Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas (review)

Misplaced Objects examines the important and profoundly ironic exchanges between the Spanish colonial empire and Latin America, in particular, the exchange of ideas embodied in material objects that have come to live beyond the physical presence of actual governing structures. Ideas certainly have the capacity to outlast armies and bureaucracies—a central premise of Silvia Spitta’s second singly authored book. The unique contribution of Misplaced Objects to Latin American postcolonial studies can be found in Spitta’s use of material culture in constructing her main thesis, which is the very compelling argument that what Spain (and other European colonizers) plundered from indigenous cultures gradually wrought unanticipated and fundamental transformations to Europe’s epistemology and world-view. Even more ironic, what Spain brought to the Americas in terms of icons and symbols—objects that re-present and project supposed Spanish superiority—were melded into hybrid or mestizaje “American” cultures and eventually taken up by independence movements that ended Spanish rule. The more recent phenomenon of latinidad, for example, bases its international cohesion on the Americanization of the “dark” Virgin of Guadalupe, initially imported by Cortes.

Rich in illustrations and descriptions of the centuries of bidirectional transatlantic flow of artifacts, Misplaced Objects needs to be placed in the category of postcolonial projects that recovers silenced and suppressed histories of indigenous peoples, namely, projects of the Subaltern Studies Group. Spitta’s use of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things as a theoretical springboard places this book in a poststructuralist framework: objects both constitute and are constituted in their relevant discursive matrixes, and the initial European endeavor to classify objects from the Americas revealed little about indigenous civilizations and much about the dominant, “master” narratives and paradigms of Europe that sought to dissect, categorize, and thereby apprehend and control their new imperial possessions, whether they were a genus of bird or a bipedal creature.

Misplaced Objects takes The Order of Things further. “When things move, things change,” writes Spitta (3). Indeed, her book examines the “epistemological, cultural, and geographical shifts that had to take place of the myriad objects that migrated between Europe and the Americas to find their place within altogether alien contexts” (3). The author’s interest is not simply in what Europe attempted to do to the objects that conquistadores, missionaries, colonial administrators, and collectors of all kinds took back to Europe; she is even more interested in what these objects “did” to European thought, that is, to the ideational structures that underpin cultural and social institutions. Once artifacts and, sometimes, human-as-specimens were misplaced in the European discursive context, they were both emptied of their original meaning, say, by collectors, such as P. T. Barnum, and reconstructed through essentially Eurocentric interpretative lenses. Mesoamerican objects were seen as examples of the primitive, the exotic, the irremediably barbaric, and the alien. Objects stood for the people that produced them; and in European minds, the indigenous peoples were inherently inferior, frozen in an ancient past, incapable of enlightenment and social progress. These bizarre objects, in other words, spoke of the other, stood as the material affirmation of the West as modernity. Vast amounts of artifacts were taken to Europe and were much sought after by royalty, by amateur and professional collectors (who sold tickets to the public that wanted to view strange things), and by pseudoscientists in a number of fledgling disciplines. Predictably, the Wunderkammern signaled European national might, cultural superiority, and aristocratic wealth and prestige.

Yet the key point that Spitta makes in this book is that ideas flow in multiple directions and can exist in various temporal and spatial locations in ways that remark on each other, emerging as ghostly traces of the past in the present that change all points of a temporal continuum. In a sense, Misplaced Objects is a history book that undoes conventional views of historiography as a rational placement of events along a linear timeline. As such, Spitta...