James Clifford

I would be lying if I said I completely understood James Clifford. His Writing style is like that of my favorite author Borges (who he references). It is a patchwork of citation, history, and literary devices. His use of poetry in the opening lines is very tastefully done. The poem shows the fetish-izing of culture, which he shows museums as guilty of doing.

His analysis is framed by discourse on Property. He critiques European museums with the main point being that they negate history all too often. This stagnates societies in a time where there can be no growth. It makes nuanced cultural and scientific subjects into static objects for the fetishes of the viewers. There is one quote that I found particularly helpful from the opening pages, “The collection and preservation of an authentic domain of identity cannot be natural or innocent. It is tied up with nationalist politics, with restrictive law, and with contested encodings of past and future” (96).

As a collector of culture there are many things you must consider. First, The distinction between history and ethnography must be established. Levels of experience separate these two practices. When contemplating the role of an anthropologist in an institution sponsored film project, his/her role may conflate the role of historian and Anthropologist. This is a necessary conflation, I think. The distinction is important but then so is its conflation for efficiency’s sake. James addresses this issue in later chapters.

At the end of “Collecting primitive culture” He attributes the idea of putting objects with their lived culture to Franz Boas. But he says that Boas’ reasons for doing this were explicitly to place people at varying levels of the evolutionary chain. For me, putting objects in their lived context is not so much for a scientific merit but for its artistic possibilities. In a filmic setting, Anthropologists are often called on to do research for character development. Recently I was employed to do just this for a zombie film. The task was to research samurai’s from a historical perspective, but also for possible enduring cultural ripples that have been established because of the veneration and nostalgia for these heroic nationally devout warriors. Unfortunately I have never been to Japan so my endeavor was more explicitly a historical one, but the ethnography is a place that history and lived experience often become conflated in ways which are helpful for movie makers, historians, and anthropologists.