visitor a message about cannibalism, the most barbaric and depraved practice of all. The teeth pivot between victim and predator. On the one hand, the teeth easily can be interpreted as the leftover souvenirs from the victim of a flesh-eating manhunt. On the other hand, in the photograph of the man with a toothsome smile, the bared teeth easily can be taken as a sign of aggression.
Figure 1.8. Floor plan of the fourth floor of the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Image courtesy of John Klausmeyer.
This message of cannibalism is reinforced by the anthropology gallery’s architectural and lighting design. Primitivism is built into the very architecture of the museum’s fourth floor. The curved shape of the gallery—calling to mind a kidney or a digestive tract—marks it off from the rectilinearity of the previous rooms. Its brown wood fixtures and furnishings contribute to a basic theme of roundness and brownness, which together evoke a sense of the organic and the seamless and thus reinforce the idea of the primitive. Only the apertures of the exhibit cases are rectilinear and white, thus declaring that this is the way to see into the display and to make sense of the people and objects on exhibit. In other words, this is how the museum’s accumulation of the primitive works to create Western power/knowledge. A hodgepodge of objects greets the eye: a large ceramic urn, human teeth, spears, bracelets, and burial items. Alongside late nineteenth-century photographs of gun-toting University of Michigan faculty and students conducting zoological research in the Philippines, these artifacts narrate the daily life of the eternal primitive. These artifacts are visually accessible behind “transparent but impregnable partitions.”55 As I noted earlier, the visiting schoolchildren know that they are not allowed to touch. They get the message: Look but don’t touch. Indeed, the act of “seeing into” the display enables the replacement of the tactile by the visual. This substitution is reinforced by the way that some of the glass partitions cant forward—rather than stand vertical—thereby inviting the viewer to lean forward and almost touch these things from another world. (By contrast, some of the informational posters cant backward, indicating that they are designed for the taller, standing—and presumably adult—museum visitor.)
But even before visitors reach the Philippine exhibit, the museum has prepared them for the sight of savages. The UMMNH is a gray, four-story building, and the Philippine exhibit is tucked away in a corner of the top floor. Visitors enter the building on the ground floor and find themselves in a quite elegant if miniaturized rotunda. The miniaturized grandiosity of the rotunda echoes the architecture of national monuments, and this aura of monumentality is accentuated by the installation of the busts of six white men, including Steere’s, associated with the founding of the museum or its collections. Climbing up the staircase from the ground floor, visitors glimpse the very big and very small fossils inhabiting the Hall of Evolution on the second floor, and then the feathery and leathery skins of “Michigan wildlife” suspended behind glass on the third floor. A display case devoted to extinct or endangered animals stands on the landing between the third and fourth floors. The stretched, parched skins of various non-extant creatures thus form the prelude to the fourth floor, which used to display a series of fourteen Native American dioramas, including one devoted to Pocahontas. (I discuss the controversy surrounding the dioramas and their subsequent removal toward the end of the chapter.) Before the dioramas were moved into storage, visitors climbing up to the fourth floor moved from a display case about extinct animals to a series of Native American dioramas to the glittering rocks and minerals in the geology room before finally arriving at the Philippine exhibit in a corner of the anthropology room. The logics of extinction and petrification are thoroughly enmeshed with that of primitivism. In ways reminiscent of the spatiality of the 1904 World’s Fair, Filipinos are demarcated from the indigenous peoples of the Americas, yet primitiveness flows through the entire floor.
Figure 1.9. Display case exhibiting extinct and endangered animals. University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.
But who are the real primitives? Who are the real headhunters? As it turns out, the white American scientist is the real headhunter. As I discussed earlier, Carl Guthe exhumed burial grounds in the Philippines and collected, packed up, and transported human skeletal material back to the United States as part of the founding of the university’s anthropology collection. This foundational act of headhunting is indicated by the six busts displayed in the museum’s rotunda. While the busts of these six white American men are meant to represent intellectual and epistemological achievement, I argue that they also are a sign of American academia’s dependence on primitive accumulation. These six heads depend on the collection of Filipino skulls in order to tell a powerful story of invidious difference between bodies that can think and bodies that cannot think.
The UMMNH also primes its visitors with what Mieke Bal calls “museumtalk” about its collections and collecting.56 “Museumtalk” refers to the self-referential, museological messages that the museum, especially the large museum, conveys to its visitors. By paying attention to the “discourse of museum discourse,” in Bal’s phrase, we can learn about how the museum defines the purpose and goal of its collections and justifies the act of collecting, meta-messages that contribute to a larger discourse and common sense about accumulation.57 For example, during the 2009–2010 academic year, the University of Michigan’s twelve museums coordinated a range of programming open to the public that celebrated collections and collecting as part of its theme that year, “Meaningful Objects: Museums in the Academy.”58 Banners that advertised the UMMNH’s exhibition Collecting for Science: Collections, Science, and Scholarship flapped atop flagpoles all around campus.59 The exhibition highlighted collections research at the museums of anthropology, zoology, and paleontology, and at the herbarium. In its promotional material, the UMMNH justified and celebrated collections and collecting as a source of scientific reliability with museological claims like the following: “Museum specimens substantiate collecting events and provide a basis for scientific research.”60 The 2009–2010 exhibition echoed the permanent didactics on the UMMNH ground-floor rotunda that introduce visitors to the different collections—again, by anthropology, zoology, paleontology, and the herbarium—with pronouncements like the following: “Modern collecting is responsible collecting,” “Museums are MORE than just storage facilities,” “The U-M Museums contain vast amounts of information,” “Museum collections document changes,” and “The collections support research.”
These kinds of claim exemplify what I have been calling the accumulative epistemology that subtends the colonial project, not only in terms of the past (for example, Guthe’s foundational expedition to the Philippines), but also in terms of the representation of “specimens” in the museum today. In the case of the Philippines, the accumulated objects serve to “substantiate”—both materially and ideologically—the “collecting events” and “scientific research.” Seen through the lens of primitive accumulation, “foreign” objects are transported to and domesticated as evidence of racialized primitivity. And this is all for the educational benefit of children, who themselves are configured as another kind of primitive who must undergo a process of learning and transformation from an ignorant, uncivilized subject into a knowing, civilized subject who understands how to behave—do not touch! do not run! do not shout!—in a museum. Progress through the museum—literally walking through the exhibitions—is part of the museum’s museological and pedagogical meta-discourse about taming the child.
Knowledge Nullius and the Pivotal, Flexible Filipino
How might we consider the white American academic’s act of headhunting as a corollary to the settler colonial fantasy of terra nullius, empty land by way of emptied land? I propose that the relationship between the American headhunter and the Filipino skull should be understood as part of a broader phenomenon that we might call “knowledge nullius,” which precedes and accompanies the logic of terra nullius. That is to say, the development of an accumulative epistemology depends on the precept of knowledge nullius. The investigation of the phenomenon of “accumulating the primitive” requires grappling with what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls an epistemological “possessiveness” on the part of the white settler.61 In her work on “White possession” and its circulation as a “regime of truth” in the Australian context of Aboriginal studies, Moreton-Robinson implies that the precept of terra nullius works hand in hand with the precept of “knowledge nullius.” According to Moreton-Robinson, the “White fantasy of terra nullius and the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty are fundamental to the narration of Australian identity and nation-building.”62 Moreton-Robinson further argues, “Whiteness operates through the racialized application of disciplinary knowledges and regulatory mechanisms, which function together to preclude recognition of Indigenous sovereignty or Indigenous knowledge.”63 These presuppositions about vacancy subtend the materiality and territoriality of settler colonial expansion—vacancy serves as a euphemism for evacuation—and they are intimately intertwined with the epistemological. While the study of settler colonialism has focused on the settler’s myth of terra nullius, we also need to examine knowledge nullius, and what Lorenzo Veracini has called the “idea that indigenous knowledge is ultimately unowned.”64 Note that there are two notions of “unownership” in play here that are connected but distinct: being unowned, which amounts to collective ownership, and being “not knowledge,” or empty of knowing. Knowledge does not count as such until it is individuated and appropriated.
When it comes to knowledge nullius and the Philippines, the Philippine material collected by the University of Michigan served as a foundational “first” that subsequently lost its value and, for the most part, has been forgotten.65 As I discussed earlier, Guthe’s account of his fieldwork shows the workings of American knowledge nullius because the American anthropologist configured native shamans not as sources or bearers of local knowledge but rather as obstacles to the scientific preservation of knowledge. The University of Michigan’s herbarium provides another important example. The vast majority of the plant specimens from Steere’s foundational collection from the 1870s and 1880s were ferns, and a huge percentage of those were from the Philippines. Today, the University of Michigan’s herbarium owns a total of 1.7 million specimens, with several tens of thousands of specimens from the Philippines scattered throughout the collection. However, according to the herbarium’s current-day curator, only a tiny fraction of the Philippine collection actually is databased, and most is not easily accessible. The herbarium prioritizes what it calls its “New World” collection, and, massive as the Philippine collection is, it is classified as part of the less important “Old World” collection. The herbarium’s curator has admitted, “While we do plan to database all of our holdings including everything from the Old World, no plans are set yet for the Old World material, except for types.”66
What is the purpose or value of this act of accumulation? What motivates the university to preserve a collection that it implicitly acknowledges is, at best, increasingly irrelevant? There are several ways to answer these questions, but I would argue that this archive is an expression of the way capitalism is innately colonial. As Steere’s Philippine fern collection exemplifies, the university’s archive and colonial capitalism, grounded as both are in the act of accumulating specimens from “primitive economies” around the world, transform the habit of “primitive accumulation” into power/knowledge. Note, however, how the professor’s habit of “primitive accumulation” constitutes the obverse of the capitalist ethic of abstention. This time, the “great old” professor’s act of collection, as opposed to the capitalist’s act of abstention, is made to be virtuous. For the sake of knowledge—knowledge for knowledge’s sake!—Steere heroically traveled and combed the world.
But there is something distinct about how knowledge nullius works when it comes to the display of the Filipino in the United States. As a number of scholars have shown, the visual display of the Filipino in the U.S. context historically is entangled with war and conquest, especially the Philippine-American War.67 Oscar Campomanes has analyzed the work of “invisibilization” and amnesia achieved by the Filipino in American imperial culture.68 Nerissa Balce importantly extends these insights when she points out that the visibility of the Filipino depends on disappearing the conditions for the emergence of that visibility.69 Building upon earlier scholarship on U.S.-Philippines relations and visual culture like Benito Vergara’s book Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th Century Philippines (1995) and Laura Wexler’s book Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (2000), Balce has traced a transmedia history of the technology of surveillance in her 2016 book Body Parts of Empire: Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive. Balce brings to bear her twinned interest in the literary and the visual, and she shows that the concept of American surveillance emerges in novels of romantic colonial encounter set in the Philippines. Moreover, in the chapters that deal with American imperial photography in the Philippines, she argues that the science of the natural world was transformed into the science of militarized surveillance. These photographs then took on another life as they circulated in popular publications. Balce analyzes a range of the “objects left behind” as America transformed itself into a world power during and after its first transoceanic war, the Philippine-American War.70 She convincingly argues that the significance of this “shadow archive” of popular culture lies in its ability to hide the Filipino in plain sight.71
For example, five years after the publication of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippines,” about twenty million people visited the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis, Missouri. With more than a thousand live Filipinos on display, the Philippine exhibit was the fair’s most popular attraction. But the spectacular nature of this imperial spectacle occluded the fact that in 1904 guerrilla warfare against the Americans was still ongoing in the Philippine countryside, even though the United States had declared the Philippine-American War officially over in 1902.72 The visual display of Filipinos temporally as well as ideologically coincided with the military conquest of the Philippines, a brutal and brutally forgotten war that scholars recently have described as genocidal according to even the most conservative definitions of genocide.73 Filipinos are subject to what could be called a primitivizing Orientalism that is specific to the conquest, colonization, and stereotyping of Filipinos.74 Whereas East Asians, particularly Chinese and Japanese, tend to be stereotyped in the United States as perpetually alien and inassimilable because they have too much culture, Filipinos do not have enough culture. Rather, Filipinos are associated with excess embodiment, which can be traced to phenomena such as the display of live Filipinos in a World’s Fair over a century ago and the display of a university’s collection today. Thus, the idea that empire is tightly bound up with vision holds true for Filipinos arguably more so than for any other colonized subjects of the United States. Furthermore, the highly visible representation of the Filipino in popular cultural forms in the early decades of the twentieth century enables the erasure of the circumstances of the Filipino’s visibility.
This phenomenon plays out in today’s American museum, wherein the display of the Filipino coincides with the disappearance of the conditions and context for that visibility. When it comes to the Philippine exhibition at the UMMNH, the founding of anthropology requires forgetting both a genocidal war and the role that anthropology as a discipline played in establishing the conditions of possibility—the racial primitivity assigned to the Filipino—for that war. The visibility of the body coincides with and enacts the forgetting of its history: This process of radical dehistoricization is the form of knowledge nullius specific to the Filipino. Filipino skulls facilitate the production of knowledge by American heads.
Drawing on Jodi Byrd’s notion of how indigenous peoples provide a “transit” or conduit for Western epistemology as the objects—but never the makers—of knowledge, I am arguing that Filipinos in the American museum similarly serve as objects but never creators of knowledge.75 I would add that Filipino proximity to Native American presence in the American museum should be understood as fulfilling an important function of another kind of “transit.” Very broadly speaking, the conquest and colonization of the Philippines and Native American nations are both structured by benevolent assimilation, the rhetoric of friendship, and tutelage. Both are considered ahistorical and primitive. But I do not intend to make any easy comparison between the Philippine and the Native. As I discussed in the introduction, there is an important difference between the status of “foreign in a domestic sense” achieved by some colonies or territories like the Philippines and that of “domestic dependent nations” in the case of Native American nations. The former achieved a form of independence (although the neocolonial is embedded in the colonial), while the latter were consigned to “some sort of ‘lasting’ for others,” as Lorenzo Veracini puts it.76 I agree with Veracini and others that these are distinct if resonant modes of colonial subjugation.
Yet the real point of comparison and connection is between two genocides that have to be erased from memory and history. When the museum does not account for the physical proximity between the Filipino and the Native by explaining their historical proximity, genocide is erased. The violence of accumulation is erased, a disavowal that, as I argued earlier, inheres in the disciplines that the museum founds. The too quick dismissal of the opportunity for comparison between colonialism and settler colonialism in the Philippine case also runs the risk of disappearing the crucial role that the Philippines plays. The American colonization of the Philippines provides us with a historical and paradigmatic example of the interconnectedness between settler and military colonialisms at the turn of the last century. The Philippines was and is a pivotally ambiguous formation that performs that crucial work of interconnection.77 The Filipino was and is pivotally proximate—in time and space—to the Native. The Philippine is pivotally proximate to the Native because the genocidal war of conquest requires the notion of the primitive for its legitimacy. Moreover, the Philippines is the pivotally ambiguous formation that marks the transition between settler colonialism in the United States, typified by the Indian wars of conquest and genocide, and a transoceanic imperialism that initially deployed the genocidal logic of the Indian wars even if in the end it substituted military occupation for settlement. By attending to the event that produced the Filipino as America’s “little brown brother,” we learn much about the supple structure of colonialism(s), both its material and epistemological dimensions. The Filipino is flexible, and colonialism is supple.
The Freedom to Accumulate and the Museum’s Crisis of Representation
Like colonialism, the university museum is supple. It responds to changing epistemological shifts and has a flexible capital of holdings to enable it to do so. The UMMNH has an explicit commitment to material accumulation as the foundation for epistemological accumulation, which requires what Rosa Luxemburg calls an “unlimited freedom of movement,” a freedom that both enables and justifies the acquisition of the Filipino by the American.78 The university’s freedom of movement requires and results in the dispossession of the colonized subject, who then becomes an enclosed, ocular object of display—in other words, dispossession by accumulation.
But my main point here is that, in the case of the university museum, the expansive freedom to accumulate is admired and promoted because the university is associated with the expansion of knowledge, an endeavor that is taken to be a good in and of itself. The accumulative practices of the university museum are ideologically self-sustaining in ways that parallel Luxemburg’s argument about militarism as a “province of accumulation.”79 The military generally does not have to justify its existence and its reproduction, accumulation, or expansion of capital because it is associated with self-defense and patriotic duty. Similarly, the university generally does not have to justify its existence because it is associated with the pursuit of knowledge, a mission connected to virtue and service for the public and all humanity. The problem, of course, is, Who counts as human? The accumulation of knowledge by the American university effects and depends on the dispossession of the Filipino. Thus, the unassailable good associated with the university’s purported mission of education and the concomitant freedom to expand the horizons of knowledge turns out to be the basis for destruction, extrication, exploitation, and indenture. The university and the museum turn out to be devoted to the accumulation of knowledge by dispossession of those deemed subhuman or, in Denise da Silva’s phrasing, the transparent subject’s accumulation of knowledge by the dispossession of the affectable subject. Moreover, the museum not only accumulates but also enacts the distribution of the human between the primitive or the affectable and the developing transparent subject. The museum cannot narrate the Filipino because that would mean establishing an alternative narrative. It can only keep repeating the gesture that ties the racial, colonial primitive to the process of primitive accumulation.
With this chapter, I have tried to show that the analysis of the misrepresentation of “primitive” civilizations in the museum must be understand not merely as a question of truth or fallacy but as a process and philosophy of primitive accumulation. In the UMMNH, what actually is on display is the museum’s inability to do anything other than simply possess its Philippine connection. The massive size of the actual collection stands in striking contrast to the smallness of the exhibit. It is, simply put, a cache. Moreover, the spatial, architectural, and textual features of the museum’s top floor indicate that the museum is at a loss as to how to narrativize and locate the Philippines, especially as regards the university’s relation to the Philippines and American imperialism. Indeed, the museum is invested in not telling the history of this relationship because to do so would require revealing the university’s direct involvement in the colonization of America’s first colony in Asia. Producing its own version of what Angela Miller calls America’s “confession and avoidance syndrome,” the museum tellingly lacks historiography when it comes to the Philippines and instead tells a Philippine lack of history.80
Yet the museum can change—or, more precisely, it can be forced to change. Following a series of protests and actions by Native Americans on and off-campus—including the Native Caucus, comprising indigenous graduate students, and the student-led group called Ethnography As Activism—the Native American dioramas in the UMMNH were relabeled and then, in 2010, removed and placed in storage. The Ethnography As Activism Subgroup on Repatriation collectively wrote a paper titled “A Case for Shared Ethics: Moving Forward on Repatriation at the University of Michigan,” in which they called for the immediate halt of all research on items subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and they presented it at a 2010 graduate student anthropology conference.81 Later that year, NAGPRA was updated so as to clarify the repatriation of remains that are “not easily traced to a current tribe.”82 In 2012 the remains of 120 ancestors of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan were repatriated from the University of Michigan and laid to rest at the Nibokaan Ancestral Cemetery on the Isabella Indian Reservation.83
In the fall of 2012, a group of Philippine studies scholars that included Victor Mendoza, Deirdre de la Cruz, Christi-Ann Castro, and Joseph Galura contributed to the creation of an exhibit overlay entitled “Let’s Talk! The US in the Philippines: The Untold Story” in order to provide basic historical, political, and socioeconomic context for the Philippine exhibition and collection. According to the University of Michigan’s website, the exhibit overlay was “developed in response to the existing display, Philippine Photos & Finds: A Century of U-M Anthropology in the Philippines. The newly added labels explore some of the ways in which ideas of race informed the American colonial period in the Philippines.”84 As I write, the University of Michigan has announced that the UMMNH will be moved to a biological sciences building currently under construction and scheduled to open in 2018. The university’s zoology, paleontology, and anthropology collections are being moved to a new collections and research facility, while the future of the Ruthven Building, which houses the UMMNH, is unclear.85 Will the UMMNH be allowed to continue to disavow the relationship between the primitive and primitive accumulation, or will it be made to find and create museological alternatives that disallow that disavowal?
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If, in 1901, the U.S. Supreme Court designated the Philippines and other new colonies “foreign in a domestic sense,” let us now consider another site filled with objects that are foreign in a domestic space. The Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, to which I turn in the following chapter, is filled with souvenirs transported from the Philippines and domesticated in the United States. The imperial museum functions much like a home. It encloses the foreign object—in this case, the Filipino—in a domestic and domesticating space. As America’s racial and colonial primitive, the Filipino fulfills the imperial capitalist state’s need for a doubled and paradoxical form of the “foreign.” But in the case of the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, the museum does not merely mimic the kind of collecting of souvenirs, curios, books, furniture, and art practiced and prized by bourgeois households. The museum literally is a home. Let us turn from the university-museum to the home-as-museum.
