James Clifford: Traveling from Place to Place, Tribe to Tribe, as a Predicament of Culture. (01/03/2002)
James Clifford has recently been accused of suggesting (at the MLA convention in December 2001: #38 "The Predicament of Clifford") that culture can be imported and exported like any other commodity on the open market, soap or bananas say, from one place to another, from one time to another (forward but not backward), while what he actually argues is quite the reverse of that proposition. Much of what Clifford says in his book is focused on the appropriation of tribal artifacts (sculpture, painting, pottery, etc.), even works recovered by archeological excavations from cultures that no longer exist (Membres pottery, for instance), by contemporary art dealers and collectors who buy, sell, and trade, them like any other commodity in that global marketplace. Clifford notes that tribal objects first had to be declared "masterpieces" by art critics before they could achieve a high enough status of value to become objects of desire in the eyes of European collectors. After that first step was accomplished, after tribal objects were described as art, they entered the world of the gallery, the world of the art museum, and were venerated, dollar for dollar, like any other work viewed as an aesthetic object. Clifford never actually asserts, as far as I could determine, that there is anything inherently wrong with viewing tribal productions in this fashion, though he does suggest that matching an object to categories of the purely beautiful may not have been the original reason any of these objects came into existence in the first place. In other words, he acknowledges the fact that such things had and served purposes for their creators that were never connected to an aesthetic motive at all. With the absence of intentionality universally recognized in artistic theory today, whether the creator of an object was attempting to fashion a beautiful object or not becomes an irrelevant speculation in the mind of critic, patron, buyer, and seller, of the object in question. Why, and exactly how, the idea that Clifford supports the notion that culture can be transported from one place to another by the objects that were fashioned by its members, as the presenters at the MLA convention argued, is difficult to determine on the basis of Clifford's work. He seems essentially opposed to that idea in his discussion of it.
A question this raises, and one that matters more to tribal people than it does to Europeans, is whether intentionality was abandoned as significant in determining the nature of an object before or after anyone wanted to begin trading in the "artistic" production of tribal people. Archeologists generally decry and denounce the fact that ancient artifacts have become valuable commodities in the artistic marketplace because it encourages an illegal trade in objects that they always considered to be their own to find and dispose of as they saw fit. Digging a tomb to recover the funerary objects interred with the body has always been perceived by archeologists as a higher scientific calling, since the product of that activity makes it possible to "understand" the culture that buried the objects with the corpse, than doing the same thing for the sake of making a profit by selling or trading the objects recovered can ever hope to achieve. Robbing tribal graves for the sake of monetary gain ruins their integrity in ways that make scientific investigation of them meaningless activity. The issue of digging tombs matters to tribal people in a completely different way, since one kind of desecration (for scientific study) is always the same as the other (for the sake of profit). The abandonment of intentionality (why did the people who made this object do so in the first place?) does not affect the activity of scientists one way or the other, since you might want to argue that the answer to the question of why this object, as opposed to another kind, was made to accompany the corpse is the one that throws the most light on the archeological quest for knowledge of the Other in the first place. Answering that same question not at all, even declaring it irrelevant, and subordinate, to a desire to transform tribal artifacts into aesthetic objects suitable for sale in the artistic marketplace, when their original purpose and function had nothing to do with fashioning beautiful objects, only encourages the desire to steal and own tribal production as art. Saying exactly how the issue of intentionality matters in this context is one Clifford does not address.
Taking that issue up here, a potter at San Ildefonso Pueblo in New Mexico explained to me that the motifs used on native pottery were changed each year to reflect a cyclical shift in the spirit that dominated a particular time period. This was done for a number of reasons. Honoring an emergent spirit over a departing one was a way to avoid offending either spirit as the first began its journey back toward the spirit-world and the second one made its way into the world where the people lived. A person's birth was maked by the spirit that existed in the world when he or she came into existence. That spirit was marked in the motif used by the tribe's potters when they created vessels of one kind and another for that child to use during clan ceremonies over the course of his/her life. Those same objects, and any new ones created to replace the initial ones if the originals were lost or broken, then accompanied that person's body into the grave, since ceremonial spirit-objects could not be used by anyone other than the individual for whom they were created. The spirit depicted on those objects was the same as the one that guided a person through the world tree on his/her journey to reincarnation in subsequent generations. That re-emergence, not of the person, but of his/her spirit, was determined by the cycle of time that governed the recurrent use of motifs by the potters. The potters followed the sequence and did not invent or create it. While Europeans always classify this kind of belief as superstitious, to native Americans it is a complex system of recording a person's, and a spirit's, temporal history. We always know who we are in the context of the passing of time because our spirit comes and goes on a regular and recorded cycle of time. Europeans always say we have no recorded history. What is actually true is that Europeans delight in destroying that recorded history by buying and selling our spiritual heritage after they steal it from our graves.