Ideologies in Archaeology

9. Secularism as Ideology: Exploring Assumptions of Cultural Equivalence in Museum Repatriation

212 9 Secularism as Ideology Exploring Assumptions of Cultural Equivalence in Museum Repatriation christopher n. matthews and kurt a. jordan The concepts sacred and secular are standard tools in contemporary social and cultural analysis. A secularist tendency that eschews overt pronunciations of religious faith is a particular hallmark of modern science, Marxism, multiculturalism, and most present-day archaeological analysis. Despite secularism’s prevalence in the academy, it rarely has been analyzed as ideology. The concept of ideology is derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1978); it links processes of consciousness production with the reproduction of social relations of domination. Ideology encourages persons to act based on taken-for-granted beliefs or assumptions that mislead them or mystify their conditions, in the process supporting the partisan agenda of others with different political-economic interests than their own. We draw on Talal Asad’s (2003) critical assessment of secularism to offer an analysis of secularism as ideology in the context of the relationship between the United States mainstream and indigenous American Indian groups. Secularism can be shown to ideologically further the Secularism as Ideology 213 project of settler colonialism, by (1) assuming that all groups “own” their culture to the same extent that mainstream states do; (2) obscuring cultural interconnection and political-economic domination and resistance; and (3) obscuring the degree of the mainstream’s use of Native American culture and objects in its own self-fashioning. In classic social-science definitions of ideology, secularism therefore acts as both a universalizing and a masking ideology (see Eagleton 1991; and archaeological applications in Leone 1984, 2005 and Matthews, Leone, and Jordan 2002). We wish to be quite explicit that by critiquing secularism, we do not advocate that archaeologists take up “religious” positions in their work, and in fact much of our analysis could be taken as an example of secular thinking. We instead encourage readers to distance themselves from their customary secularism, caution them that secularism should not be taken for granted, and alert them to some potential dangers associated with uncritical application of secularist thinking. We illustrate these points using two cases from the history of repatriation , or return, of indigenous artifacts from mainstream museums to American Indian communities in the United States. The first example is the decades-long historical battle over ownership of twelve shellbead wampum belts held by the New York State Museum, a conflict that came to a head in the late 1960s. The debate provides an example of overt ideological positioning and strong rhetoric from anthropologists , which succeeded in keeping the wampum belts in the museum’s property in the short term, but ultimately failed as the belts were returned to the Onondaga Iroquois Nation in 1989. Our second example is present-day American repatriation practices, as structured by the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA). Although these two instances seem on the surface to be quite different—anthropologists stonewalled repatriation using vitriolic language in the 1960s controversy, while in contemporary repatriation under NAGPRA anthropologists often facilitate the transfer of human remains and objects to indigenous groups—we find the structure of discourse to be remarkably similar, and equally ideological, in the two settings. 214 matthews and jordan The Onondaga Wampum Repatriation Controversy In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “belts” woven from thousands of small tubular marine-shell beads were employed by Iroquois and colonial leaders in elaborate and highly patterned diplomatic rituals (Fenton 1998: 224–239). The beads, widely called wampum based on a New England Algonquian term for them, came in white and purple varieties; the contrasting light and dark colors were used to create abstract designs and representational images within the rectangular belts. For Iroquois peoples, wampum belts served as mnemonic devices, emblems of the truthfulness of the reciprocal obligations pledged during treaty negotiations, and potent reminders of the content and solemnity of the talks. European and later American officials recognized the value of wampum belts in “forest diplomacy” and commissioned belts of their own which they brought to and used in negotiations (Fenton 1985: 17). The degree of European influence on the wampum bead form and the use of belts has been a matter of some scholarly controversy for over a century (Beauchamp 1901; Becker 2002; Ceci 1989; Fenton 1971, 1998; Slotkin and Schmitt 1949). While the details of this debate need not concern us, well-contextualized short tubular shell beads and...