The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress, and: Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (review)

A spate of recent books unpacking our obsession with the "exotic" and the "primitive" (e.g., Micaela di Leonardo, Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity [University of Chicago Press, 1998]; Marianna Torgovnick, Primitive Passions: Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy [University of Chicago Press, 1998]) has graced academic bookshelves across the country in recent years, which suggests a renewed vigor in the project to situate our most intimate desires and longings in objects of ethnographic investigation. The two books under review participate, perhaps unwittingly, in this project. Both are the culmination of approximately a decade of research and writing, and both deal with sets of similar issues surrounding the politics of representation, authenticity, museums, tourism, art, and the production of value. Both are also profusely illustrated, well written, ironic, witty, and perceptive in the observations made about the state of culture at the end of the 20th century. It is for this reason that I bring them together. In what follows, I wish to tease out some of the common strands of thought found within their pages but also to note some of their differences in terms of disciplinary approach and aesthetic style.

Although it is true that the two volumes touch on many similar points, the authors do not draw upon each other's work. I find this rather surprising, given the fact that their objects of inquiry are similar in so many respects. Nonetheless, the two books can be seen possibly as an imaginative dialogue about the implications and consequences of display, and could be used for this purpose in the classroom. Errington's volume is essentially two mini monographs in one, woven together by the metanarrative of "progress," dealing as she does with the historical development of the concept of "primitive" art's relationship to authenticity in the first part and with nationalism, modernization, and development in the second. On the other hand, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's collection of previously published essays (revised for the volume under review) takes the form of sustained historical analyses and contemporary critiques of a wide range of phenomena associated with displaying objects and peoples in museum settings and on the tourist trail.

During the course of the latter's efforts, we receive a sophisticated recounting of the developmental logic behind museum display (e.g., "Objects of Ethnography"); the implications of displaying human specimens in controlled environments (e.g., exhibiting Jews at world expositions, performing pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation); the "staged ethnicity" of festival performances (e.g., Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Los Angeles Festival); a political examination of exhibitions at Ellis Island; the cultural constructions of "heritage" at the intersection of museum visitation and tourism; and the relativity of taste formation through an analysis of kitsch. To make her points, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett provides a provocative series of examples culled from her experiences in many parts of the world and written sources located in popular literature, archival materials, and journalistic accounts. Errington's text is no less global in scope, but focuses more pointedly on Indonesia, her area of expertise, with a brief excursion to Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology in chapter 6.

Briefly stated, Errington's position, in her own words, is that "artifacts themselves are mute and meaningless. Their meanings are created by the categories they fall into and the social practices that produce and reproduce those categories" (p. 4). Discourse thus determines an object's value through narrativizing categories within which a thing's beauty or value may be bolstered by the institutions and the concomitant media apparatuses responsible for creating and perpetuating the dominant narratives of the time. And while an object might preexist or outlive a specific institution and its discourses, it is transformed into a...