Ethnological and anthropological museums
On 12/6/10 12:13 AM, "William Conger" <[email protected]> wrote: One problem has been to lump all the cultures of Africa together and call them African. There are so many different cultures and so may different uses of objects -- sometimes quite similar objects share no functions across the cultures -- lie masks. Some ritual objects are/were not religious either but served varied purposes. Oddly, except for tourist sculpture, little of the so-called art of African cultures is/was called art or otherwise distinguished from everydayness except being well made. The Western fascination for "African" art began in museums where it was displayed as art. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Saul Ostrow <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Sun, December 5, 2010 9:32:14 PM Subject: Re: "...The impulse to use one's own culture to interpret the customs of others...our need for fixed points of reference." Ever hear of doing research - rather than being empirical or pragmatic - for instance we have this thing called african art because we neither wanted to acknowledge that the things we had confiscated were religious objects and because they were exotic should be viewed aesthetically - this did hundreds of years of damage to our understanding of continental africa's various cultures, while allowing us to envision the peoples of that continent as being primitive and therefore incapable of ruling themselves or being left to their determination On 12/5/10 10:17 PM, "Michael Brady" <[email protected]> wrote: The MSNBC story was utterly inane, and it reeked of a high-tone version of "Just look at what those artists are doing" credulity while nonetheless countenancing it withal. The premise of the excerpt given in the subject line is ludicrous, or should I say, the implication of the excerpt is ludicrous, namely, that one should NOT interpret the customs of others from one's own culture. Well, pray tell, how else is one to even apprehend the artifacts of another culture but only by starting from one's own understanding of things? And why the condescension of "our need for fixed points of reference"? Everything --- every thing --- that we encounter undergoes our interpretation in our own terms, and this begins with the first other we meet, namely, you, the other person, the not-me person. Every other person is radically not-me. Many many people conduct their interactions with each other and with me by use of American cultural artifacts, so that their habits are familiar. Other people conduct their affairs by using other cultural artifacts. Eventually, these artifacts and practices are sufficiently different that one finds it necessary to correlate them to known, familiar experiences so as to get an idea of how these practices fit into the lives of others. That's the interpreting that the article refers to, and the familiar things that we correlate the strange things with are the fixed points that the article seems to denigrate. FWIW, any collection of items removed from their everyday circumstances confers on them the dual status of "strange" (by being selected and isolated) and "knowable" (by being chaperoned, as it were, in the collection). They are zoos, these collections of things. We have art zoos and science zoos, air and space zoos and history zoos, and we also have wild animal museums and aquatic museums of living specimens. Don't we have to interpret them? and don't we gladly fulfill our "need for fixed points of reference" when we look at animals that come from Australia or Polynesia? | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady -- --
