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.

Clifford

Clifford traces the history of “culture” and analyzes how different people become fixated on collections. The idea of culture changes constantly, and has different meanings throughout history. People collect various items and assign them different meanings and hierarchies as they go along. While structured collecting is usually seen in a good light, collections without rhyme or reason are seen as fetishes. These collections start at a young age, and often are linked to identity. There are many ways collections can be interpreted, and different objects can be classified as scientific or aesthetic. Four of the main zones that collectables can identify with are authentic masterpieces, authentic artifacts, inauthentic masterpieces, and inauthentic artifacts. There is a fine line between scientific artifacts and fine art, but artifacts can move through the zones because the art culture circuit is constantly changing. Assigning culture to a group of people is a means to understanding other ways of life, which becomes difficult when the cultures of the world intertwine. Boas was the first anthropologist to introduce the idea of cultural relativism, which introduced the idea that cultures are all equal, and not something just the West has.

This article was thought provoking while trying to grasp the made up notion of culture. I found the discussion about Levi-Strauss’s thoughts on New York City very interesting. The city was described as having many different cultures with holes to slip from one into the other. The fragmentation is a juxtaposition of the past and the present. Clifford also talks about how culture is a nationalistic idea and is heavily systematic. How is the idea of culture changing now that mass society is able to go global when it comes to technology and the internet?

Clifford response

Clifford's "On Collecting Art and Culture" discusses the motifs of authenticity of artifacts and how the collections give a person an identity, despite that the reproduction of the object loses its original authenticity as it is taken out of its original environment, which gives it a different meaning, and/or loses its meaning completely. What is considered to be taboo is fascinating as we "do not encounter these objects except as curiosities to giggle at, art to be admired, or evidence to be understood scientifically." (217) Griffith brings up the idea of creating an identity through the collecting of art, and how that created identity itself, is a "kind of wealth" (218). The collections have a hierarchical nature because in a sense, a person with more other-worldly objects and art is considered to be of a higher social rank due to their ability to own such exoticized art. As I mentioned before, this reading reminded me that when objects are taken out of context, they lose their original meaning as well as their authenticity. Griffith discusses this further that "collections-most notably museums-create the illusion of adequate representation of a world by first cutting objects out of specific contexts...and making them "stand for" abstract wholes." (220) The objects which are exhibited and collected lose their original meaning when they are presented as merely non-Western objects, and in a setting that presents them out of context. When non-Western art and artifacts are exhibited and/or collected, their presentation out of context loses all sense of time and place, as well as the "concrete social labor of its making." (220)

It is interesting that non-Western artifacts have been called "objects sauvages," "sources of fascination with the power to disconcert." For someone to be considered wealthy and powerful, they discover, collect, and exhibit their artifact as a sort of exotic prize for all to gawk at and acknowledge that they have acquired a taste for exoticism, as a sort of cultural fetish that is appropriate to collect. Objects which served a purpose, which had a deeper meaning in its original context, like many artifacts and works of art, once brought over and adapted to the Western world, lose their authenticity and instead become an object of fetishism, an artifact that is merely objectified and its creation is not at all questioned, instead it is simplified to a collectible that the bourgeois are entitled to own and exhibit at their own expense. This is evident throughout history, and I think even today, with the people who are wealthy enough to 'collect' art are causing original works to become less authentic in a Western environment, and even the way that it is exhibited at all causes objects to lose their original meaning.

Clifford

The chapter from James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture that stuck out to me most was that on ethnographic surrealism and its concentration on its growth in Paris from the 1920s and 1930s. The notion most emphasized is that surrealism is used to create interesting and unexpected juxtapositions. Surrealist ethnographers saw culture as a contested reality—something I still believe to be true to this day—that needed to be analyzed and rearranged.

Clifford includes an excerpt from Griaule where he states that “ethnography…is interested in the beautiful and the ugly[1].” This article today I think holds true in art and my approach to photography. I guess I am a surrealist at heart, but I essentially try to take what seems common and make it peculiar and the bizarre banal. William Makepeace Thackeray once said, “the two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.” This is true of any work that one is doing, especially anthropology. Geertz states that we should study common sense because it is “natural” to the person in that culture, but never the thing analyzed. This is making the familiar new. When we study other cultures in anthropology we are looking to understand it and therefore make the new thing familiar to us. Clifford essentially does this when telling us about Western culture and how we learn as children to collect things and put them on display, like a “treasured bowl filled with the bright shavings of a crayon[2].” I would have never noticed this because it is part of the “familiar” of our Western culture.

Clifford’s chapter on collecting art and culture made me wonder how one decides what is scientific, cultural artifacts, what is an aesthetic work of art, and what is seen as a collectible. Are they all valued equally? If not, why is the one valued more? We kind of consume these three different types like a commodity, part of a museum attraction or exhibit in a gallery. It wasn’t seen as “beautiful” in the European sense of the word until recently, which then pushes to the forefront why we were interested in these nonwestern works. Even those that were considered “art” where in some ways consumed because of its exotic characteristics and therefore appeal in Western culture. It wasn’t primarily for its appreciation of art for art’s sake. The art world is really about it’s mass appeal and value and these were valued because it was seen as curious, exotic, and bizarre. The value, not the monetary kind, behind the art to the culture it came from, in this case the West Africans, gets ignored and lost. The meaning is insignificant to the West and their art is seen as another good that we can consume.

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[1] James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ehtonography, Literature, and Art, p 131

[2] James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ehtonography, Literature, and Art, p 96