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Objects and Selves—An Afterword
- University of Wisconsin Press
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OBJECTS AND SELVESAN AFTERWORD JAMES CLIFFORD Entering You will find yourself in a climate of nut castanets, A musical whip From the Torres Straits, from Mirzapur a sistrum Called Jumka, 'used by aboriginal Tribes to attract small game On dark nights', coolie cigarettes And mask of Saagga, the Devil Doctor, The eyelids worked by strings. James Fenton's poem, "The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford" (1984:81-84),1 from which this stanza is taken, rediscovers a place of fascination in the ethnographic collection. For this visitor, even the museum's coolly descriptive labels seem to increase the wonder ('''... attract small game / on dark nights"') and the fear. Fenton is an adult-child, exploring territories of danger and desire. For to be a child in this collection (" 'Please sir, where's the withered / Hand?"') is to ignore the serious admonitions about human evolution and cultural diversity posted in the entrance hall. And it is to be interested instead by the claw of a condor, the jawbone of a dolphin, the hair of a witch, or "a jay's feather worn as a charm / In Buckinghamshire...." Fenton's ethnographic museum is a world of fetishes, of intimate encounters with inexplicably fascinating objects. Here collecting is inescapably tied to obsession, to personal recollection. Visitors "find the landscape of their childhood marked out / Here, in the chaotic piles of souvenirs" ..."boxroom of the forgotten or hardly possible." 1. Quoted with permission from Children in Exile: Poems 1968-1984, copyright 1984 by Random House, Inc. James Clifford is Associate Professor of the History ofConsciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World. He has recently edited, with George Marcus, Making Ethnography , forthcoming from the University of California Press. 236 OBJECTS AND SELVES Go As a historian of ideas or a sex-offender, For the primitive art, As a dusty semiologist, equipped to unravel The seven components of that witch's curse Or the syntax of the mutilated teeth. Go In groups to giggle at curious finds. But do not step into the kingdom of your promises To yourself, like a child entering the forbidden Woods of his lonely playtime: 237 Do not step into this tabooed zone ": .. laid with the snares of privacy and fiction / And the dangerous third wish." Do not encounter these objects except as curiosities to giggle at or as evidence to be understood scientifically. The tabooed third way, followed by Fenton, is a path of too-intimate fantasy, recalling the dreams of a solitary child "who wrestled with eagles for their feathers," or the fearful vision of a young girl-her turbulent lover seen as a hound with "strange pretercanine eyes." And this path through the Pitt Rivers Museum ends with what seems to be a scrap of autobiography, the vision of a personal "forbidden woods"-exotic, desired, savage, and governed by the (paternal) law: He had known what tortures the savages had prepared For him there, as he calmly pl.lshed open the gate And entered the wood near the placard: 'TAKE NOTICE MEN-TRAPS AND SPRING-GUNS ARE SET ON THESE PREMISES.' For his father had protected his good estate. Fenton's journey into otherness leads to a forbidden area of the self. His third way of engaging the exotic collection finds only an area of desire, marked off and policed. This law is preoccupied with property. C. B. Macpherson's classic analysis of Western "possessive individualism" (1962) traces the seventeenth-century emergence of a sense of self as owner. The ideal individual surrounds itself with accumulated properties and goods. Richard Handler's essay in this volume on the construction of a Quebecois cultural "Patrimoine" draws on Macpherson to unravel the assumptions and paradoxes involved in "having a culture;' selecting and cherishing an authentic collective property. Extending his point, it can be said that this form of identity, whether cultural or personal, presupposes the act of collection, a gathering up of properties in arbitrary systems of value and meaning. These systems, as various essays in this volume show, have changed historically. But they are always powerful and rule-governed. One cannot escape them. At best, Fenton suggests, one can transgress ("poach" in their tabooed zones), or make their self-evident orders seem strange. In Handler's subtly perverse [18.222.23.119] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:45 GMT) 238 JAMES CLIFFORD analysis a common system of retrospection-revealed by a Historic Monuments Commission's selection...