Cultural institutions like museums and archives are critical sites for shaping debates and discourses around cultural property. This is not only in relation to collections and the varying questions about the accumulation and assemblage of cultural ‘things’, but also within the very politics of museum display and representation. Questions about who gets to speak for and on behalf of a community are now central to cultural property discussions. In these contexts, there has been a strategic movement away from a zero-sum question of ownership, expanding the discourse into cultural rights, entitlements, ethics and responsibility. Critics however might see this shift as reinforcing the boundaries of ownership and its consequences for the production of knowledge and the practice of cultural representation. The conversation about cultural property that intersects with museums raises important issues around public trust, memory and authority. It encourages reflexivity upon our understanding of the power of objects, the ongoing resonance of their exchange histories and various routes of circulation, and the relationships that give them meaning.
Community is as slippery a term as any and its use as a general descriptor has the danger of erasing the very real political differences and historical experiences that exist within any grouping named as such. As Raymond Williams observed and more recently Bennett, Grossberg and Morris have elaborated, community is a ‘keyword’ in our vocabulary of culture and society, but it requires increased specification and care when being used in order to offset false equivalences (Williams 1976; Bennett et al. 2005). Karp, Kreamer and Levine offer the idea of community as deeply experienced encounters where “cultures, identities and skills are acquired and used” (Karp et al. 1992: 4). We might also add here how important place, memory and time are for expanding this idea of community and how a sense of group belonging enables individuals to also conceptualise identity. What experiences make up any community, and how identity across and within a social grouping is produced through moments of openness and closure, also suggest that a community is never a fixed entity. Community is always in processes of development and change.
This section explores the multiple ways that museums and archives and the communities from which institutional collections originated inform and mutually work to determine ideas of cultural property in relation to these collections. Especially in the past two decades, the extension of curatorial and other authority to groups of people outside the museum walls has become pivotal to institutional futures. This process has not only brought ideas and ideals of community into being; it has also enabled engagement with peoples who have not only been marginalised and excluded from institutions but also of whose belongings these institutions have become owners, stewards, guardians and caretakers. The necessity of these engagements has broken apart traditional ideas and language of ‘objects’ and ‘property’ and has also been central in redirecting understanding of historical power relations in the transit of cultural properties, in both tangible and intangible forms.
James Clifford’s development of Mary Louise Pratt’s conception of a contact zone (Pratt 1991; Clifford 1997) articulates the museum and archive as sites of engagement between institutions and communities inflected by these histories and power dynamics. There has been a recent backlash against the secondary appropriation of the idea of a contact zone within museum practice as a way to authorize and celebrate new kinds of participation and collaboration (e.g. Gere 1997; Bennett 2013). Recent critics have argued that the formulation of the ‘contact zone’ is neocolonial (Boast 2011) as it ignores power differentials that make the contact moment possible and becomes another burden of representation for Native peoples who, through the opening up of the museum, are charged with saving the institution’s reputation (Mithlo 2004). In the chapters assembled here, Fred Myers and Aaron Fox both offer a close analysis of the multiple relationships and movements of cultural property that can occur between community, institutions and between individual collectors. Both trace these movements through the production of film and audio, forms not traditionally considered cultural property but now very much part of a cultural property spectrum. Rae Gould and Jennifer Kramer make visible the shifting lines of responsibility and care in response to the extreme sensitivities of the US federal legislation governing the return of Native American human remains, or ancestors, and in the transformation of meaning that can be bestowed onto items that have deep First Nation histories. These two chapters speak to the complex layers of mistrust and misunderstanding that continue to condition relationships between Indigenous communities and institutions demonstrating the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism. George Nicholas draws on a range of examples to explore the question of why the tangible always trumps the intangible in cultural property policy in Canada.
The diverse and rich repatriation literature of the past 20 years has opened understanding about the multiple relationships of meaning and memory that are embedded within cultural property as very particular belongings and items of embodiment. More than 20 years after the passing of NAGPRA the landscape has changed dramatically – there has been an almost universal outlawing of treating human remains as collections like any other. Similarly, the obligation to consult has also become mainstream in the curation of many ethnographic collections. The politics of repatriation, including what that really means at a legislative, institutional and community level and what histories of colonial violence it evokes, are the subject of Rae Gould’s chapter. With specialized experience as both a NAGPRA co-ordinator within a university context working on repatriation and a member of the Nipmuc Nation in Massachusetts, Gould unravels what it takes to commit to the return of Native American human remains and how much institutional will matters in this process. In this Gould is very clear: the point and project of NAGPRA is assuring the safe and complete return to Native communities of their ancestors who were wrongly taken from graves and burial sites across the country. This unique violence and disruption has its base within colonial logics of supremacy and the use of science in support of this. The very language that Gould deploys here, renaming human remains as ancestors, for instance, does very important work in de-objectifying and pointing to the strategic erasure of Native standpoints and protocols about respect for the dead. Specifically focusing on one part of the legislation pertaining to the new provision, Section 10.11, developed for the dispossession of culturally unidentifiable human remains, Gould argues how this provision within the law has worked to support institutional agendas that position the return of ancestors to their communities of origin as secondary concerns.
As Gould’s chapter illustrates how legal categories are adapted and interpreted to serve specific purposes, Kramer similarly points to the multiple relationships of looking and seeing Native works within institutions. Using the example of the loan agreement put in place between the Seattle Art Museum and the Denver Museum in a wager over the 2014 Super Bowl that led to the loan of artwork considered significant to each institution, Kramer explores how cultural property can be full of investments and misplaced meaning. In an account of the various possible routes of circulation of cultural property, the Raven Mask of the Nuxalk community is transformed from community cultural property into a different kind of spectacle. In this ‘looking relations’, or how we see and how we create relationships through shared experiences of looking, are critical. As Kramer states, ‘When non-Native viewers impose their own meaning onto manifestations of Nuxalk culture, historically unequal power relations between Native and non-Native people become further accentuated.’
In turn, the debates about repatriation have become nuanced in the context of the explosion of digital media and other new forms of collecting. A 2011 conference at the Smithsonian, After the Return (see Bell, Christen and Turin 2012), interrogated the meaning of repatriation in the light of new media practices and collections. Participants at the conference engaged with how the boundaries of collections, and the possibilities of their experiential presence in communities (as well as communities being brought into the museum), had increased massively (see also Silverman 2015 and Harrison et al. 2013). At the same time, there continues to be a fervent resistance to the status of collections as property and the power relations that this perpetuates. At the above conference, Jim Enote, the Director of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum, made an impassioned plea to not forget that the return of digitized collections to communities is not the same as repatriation (Boast and Enote 2013).
With regard to the complex ways in which different media activate questions about ownership and entitlement of collections, Fred Myers’ chapter underscores the way that film and other indexical images work to establish relationships and other effects in the world. This chapter tracks the initial making and subsequent return of visual recordings made of the Pintupi, an Aboriginal group in central Australia, in the early 1970s as they encounter and negotiate new living conditions in established governmental settlements. Myers’ account offers a unique position; he was there when the film footage was originally made and he is intimately involved in the collaboration and negotiation that leads to the making of Remembering Yayai that utilizes this footage in 2015. Through this positioning, Myers is able to explore the different tensions and ambivalences in cross-cultural negotiations of rights and representation. The archive as the repository for the original footage and the conditions of authorial control that remain relatively fixed within that space adds an additional layer of complexity to the negotiations required from a community standpoint. Myers’ piece highlights how ownership and collaboration pivot on each other in the process of making representations and negotiating the complexities of cultural property. This chapter offers itself as a rich ethnography of cultural property, illustrating just how it can function as a marker of identity and difference.
In Aaron Fox’s chapter, the archive is also a site of investigation and analysis but at a different register. Here the focus is on tracing the multiple hidden alliances and relationships that led to the making of a significant ethnographic music archive, the Laura Boulton Collection, at Columbia University’s Department of Ethnomusicology. In this account we are afforded insight into what might be understood as the archive of the archive – the documentary trail that once uncovered reveals myriad interpersonal motivations and strategic manoeuvring. What we learn from Fox is that the making of an archive, of a collection, is never assured and is haphazard at best, and the representation of it as whole and complete is a fiction that serves very particular interests. This chapter is about how the archive itself emerges as cultural property. Thus in bringing it to life, and the way one person’s archive goes on to live in the world – who it engages, who it reaches out to – demonstrates how cultural property activates its own forms of agency.
The final chapter by George Nicholas offers a reflection upon the multiple cultural positions that inform, condition and also limit understandings of cultural property. Nicholas makes the argument that cultural property is an essentially inseparable aspect of heritage. In doing so he draws largely from the multi-year interdisciplinary project in Canada that he directed, Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage. This project allowed for various investigations and interventions into ideas of heritage, property, ownership and responsibilities to and for tangible and intangible cultural property. The breadth of this work and the examples used in this chapter highlight the range of issues facing communities in the translation of their material and immaterial culture and cultural expressions into dominant languages of cultural property and possession.
Together these chapters work to highlight how the figure of cultural property is involved in activating and producing a variety of relationships between communities and institutions like archives and museums. These engagements turn upon colonial histories of collecting and documentation and the multiple lives that this material has gone on to have. The varied meaning that it can mobilize depends upon who is looking, who is accessing and who it is indexing and referencing. These chapters also point to the unique moments that underpin the making of cultural property as well as the temporal dimensions that continue to inform its circulation and its characterization. Cultural property is not only many things to many people; it is also used strategically to mark specific moments and events, and thus it too becomes an active agent in the making of identity and in the calibrations of cultural difference.
Bell, Joshua A., Kimberly A. Christen, and Mark Turin. 2013. “Introduction: After the Return.” Museum Anthropology Review 7(1–2): 1–21.
Bennett, Tony. 2013. “The ‘Shuffle of Things’ and the Distribution of Agency.” In Rodney Harrison, Sarah Byrne and Anne Clarke (eds.), Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research.
Bennett, Tony, Lawrence Grossburg and Meaghan Morris. 2005. New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Blackwell Publishing.
Boast, Robin. 2011. “Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited.” Museum Anthropology 34(1): 56–70.
Boast, Robin, and Jim Enote. 2012. “Virtual Repatriation: It Is Neither Virtual nor Repatriation.” In Heritage in the Context of Globalization, Vol. 8. Springer Briefs in Archaeology. New York: Springer New York.
Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Harrison, Rodney, Sarah Byrne and Anne Clarke. (eds.) 2013. Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research.
Karp, Ivan, Christine Kreamer and Steven Levine. 1992. Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Mithlo, Nancy M. 2004. “Red Man’s Burden. The Politics of Inclusion in Museum Settings.” American Indian Quarterly 28(3–4): 743–763.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession, 33–40.
Silverman, Raymond. (ed.) 2015. Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledges. London: Routledge.
Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Oxford Press.