Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives (review)

The twelve essays gathered in Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives are written by an impressive group of international scholars. Their essays look far beyond the question "Who has the authority to speak for any group's identity?" and examine, largely, the varied ways that power has operated in the formulation of knowledge about indigenous cultures—that is, in the construction of ethnographic knowledge—and how that knowledge has shaped the narratives that museums, other cultural institutions and social practices have presented about indigenous peoples. Written from a decidedly postcolonial perspective, the essays emerge from deeply held convictions about the significance of museums, in particular, as sites where knowledge is constructed, contested, and negotiated. Many of the essays are well-thought-through examinations of different histories and cultural and political situations in which museums operate. They present nuanced understandings of the factors that subtly and not so subtly shape the representation of indigenous cultures—in tribal as well as national museums, archives, libraries, and public displays. The book is organized into three parts, each composed of four linked essays with an overarching introduction.

Part 1: Ethnography and the Cultural Practices of Museums

While we get little sense of how Native groups may have attempted to resist colonists in the early nineteenth century in Hal Langfur's essay "Elite Ethnography and Cultural Eradication: Confronting the Cannibal in Early-Nineteenth Century Brazil," we do get an extremely detailed account, informed by facts based on rigorous archival research, of how Portuguese colonists rationalized their harsh and ultimately violent treatment of Native peoples, specifically the Botocudo in eastern Brazil, and of how, in time, the production of ethnographic knowledge and a concomitant European mindset toward those people took hold and eventually shaped Brazil's first historical societies and museums.

Zine Magubane's essay "Ethnographic Showcases as Sites of Knowledge Production and Indigenous Resistance" examines one of the many tragic ways in which the spread of the British Empire and subjugation of indigenous peoples went hand in hand. Drawing largely on announcements and articles in the Illustrated London News, a hugely popular newspaper, Magubane examines the phenomenon of displaying indigenous Africans in London in the nineteenth century. She explores the motivations—the quest for imperial dominance—behind this middle-and upper-class amusement and the popular attitudes toward it. While she persuasively contextualizes the phenomena of these showcases within the nineteenth-century racial "sciences" of ethnology and phrenology, she also takes note of the strategies employed by African people to make known their reluctance to participate in these showcases and relates the participants' own astute observations on English society—that is, their return of the gaze.

On first appearance, the subject of Ann McMullen's essay, "Reinventing George Heye: Nationalizing the Museum of the American Indian and Its Collection," deals with the caricature of George Gustav Heye that has taken hold over the years since his death and, McMullen argues, that has obfuscated any understanding of Heye's original intent in establishing the NMAI's forerunner institution and, worse yet, has (mis-)shaped many people's deepest assumptions about the value of the collection. While having no desire to "valorize" Heye, McMullen maintains that a more balanced understanding of Heye and his purpose is fundamental to any interpretation of the objects in the core collection of the NMAI. Most pertinent, McMullen ponders the ways in which this important collection can now be of value in increasing Native American cultural sovereignty—and she questions why "reinterpretation and repossession of visual culture has fallen so far behind writing in Native self-representation."

Ciraj Rassool's "Ethnographic Elaborations, Indigenous Contestations, and the Cultural Politics of Imagining Community: A View from the District Six Museum in South Africa" is an activist scholar's unflinching look at the apartheid legacy of a major ethnographic museum, the South African Museum (SAM), and its (white) crowd-pleasing Khoisan diorama. It is an equally honest portrayal of the challenges facing a post-apartheid...