Jenkins ObjectLessonsEthnographic 1994

Object Lessons and Ethnographic Displays: Museum Exhibitions and the Making of
American Anthropology
Author(s): David Jenkins
Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr., 1994), pp. 242-270
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Object Lessons and Ethnographic
Displays: Museum Exhibitions
and the Making of
American Anthropology
DAVID JENKINS
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In the early nineteenth century, many private, well-to-do

rocks, minerals, fossils, insects, skeletons, animal skins, Indi
so on, for their aesthetic appeal or mystical connotations. Th
and miscellaneous collections incited wonder and admiration
leged to see them while communicating a narrative of the p
knowledge, and adventurous spirit of the collector. Referring
mystical, rather than scientific criteria, collectors juxtapos
incongruous hodge-podge of objects in their cabinets-armad
eggs, quartz crystals and rattlesnake rattles, for example. T
sought to celebrate the stability of their belief systems through
understood marginality of the strange freaks and curiosities t
imaginations. The rare, abnormal, bizarre, and the old were
ued.2
In contrast to these fragmentary collections, emerging natura
ums in the late nineteenth century functioned to sort the worl
into drawers, glass-fronted cases, bottles, and filing cabine
sented a shift from delighting in the world's strange offerin
of subjective involvement to an attempt to master and cont
diversity through new forms of conceptualization. Based on s
Acknowledgments: The initial research for this article was supported in

fellowship at the University of Utah, for which I would like to thank the U
Fellowship Committee. I would also like to thank Richard White, David
Letourneau for their comments on various drafts and reviewers for Com
Society and History for their comments on the penultimate draft.
1 See The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth-
Century Europe, Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds. (Oxford: Clar
2 Susan Sheets-Pyenson, "Civilizing by Nature's Example: The Develo
Museums of Natural History, 1850-1900," in Scientific Colonialism: A Cro
son, Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Smit
Press, 198), 352. See also David Murray, Museums: Their History and Th
MacLehose and Sons, 1904).
0010-4175/94/2211-2100 $5.00 ? 1994 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History
242
MUSEUMS AND AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY 243
of classification, spurred by the Darwinian reorganization of ev

theory, and increasingly connected to universities and governm
natural history museums abandoned many of the aesthetic and my
ria that had previously determined the arrangement of objects. In
museums began to emphasize the summary relationships among
sense that this or that specimen metonymically suggested a large
ent whole, and the idea that a general understanding of the wor
inferred adequately by a collection of things removed from their
origin.3
Some mid-nineteenth-century museums, such as P. T. Barnum's American
Museum in New York City, were run solely for profit. Catering to a popular
taste for the exotic and curious, Barum collected and displayed a variety of
live and dead animals, including whales, hippopotami, buffalo, birds, and
bears. Live performers, from midgets to bearded ladies, from American Indi-
ans to tattooed men, from gypsy girls to "industrious fleas," were also promi-
nent. Other museums, such as the National Museum of the United States, later
known as the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, were in-
tended, in Smithson's words, "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge
among men." Although different in intention, the American Museum and the
Smithsonian were similar in kind. Both sought to collect, order, and display
objects of the world.4 Both, moreover, were part of a general trend to objec-
tify and, hence, dominate on a grand scale the world and its inhabitants. The
search for profit and knowledge thus found a similar institutional form.
Many recent studies of the development of natural history museums, expo-
sitions, fairs, and other sorts of collections emphasize the relationships be-
tween capitalism, Western styles of representation, and colonialism; other
studies place greater emphasis on the relationships between systems of classi-
fication, objects chosen for display, and the emerging ethos of scientific
rationality.5 I wish here to take the general perspective articulated in the
3 Sheets-Pyenson, "Civilizing by Nature's Example," 351. See also Sally Gregory Kohlstedt,
"Curiosities and Cabinets: Natural History Museums and Education on the Antebellum Campus,"
Isis, 79:298 (September 1988), 405-26; Silvio A. Bedini, "The Evolution of Science Museums,"
Technology and Culture, 6:1 (Winter 1965), 1-29.
4 Michael M. Ames, Museums, The Public And Anthropology (Vancouver: University of
British Columbia Press, 1986), 13-14.
5 See, for example, Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988); Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonial-
ism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Donna Haraway, Primate Vi-
sions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989);
George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Simon J. Bronner, ed., Consuming Visions:
Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1888-1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989);
Robert W. Rydell, All The World's A Fair: Visions of Empire at American International; Exposi-
tions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Ivan Karp and Steven D.
Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Displays (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Stephen Bann, "'Views of the Past'-Reflections on
244 DAVID JENKINS
studies of Timothy Mitchell; Donna Haraway; Nicholas Thom

Bronner; George Stocking, Jr.; Robert Rydell; and others-a p
which links colonialism, classification, science, and display-and w
it a discussion of American anthropological practices that develop
late nineteenth century. These practices included field expedition
explicit goal of collecting as many "authentic" ethnographic artifac
sible; the invention of archival systems oriented toward the rationa
tion of the tens of thousands of collected artifacts; the reduction
dimensional objects to "inscriptions on paper," resulting in the sim
of their conceptual and symbolic management; and the production o
dinary public displays of other people's material culture.6
Rather than attempting to demonstrate historical cause and effect,
pretive approach I will use is one of "multiple contextualization."7
the contexts discussed, ethnographic objects were the locus of
meanings; and various institutional practices, scholarly debates, a
exhibitions were attempts to stabilize the meanings of those obje
stabilization of meaning had both scientific and public consequenc
important, then, to explore how and to what extent museum and
displays achieved both popular and scientific assent. Such asse
continues to be mixed: The recent movement to repatriate ethnog
jects with the descendants of their makers indicates that the
nineteenth-century collections are still of contemporary concern a
that the meanings of these collections were never completely agr
THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century,

complexity of natural history museums increased dram
the United States, as well as in those countries colonized
By 1900, the United States had 250 natural history mus
France, 300; and Britain, 250. By 1910, more than 2,00
history museums had been established throughout the w
ing, classifying, cataloguing, and exhibiting their rapi
tions.8
the Treatment of Historical Objects and Museums of History (1750-

Visual Depiction and Social Relations, 39-64, Gordon Fyfe and
Routledge, 1988); Carol A. Breckenridge, "The Aesthetics and Polit
India at World Fairs," Comparative Studies in Society and History,
6 For an elaboration of the notion of "inscriptions of paper," see Br
and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands," Knowledge and Societ
of Culture Past and Present, no. 6 (1986), 1-40; Bruno Latour and S
Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton Unive
7 See George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New Yo
8 A. B. Meyer, Studies of the Museums and Kindred Institutions of
Buffalo, and Chicago, with Notes on Some European Institutions (W
By the late nineteenth century, the heavy task of sorting and naming ob
had replaced the earlier unmandated accumulation of natural pheno
Museum collections came not merely to feed idle curiosity with eerie
mens and unworldly anomalies but to allow the scientific mind to dwell
appraise all regions of rational understanding. Thus, as one writer des
the didactic power of natural history collections, "let each object repres
much knowledge, to which the very mention of its name will immed
conjure up a crowd of associations, relationships, and intimate acquainta
and you will then see what a store of real knowledge may be represente
carefully arranged cabinet."9 At first considered legitimate, though mar
objects of contemplation and wonderment, such curios as narwhal tus
shrunken heads became part of a "grid of rationality,"10 equally legitima
in no way marginal, as the value of these sorts of objects filtered throu
emerging ethos of rational inquiry.
In collecting and displaying disparate objects from all around the w
natural history museums generally had a dual purpose of research and e
tion. Scholars and the general public found them useful and edifying, i
enlightening. But the new interest in museum collections went deeper
use, edification, or enlightenment. Not only were such collections "a r
outgrowth of modem tendencies of thought," as G. Brown Goode wrote
1895 article in the journal, Science, but the museum itself was a demo
institution, "more closely in touch with the masses than the universi
learned society." As such, museums not only claimed responsibilities t
scholar and to posterity but also to the public. ' Consequently, "in this
cratic land," Goode argued two years later, museums "should be adapte
ment Printing Office, 1905), 324; Sheets-Pyenson, "Civilizing by Nature's Example," 3

The range and diversity of objects collected by these museums is indeed astonishing. By th
1980s, for example, the Smithsonian Institution alone had amassed more than 60 million
mens, including
four million plant specimens, 26 million insects, 34,146 nests and eggs, several tons of m
fragments, over 20,000 human skulls, numerous ethnological items, 14 million postage st
and even, so it has been said, the ashes of a deceased staff member and his first wife and
pickled brains of two former curators.
Ames, Museums, The Public And Anthropology, 13.

9 Quoted in Sheets-Pyenson, "Civilizing by Nature's Example," 360.
10 The phrase is from William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cam
Harvard University Press, 1953).
1 G. Brown Goode, "The Relationships and Responsibilities of Museums," Science
11:34 (August 1895), 200. 0. T. Mason similarly recognized the democratic nature
museum:
It seems that there is something for everybody on earth to do, and I attribute the ph
rapid growth, at little cost, of the national museum, to the great variety of minds t
spirit and are glad to work for it in their several spheres.
"The Occurrence of Similar Inventions in Areas Widely Apart," Science, 9 (May
246 DAVID JENKINS
the needs of the mechanic, the factory operator, the day laborer, the salesman,
and the clerk, as much as those of the professional man and the man of
leisure."12
With the public in mind, curators presented museum displays as spectacles

intended to entertain as well as instruct, regardless of whether the underly-
ing motive was profit or education. Many displays were set up as if they
were photographs: flattened, bounded, glass-covered, to be viewed (never
touched)13 as a direct connection to the world they represented-the world of
the Bella Coola, say, or the northern timber wolf (Canis lupus) or the common
bullfrog (Rana catesbiana). Other displays were purposely three-dimensional,
constructed either as miniature representations or life-sized copies of animals
and humans and their various activities and environments.
The relationship between objects in display cases and three-dimensional
models was especially crucial for ethnographic displays. Writing of the an-
thropological exhibit in the United States Government Building at the World's
Columbian Exposition in 1893, Frederick Starr noted that
very interesting to the crowd are the cases wherein are displayed life-size figures
dressed in costumes. Some of these are particularly pleasing: the Xivaro, with his
feather belt and crown; the Chippewa blanket painter; two plains Indian women dress-
ing a buffalo hide-one kneeling before a hide hung upon poles scrapes it, while the
other pounds a second hide with a stone maul; a Moki man drilling a turquoise bead
with a pump-drill; a Sioux squaw and children on a pony dragging a travois; a Mojave
man with apron of bark strips, head feathers, and a shell ornament; a Hupa woman and
girl in straw caps and dresses, with a papoose in its pretty basket cradle-these and
other carefully chosen and usually well-executed groups give life, reality, and meaning
to the objects in the cases around.14
Miniature models similarly gave life, reality, and meaning to human and
non-human museum displays, perhaps even "attracting more attention than
full-sized reproductions," as Frederic Lucas noted in The American Museum
Journal in 1911. There were two reasons for the attraction of miniature
models of reptiles, buffalo herds, foxes, Pawnee religious ceremonies, Nav
weaving, and so on, in museum displays: They represented a "whole scene
12 George Brown Goode, "The Museums of the Future," Annual Report of the United States
National Museum: Year Ending June 30, 1897 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,
1898). For a similar point of view concerning the British Museum, see C. H. Read, "A Museum
of Anthropology," in Anthropological Essays, W. H. R. Rivers, R. R. Marett, and Northcote W.
Thomas, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907).
13 Stewart Culin, however, who was instrumental in developing a variety of museum and
exhibition displays in the late nineteenth century, recognized the limitations to a purely visual
arrangement of ethnographic artifacts. See Simon J. Bronner, "Object Lessons: The Work of
Ethnological Museums and Collections," in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of
Goods in America, 1880-1920, Simon J. Bronner, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company,
1989), 232.
14 Frederick Starr, "Anthropology At The World's Fair," Popular Science Monthly, 43 (May to
October 1893), 615-6. The use of the present tense to describe static models and, by implication,
the putatively timeless and characteristic activities of Indians is consonant with the so-called
"ethnographic present" which informed later anthropological discourse.
[that] can be grasped at once as in a picture," and they were indicativ

fact that we know some one wrought the entire work-figures, land
all." There was, in other words, an apparent, completely encom
realism to museum models based on the manner in which they were
point of view of the detached observer. At the same time, howeve
were obviously clever constructions and, as such, called for the adm
the museum goer. Consequently, the interest in, for example, the
Group of Birds at the American Museum,
is due not merely to the skillful reproduction of nature but to the fact
reproduction, that waving branches and jagged rocks have been deftly imita
hand of man. The admiration of the observer is not entirely for the group; a p
the brain that devised it and to the hand that wrought it.15
The apparent realism of these sorts of displays-whether adm

rudely constructed as a flattened surface or in three dimensions, in l
miniature-allowed museums and exhibitions to serve as a substitute for the
direct experience the masses would never have. Indeed, suggested Goode,
"the effect of the museum is somewhat analogous to that of travel in distant
lands."16 The experience was similar: The exotic could be seen and investi-
gated, its reality vouchsafed by the objects one visually encountered. Even a
camera-like consciousness was suggested as appropriate for looking at dis-
plays. One art critic for Century Magazine recommended that her readers
attend the World's Columbian Exposition "wholly conscienceless-not like a
painstaking draftsman, but like a human [K]odak, caring only for as many
pleasing impressions as possible, not for analyzing their worth."17 Mediated
by the sense of sight, thus open and accessible to all, knowledge about the
wider world became a product of a collection of disparate things.
Goode argued that the sense of sight was more efficacious than language for
the important task of teaching object lessons. "In this busy, critical, and
skeptical age," he wrote in 1897,
each man is seeking to know all things, and life is too short for too many words. The
eye is used more and more, the ear less and less, and in the use of the eye, descriptive
15 Federic A. Lucas, "A Note Regarding Human Interest in Museum Exhibits," The American
Museum Journal, 11:6 (October 1911), 188. As with birds, so with non-Western civilizations.
Writing of the Egyptian exhibit at the 1867 Paris Exhibition, Timothy Mitchell notes that
the remarkable realism of such displays made a strange civilization into an object the visitor could
almost touch, yet, to the observing eye, surrounded by the display but excluded from it by the
status of visitor, it remained a mere representation, the picture of some further reality. Thus two
parallel pairs of distinctions were maintained, between the visitor and the exhibit, and between
the exhibit and what it expressed. The representation seemed to be set apart from the political
reality it claimed to portray, as the observing mind is set apart from what it observes.
"The World as Exhibition," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31:2 (April 1989), 223.
16 Goode, "The Relationships and Responsibilities of Museums," 201.
17 Mariana G. van Rensselaer, "At the Fair," Century Magazine, 46 (May 1893), quoted in
Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 47.
248 DAVID JENKINS
writing is set aside for pictures, and pictures in turn are replaced by actual objects. In
the schoolroom the diagram, the blackboard, and the object lesson, unknown thirty
years ago, are universally employed. ... Amid such tendencies, the museum, it
would seem, should find congenial place, for it is the most powerful and useful
auxiliary of all systems of teaching by means of object lessons.18
The late-nineteenth-century museum and exhibition thus defined a new

physical space devoted to display, a space in which objects, facts, and images
could be arranged and rearranged into patterns and classificatory schemes and
in which the public could be entertained and educated by means of the world's
specimens. More than a spectacle that allowed the public to see and appreciate
things of the world, the museum was central to many scholarly investigations.
In it one could find a wealth of material and a place to contemplate cosmic
purpose. 19 Indeed, "it is in the study of objects," wrote Joseph Henry, the first
Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, "that genius finds the most important
and interesting phenomena."20 Although museum collections generated a new
and increasingly cumbersome body of knowledge, they simultaneously gener-
ated new experts to collect, interpret, organize, and display that knowledge.21
With the rapid development of the rationalized collection in the late nine-
teenth century, geniuses and objects found their proper institutional place:
One justified the other.
As with public display, scholarly investigation depended upon the availabil-
ity of objects as things seen. In a 1907 edition of the journal, Science, George
Dorsey criticizes a new policy at the American Museum that resulted in the
storage of the majority of the Museum's ethnographic collections, clearly
making the point about visible availability:
The argument that such collections are always available for study is on the whole
specious. As a matter of fact, at any rate in anthropology, these collections are rarely
demanded for study. The reason for this is, of course, that one does not know what
exists in the storage rooms; nor can a catalogue of storage material ever be of such a
nature as to make such collections of any great value. When one visits a public
institution like the American Museum ... it is not for the purpose of finding what
18 Goode, "The Museums of the Future," 243. This was a common sentiment. See, for
example, Jesse Walter Fewkes, "Anthropology," in The Smithsonian Institution, 1846-1896: The
History of its First Half Century, George Brown Goode, ed. (Washington, D.C.: City of Washing-
ton, 1897), 771-2; Edward Hale Brush, "Popularizing Anthropology: What Museums are Doing
to Make Science Attractive," Scientific American Supplement, 84:2191 (December 29, 1917),
408-11.
19 Curtis M. Hinsley, Jr., Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the
opment of American Anthropology, 1846-1910 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1981), 84.
20 Smithsonian Institution, Annual Report of the Board of Regents for 1852, quoted in Wil-
comb E. Washburn, "Joseph Henry's Conception of the Purpose of the Smithsonian Institution,"
in A Cabinet of Curiosities: Five Episodes in the Evolution of American Museums (Char-
lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1967), 133.
21 See George H. Daniels, American Science in the Age of Jackson (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1968), for an account of how new systems of scientific classification similarly
generated new knowledge and new experts in the early nineteenth century.
they have in storage but to see what they have on exhibition and to take advant
the information which may be thus obtained.22
Dorsey went on to suggest that "the student . .. might be reconciled t

idea of storage of the bulk of the collections if they were in glass cases,
accessible."23 For Dorsey, ethnographic displays worked somewhat
geological cross section: Through its material culture, each tribal group
well as the relationships between tribal groups, should be visible to ins
tion, allowing the observer to make inferences about structure, time, con
and change, the ultimate goal being a global survey of historical and ev
tionary social processes.24 Stored artifacts, even if elaborately describe
catalogued in museum archives, did not allow for such inferences
drawn, thus effectively defeating a museum's purpose. The object lesso
clear: To be useful to the scholar, ethnographic artifacts must be seen.
general, then, the museum and exhibition linked profit, democracy, e
tion, and scholarly research through the detached observer-student, sch
or casual visitor-who was in the privileged position to inspect and appr
the tangible reality of collected objects displayed "behind the clear
glass."25
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY AND GATHERING ARTIFACTS
American anthropology developed in relation to the worl

classifying and exhibiting specimens gathered from distant
ogy, like geology and geography, found itself faced with
descriptive sciences confronted: How could these things w
to understand be brought back without loss. The need to
off and limited by the need to have. As with geology and
cursive language alone proved inadequate to the task.2
22 George A. Dorsey, "Letter to the Editor," Science (n.s.), 25:641

23 Ibid.
24 For geology, "by combining and coordinating. .. local sequences" of geological strata,
"the broad outlines of a global history could be discerned with ever increasing clarity." To this
end, "maps, traverse sections, and columnar sections were the indispensable 'visual language' of
a cognitive project that was profoundly visual from beginning to end." Martin J. S. Rudwick, The
Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Special-
ists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 4, 48.
25 George Brown Goode, "Museum-History and Museums of History," Annual Report of the
United States National Museum (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1897), 73.
26 For an analysis of the importance of visual materials in geology, see Martin Rudwick, "The
Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science: 1760-1840," History of Science, 14:25
(1976), 149-95; for archaeology, see Stephanie Moser, "The Visual Language of Archaeology: A
Case Study of the Neanderthals," Antiquity, 66:253 (1992), 831-44; for anthropology, see David
Jenkins, "The Visual Domination of the American Indian: Photography, Anthropology and Popu-
lar Culture in the Late Nineteenth Century," Museum Anthropology, 17:1 (February 1993), 9-21;
for paleontology, see Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of
History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989); see also James Elkins, "On Visual Desperation and the
Bodies of Protozoa," Representations, 40 (Fall 1992), 33-56; and Lorraine Daston and Peter
Galison, "The Image of Objectivity," Representations, 40 (Fall 1992), 81-128.
250 DAVID JENKINS
and geography, which were not content merely to produce

photographs, sketches, diagrams, and so on-to support verbal de
of the structure of the earth, anthropology also needed somethi
needed the specimens themselves. This included baskets, hun
ments, woven blankets, sacred bundles, totem poles, and so on,
were collected by the thousands in the late nineteenth century. It
the collection and display of other people, either as living represe
vanishing races or as lifelike mannequins intended to demonstra
diversity.
The Bureau of Ethnology, given institutional life by an act of Congress
when the various Western surveys were reorganized as the United States
Geological Survey in 1879, became one organ of a massive effort to collect
Indian artifacts.27 John Wesley Powell, formerly the director of the Geograph-
ical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, became director
of the new Bureau, and then, two years later, when geologist Clarence King
resigned, also became director of the U.S. Geological Survey.28 As Powell
conceived it, the Bureau of Ethnology would continue the anthropological
investigations that he had engaged in over the prior decade, focusing espe-
cially, but not exclusively, on questions of language.29 "All sound anthro-
pologic investigations," Powell wrote in the First Annual Report of the Bureau
of Ethnology (1879-1880), "must have a firm foundation in language. Cus-
toms, laws, governments, institutions, mythologies, religions, and even arts
can not be properly understood without a fundamental knowledge of the
languages which express the ideas and thoughts embodied therein."30
In an 1880 letter to Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Spencer F.
Baird, Powell further categorized his studies of American Indians into
1. Somatology-skeletons and especially the skull.
2. Philology-languages of North American Indians studied and tentative classifi-
27 For these surveys, see Richard A. Bartlett, Great Surveys of the American West (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1962); William H. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The
Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978);
Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening
of the West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).
28 Powell seems to have dropped out of the history of anthropology written by some anthro-
pologists. Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York: Harper and Row,
1968), 255, passes off Powell in half a paragraph, calling him "another influential but dis-
tressingly undisciplined dabbler in anthropological evolutionism." Elman Service's more recent
A Century of Controversy: Ethnological Issues from 1860 to 1960 (New York: Academic Press,
1985) mentions Powell only once in passing.
29 See the eight volumes of Contributions to North American Ethnology (Washington: Govern-
ment Printing Office, 1877-1893), which Powell began prior to the organization of the BAE as a
means to systematize and disseminate information about American Indians gathered by the
Western surveys.
30 J. W. Powell, "Report of the Director," First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology,
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1881), xv.
MUSEUMS AND AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY 25I
cation made of linguistic stocks; map of United States prepared to show

habitats.
3. Mythology-large collection, myths of various tribes.
4. Sociology-following line pursued by Lewis H. Morgan (results published by
Smithsonian Institution) regarding family, clan, tribe, etc., of North American Indi-
ans.
5. Habits and customs, especially mortuary customs and religious c

6. Technology-especially houses with reference to domestic life; the
ments, and ornaments.
7. Archeology-much done, especially in California, Arizona, New
orado, Utah, and part of Wyoming.
8. History of Indian affairs including treaties, cession of lands by Ind
als; progress in industrial arts; distribution of lands among them; scho
Notwithstanding Powell's insistence on the importance of lin

cultural studies, Baird warned him that "members of Congr
interested in Indian languages, customs, and governments than
for the National Museum-specimens that could be seen by v
capital city."32 From the early Annual Reports of the Bureau,
senses that Baird's warning was unnecessary. Although many of
these reports reflect Powell's categories for linguistic and cultur
tions, there was also a marked concern with the collection of In
destined for analysis, labeling, and museum display. In his "Re
Director" for the Second Annual Report, for example, Powell not
Stevenson's expeditions to New Mexico and Arizona in 1879
lected nearly four thousand Hopi and Zuni artifacts, "the most in
typical of them being [here] illustrated, for the benefit of stud
examine the originals, in three hundred and sixty eight figures
facts included war and hunting implements, clothing, baskets,
pings, images, toys, stone tools, musical instruments, objects u
31 John Wesley Powell to Spencer F. Baird, quoted in Neil M. Judd, The Burea
Ethnology: A Partial History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967),
32 Judd, The Bureau of American Ethnology, 17-18. Judd gives no source for t
however, in a 1883 letter to Powell, Baird connects funding for the Bureau of Et
continued collection of Indian artifacts:
In presenting to Congress, from year to year, the estimate for ethnological research and defending
it against proposed reduction, the Secretary has found the Appropriation Committee extremely
impatient in regard to expenditures other than those looking towards the actual increase of the
ethnological collections in the National Museum. The most potent argument used has been the
assertion that unless we occupy the field at once, we shall find ourselves anticipated therein by
the emissaries of foreign governments, who coming with ample means at their command, and
working with great activity, will sweep the localities before we can take the requisite action. For
these reasons the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution has been very much gratified at the
work done by the Bureau in making such large collections from the Pueblos and the mounds of
New Mexico and Arizona; and it is to be hoped that this work will be continued until the most
complete representation possible is obtained.
Quoted in Nancy J. Parezo, "Cushing as Part of the Team: The Collecting Activities of the
Smithsonian Institution," American Ethnologist, 12:4 (November 1985), 769.
252 DAVID JENKINS
gious ceremonies and games, fabrics, paints, dye stuffs, medicines

other articles." Recognizing that Indian cultures were changing,
ther justified the activities of collectors: "These expeditions have se
just in time, and deposited for permanent study, the materials n
understand the life and history of a most interesting body of peo
Frank Hamilton Cushing, "probably the first professional ethn
along with James and Matilda Coxe Stevenson, Victor Mindeleff, a
rapher John K. (Jack) Hillers, made up the core of the Bureau of
collecting expeditions in the Southwest in the early 1880s. They
cerned with collecting as much as possible, preferably through t
European goods, such as calico cloth and sleigh bells, but also throu
tion, removing baskets and pottery from graves just before leaving t
order to avoid any bad results to our work that might follow
discovery," as Mindeleff noted in a letter to Powell.35
In addition to obtaining artifacts by trade and stealth, Cushing tr
ing with the Hopi, who wanted little to do with trade. He exp
articles of their material culture would be placed in glass-fronted c
enlightenment of Americans and how such placement would pres
artifacts for the Hopi themselves. These were spurious, if not inco
ble, arguments for the Hopi, and they angrily insisted that Cush
Cushing, however, in a pattern typical of many late-nineteenth-ce
thropological collecting expeditions, was determined to stay: The u
ing and wishes of the Hopi and Zuni were less important than wer
of the Bureau. Even the threat of violence was but a small deterrent to the
attempts to collect Hopi artifacts. In a letter to Mindeleff, who had left the
Hopi to secure packing materials, Cushing, fearful of bloodshed, wrote:
One matter ... is certain:-we can make no collection here, save by force, for the
body of the people send word in the letter they dictated to the chiefs and caciques of the
Americans, that they wish for war this month and no later; that they wish to spare us as
the bearers of such messages; that they are prepared to die, as through the power of
their gods and priests they shall live again, and that too, through the total destruction of
the Americans. They beg for war and say: "When the Cacique of the Americans sit on
our decapitated heads, then they can dress our bodies in their clothes, feed our bodies
with their victuals, they can have our things to take with them to their houses of their
fathers.36
33 J. W. Powell, "Report of the Director," Second Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology,
1880-1881 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1883), xxxvi-xxxvii. See also James
Stevenson, "Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Indians of New Mexico
and Arizona in 1879" and "Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Indians of
New Mexico in 1880," both in the Second Annual Report. Parezo sets the figure of objects
collected during the 1879 expedition at 6,000 ("Cushing as Part of the Team," 765).
34 Fred Eggan, "One Hundred Years of Ethnology and Social Anthropology," in One Hundred
Years of Anthropology, J. O. Brew, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 125.
35 Mindeleff to Powell, 15 January 1883, quoted in Parezo, "Cushing as Part of the Team,"
770.
36 Quoted in Parezo, "Cushing as Part of the Team," 769-70.
Despite the danger (Cushing simply moved on to collect at another less

village), the goals of anthropological expeditions under Powell's dir
were clear: gather as much material as possible; number and label each a
and record other information, such as native terms for the articles, how the
made, their use and meaning, the quality of their construction, and so on
From field expedition to museum display, ethnographic objects were
ject to several transformations. Most obvious was the change in context
Hopi culture to American institution. Less obvious were the transforma
from material objects to written and visual summaries of those objects.
The field labels, numbers, and descriptions of artifacts, as Powell re
nized, provided the link for further museum study, as well as the mean
archival systematization. As with natural history collections, ethnogra
investigations minimally required a way of inscribing information about
imens that was both connected to and stood apart from the specimens t
selves. This requirement became central to the practice of collecting. T
National Museum, for example, in its instructions for collecting every
from fossil plants to birds' eggs, batrachians to mollusks, dragon flies
Indian baskets, continually stressed the importance of proper names a
bels: "A man who is not willing to take the trouble of properly labelin
specimens need not go to the trouble of collecting them, for in ou
specimens without data as to the exact locality, at least, are not worth
alcohol they are kept in." Thus, unlike wonder cabinets that had no nee
labels, museum collections came to depend upon proper names, since wit
them there is no possibility of consistent classification.37 One result wa
field expeditions had an archival counterpart that worked as much wi
scriptions about specimens as with the specimens themselves (an anthr
pological practice that has drawn little interest or analysis, being neit
exotic nor obviously problematic).38
The labeled, numbered, and described artifacts brought back from the
were further systematized by the collectors themselves or by other mu
37 Leonhard Stegneger, "Directions for Collecting Reptiles and Batrachians," United

National Museum, Bulletin, no. 39: Part E (1891), 6. These collecting instructions, as Pa
of the Bulletin, were published between 1891 and 1902. See especially Part J, "Directio
Collecting Specimens and Information Illustrating the Aboriginal Use of Plants," Frede
Coville (1895); Part P, "Directions for Collectors of American Basketry,"
0. T. Mason (1902); and Part Q, "Instructions to Collectors of Historical and Anthropological
Specimens, Especially Designed for Collectors in Insular Possessions of the United States,"
William H. Holmes and 0. T. Mason, (1902).
38 This is similar, however, to the more general problem of ethnographic writing. See George
E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fisher, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental
Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); James Clifford and
George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-
Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Joh-
annes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983).
254 DAVID JENKINS
employees. One method of systematization was to transform

dimensional artifacts into two-dimensional drawings and sketches
reproduced as lithographs and woodcuts in early Bureau reports. T
only the application of proper labels but also the ability to produce
consistent images became a criterion of ethnographic objectivity.3
reliance on optical consistency, as Bruno Latour points out in his
contemporary scientific practices, produces a kind of "semioti
neity": Fragments of the empirical world that are picturable can be
bounded, and given the same scale. In this reduced and homogeniz
Hopi kachina, a Zuni fetish, a Ute hunting stick, a Navajo sand pa
for that matter, a new species of fossil fish or a view of Mount of
Cross in the Rockies) can be presented in the same publication and in
scale. The result is a reduction of the empirical world to new, mo
manageable objects that are, in Latour's phrase, "mobile. . . im
presentable, readable and combinable with one another."40 That thi
reduction and summary was central to anthropology in the late n
century can be seen in the Bureau of Ethnology's annual reports: Th
reports alone contain more than four thousand illustrations.
A second form of systematization of ethnographic artifacts was
rectly archival. In a 1900 review of the Field Columbian Museum i
which inherited many of the impressive ethnographic collections d
the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and in an earlier survey of
anthropological museums, George Dorsey explained this system an
its consequences. The technology of archival systematization was s
practice, tedious:
Every newly acquired collection, immediately upon its arrival, is assigne
and given an "accession card." This card bears, in addition to a serial nu
name of the collector, the manner of acquisition of the collection by t
[author's note: not the manner of acquisition by the collector], the place and
collection, the numbers assigned to the specimens, and a general statem
nature of the collection.
This information, written out in duplicate and placed in a "stout envelope,"

was then sent to the offices of the curator and the recorder. In addition,
each object in the collection is then numbered to correspond with the number on a card
which bears the name of the object, with a drawing of the same if deemed necessary,
the tribe or locality whence the specimen came, the name of the collector, and finally
the location of the specimen in the museum-whether it be on exhibition, and, if so,
where, or whether it has been placed in the temporary or exchange storage room.
Next, specimens were "transferred to the department inventory books under

the appropriate numbers" in the form of cards (numbered, dated, labelled,
drawn, and located in "museum space"). Such transferral was still insuffi-
39 On the subject of optical consistency, see William Ivins, On The Rationalization of Sight
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1973).
4" Latour, "Visualization and Cognition," 7.
cient, however, as "the cards are then collectively filed in a card cabinet
the accession number, each group of cards being provided with an
card." Finally, as if exhausting the impulse for archival control, "the
tion is . . . indexed in a single large volume under the name of the colle
the locality, and the tribe."41
For Dorsey, the archival system formally mirrored the actual displa
artifacts. As with ethnographic displays, so with archival representati
those displays:
It can be determined at a glance what collections are in possession of the depart
from any locality or tribe in the world, as well as ascertained what collectio
department may possess from any individual collector or donor or through purc
The results were impressive. Between 1894 and 1895, some 15,000 ob
were catalogued and 650 labels prepared; the next year (between 1895 a
1896), some 13,000 objects were catalogued; and the following year (be
1896 and 1897), 10,000. Between 1897 and 1898, the records of the Field
Columbian Museum were rewritten, producing nearly 42,000 catalogued ob-
jects, 17,960 of which were entered into inventory books. Between 1898 and
1899, ten thousand more objects were entered into the catalogues, with
15,912 more entries in the inventory books.43
For the "entire Museum" the archival systematization of ethnographic arti-
facts became more important than field expeditions: "Expenditures have been
made more in the direction of classification than in reinstallation; in working
over old rather than producing new material; and in labeling, numbering, and
cataloguing specimens."44 The shift in expenditure indicates that the transfor-
mation from material culture to museum specimen had become institutionally
secure. Each step-field collection, proper labeling, archival systematiza-
tion, and museum display-was apparently linked to the prior step, ensuring
the authenticity and stabilizing the meanings of ethnographic collections.
Thus, although in the midst of his summary Dorsey lamented the loss of
aboriginal Hopi culture, he was nonetheless relieved that "katcinas, masks of
katcinas, bahos or prayer-offerings, stone implements, tools and utensils,"
and so on would be preserved and readily accessible for museum study and
public exhibition.45
41 George A. Dorsey, "Notes on the Anthropological Museums of Central Europe," American

Anthropologist (n.s.), vol. 1 (1899), 473. This kind of systematization was practiced at many
other museums. Between 1867 and 1884, Edward Foreman made 45,000 entries in the Smithso-
nian ethnological accession catalogues, including more than 5,000 sketches. See Hinsley, Sav-
ages and Scientists, 71-75.
42 Dorsey, "Notes on the Anthropological Museums of Central Europe," 473-4.
43 George A. Dorsey, "The Department of Anthropology of the Field Columbian Museum-A
Review of Six Years," American Anthropologist (n.s.), vol. 2 (1900), 252-9.
44 Ibid., 253. Dorsey is here quoting from the second annual report of the director of the Field
Columbian Museum.
45 Ibid., 261. As Hinsley notes of the career of another collector of ethnographic artifacts, th
process of collecting contributed to both knowledge about and the annihilation of native Amer
cans. Savages and Scientists, 71.
256 DAVID JENKINS
Dorsey ends his summary of six years of anthropological collecting with a

call for greater effort, the results destined for the card catalogue, inventory
book, and museum display:
It is recognized that there are vast regions of America, and even one entire great
continent and many regions of other continents, which are but poorly represented or
not represented at all, and to these regions must be directed the energies of the future,
if the high educational objects of the Museum are to be adequately fulfilled.46
UNPACKING THE HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS
Given the practices of anthropological expeditions, the

tutions geared toward gathering Indian artifacts for stud
archival techniques oriented toward rationalizing catalo
specimens, it is clearly important to unpack the histor
collection in order to understand the way in which mus
helped define American anthropology, indeed America
gorizing, hierarchizing, stratifying, and displaying dom
by exhibiting lifelike representations of the native peop
century Americans wished to displace. As with other sc
dominant, variously authorized visual displays constitu
pological practice. A visual language developed, into
peoples and their material culture were fitted. The visu
pology, however, ultimately had less scientific efficac
guage developed, for example, in geology.47 The effica
displays was found elsewhere-in the perpetuation of sc
in notions of social evolution which culminated in the
Victorian America.48
The eventual arrangement of objects-rocks, butterflies, fossil reptiles,
stuffed birds, Navajo metalwork, Haida canoes, Hopi pottery, and so on-for
public display was not neutral. Collections did not merely reflect abstract
scientific principles subject to change as science itself changed. As important
were the ethnographic museums and expositions, themselves new objects and
46 Dorsey, "The Department of Anthropology of the Field Columbian Museum-A Review of
Six Years," 265.
47 There is continuity betweenf the maps, sketches, diagrams, and so on produced by
nineteenth-century geologists and the visual materials produced by twentieth-century geologists.
Techniques of fact construction have become more sophisticated, but the scientific usefulness of
visual displays remains the same. Anthropology has no similar continuity. Indeed, it is difficult to
imagine a crisis of representation in contemporary geology similar to the crisis of representation
in contemporary anthropology.
48 See Rydell, All the World's a Fair, chs. 1-2, 10-71. On science and race, see William
Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815-1859 (Chi-
cago: Chicago University Press, 1960). On race and American Indians, see Richard Drinnon,
Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1980). For an overview of the history of European conceptions of American
Indians, see Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., "White Conceptions of Indians," Handbook of North
American Indians, vol. 4 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1988).
techniques of visualization that functioned to stabilize certain culturally

nificant categories, especially evolutionary progress, hierarchy, and r
stake in the physical arrangement of objects was the relationship betw
knowledge and power, between an interpretation of the world and the
to justify that interpretation. By offering visible evidence-a "thea
proof"49-of the natural progress from savagery to barbarism to civiliza
for example, museums and expositions linked science with the concern
American imperialism. In this way, ethnological displays validated the
pian projections of many late-nineteenth-century elites-those who, in
cert with federal funding, supported by government surveys, and back
the prestige of science, produced an interpretation of social reality dep
upon theories of racial development, national progress, and, in som
stances, the ultimate disappearance of native peoples.
The operations of museums and exhibitions, however, often gave th
pression of good intentions to the practices and acquisitions of
nineteenth-century American anthropology. Powell and Baird, for exa
hoped that the Indian exhibit at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in
delphia would foster a greater understanding of and respect for the rich
Indian culture-an understanding and respect, it should be noted, g
from the standpoint of the solid beneficence of civilized man.50 Yet t
exhibition of Indian artifacts and images met with the fate of all such e
tions: Its objects, however labelled and displayed, did not supply their
narratives and so were open to a variety of interpretations. Many wri
found the display of North American Indians instructive and interestin
part because it was contextualized by other displays concerned with n
history. Frank Norton, for example, writing in the Illustrated Historical
ter of the Centennial Exhibition, noted that
with regard to the Indian collection, it may be remarked that a stranger to the
and customs of this curious people can learn more about them in this section th
could in any other way, except by living with them. Here are concentrated the
and traditions of tribes scattered thousands of miles apart. Every article is care
labeled, and the studious observer will here find much to repay him.
Norton goes on to mention how cases containing the North American

exhibit were juxtaposed with those containing various objects from th
partment of Natural History, including "insects . . . injurious to plants,
stuffed birds, 3,000 imitation fruits made of plaster of paris, 100 kin
tobacco, 800 samples of cereal grains, and various specimens of wo
wood. Also juxtaposed with Indian "curiosities" were cases of minerals
ble, cobalt-ammonia-sulfate, crystallized ores housed in "a case orname
49 I am here borrowing Latour's felicitous phrase, "Visualization And Cognition: Thi

With Eyes And Hands," 19.
50 Robert A. Trennert, Jr. "A Grand Failure: The Centennial Indian Exhibition of
Prologue, 6:2 (Summer 1974), 124.
258 DAVID JENKINS
with deer-heads and horns"), specimens of algae and eel grass, and of sea-
men's oilcloth clothing. In this heterogenous context, miscellaneous eth-
nographic artifacts, including "snow spectacles from the Esquimaux . . .
snowshoes from Carriboo, a pack-saddle, once the property of Sioux," and so
on, seem hardly remarkable.51 Another set of things to look at.
Atlantic Monthly editor William Dean Howells, however, had a different
reaction to the same displays. He complained that
the red man, as he appears in effigy and in photograph in this collection, is a hideous
demon, whose malign traits can hardly inspire any emotion softer than abhorrence. In
blaming our Indian agents for malfeasance in office, perhaps we do not sufficiently
account for the demoralizing influence of merely beholding those false and pitiless
savage faces; moldy flour and corrupt beef must seem altogether too good for them.52
For both Norton and Howells, the various objects in an exposition created
meaning or allowed for the creation of meaning; and the manifestly visible
display of fragments and pieces of the empirical world validated that mean-
ing. Clearly, however, the material stability of the ethnographic objects on
display at the Centennial Exposition was matched by an interpretive insta-
bility, producing meanings which ran the gamut from being consonant with,
and antithetical to, the intentions of Baird and Powell.
The problem of interpretive instability had been addressed but not solved
by the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Systematic arrange-
ments of ethnographic artifacts had replaced the earlier chaotic displays of the
Centennial Exposition. There were, however, several different systems used
at Chicago. Frederic Ward Putnum, head of the Peabody Museum of American
Archaeology and Ethnology, was in charge of the anthropology exhibit (De-
partment M of the Exposition) and arranged ethnographic objects from all
around the world according to historical and geographical criteria. Fair goers,
in their tour of the exhibit of North American Indians, for example, could
begin with the "pre-historic cliff-dwellers, who faded from history's pages
when the earth was yet young"; continue "to the Aztec's early but abundant
civilization and art, as evidenced in their ruined fanes"; and finally proceed
"to the representatives of the races found and dispossessed by Columbus and
the hordes who followed him." Those "races" not yet dispossessed. "Indians
of every kind" were arranged geographically, beginning with the "Esquimaux
from the extreme north" and ending with the "Papagos and Yakuis from the
extreme southern border of the United States and Mexico."53 A slow walk
51 Frank H. Norton, Illustrated Historical Register of the Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia,

1876, and of the Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1878 (New York: American News Company,
1879), 100-10.
52 William Dean Howells, "A Sennight of the Centennial," Atlantic Monthly, 38 (July 1876),
103.
53 A Week At The Fair (Rand, McNally, and Company, 1893), 106. See also Putnum's own
description, in Trumbull White and William Igleheart, The World's Columbian Exposition, Chi-
cago, 1893 (Philadelphia: Elliot and Beezley, 1893), 415-35.
through these displays was sufficient to encompass several thousand y

several dozen tribes. Once outside the Anthropological Building, fair
could confirm their observations of Indian life by looking at the real
encampment of several hundred Indians from different tribes, living
tatives of rapidly disappearing aboriginal cultures. According to one
num's assistants, the lesson to be learned was clear: "From the first
last," these exhibits "show the advancement of evolution of man."54
In a separate exhibit, the National Museum, under the direction of
Tufton Mason, arranged artifacts according to linguistic criteria. Pow
of the languages of North America, completed in 1891, provided the
this ethnographic display. Mason chose sixteen language families out
ell's fifty-seven language stocks and arranged in separate alco
nographic artifacts and lifesized mannequins representative of India
each language family. By this arrangement, with a large copy of Pow
in the center, Mason intended to demonstrate one of the prominent
pological problems of the day, which revolved around the relationship
language, race, material culture, and systems of thought.55 Thus, as F
Starr noted in his review of anthropology at the exposition, by movi
the map to the displays, fair goers could discover that "tribes speak
guages of one stock may show marked diversity in arts if living in
surroundings, while tribes widely differing in language may show in
unity if subject to similar environments."56
Other ethnographic displays were less directly didactic. Some, suc
large-scale reproduction of the Cliff Palace, Mancos Caiion, Colorado
constructed and run for profit. This five-story-high exhibit included
trails for the adventurous to traverse" and "cliff relics for the inspectio
scientist, student, or curious." Its realism was such, reported one gu
to the fair, "as to cause many an old frontiersman instinctively to loo
for the treacherous Utes." Admission: twenty-five cents.57 Other d
implicitly ranked in an evolutionary hierarchy along the Midway P
were of living representatives of various cultures who constructed and
their traditional dwellings, wore traditional clothing, and performed t
al activities. Along the Midway, one could delight in or find disturbin
ples of savage and barbarous peoples, such as the savage Dahom
"blacker than buried midnight and as degraded as the animals which p
jungles of their dark land" or the barbarous Samoans.58 Still other d
54 Harlan Ingersoll Smith, "Man and His Works: The Anthropology Building at th
Columbian Exposition," American Antiquarian, 15 (March 1893); quoted in Ryde
World's a Fair, 57.
55 Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 110.
56 Starr, "Anthropology at the World's Fair," 615.
57 A Week At the Fair, 102.
58 Rydell, All The World's A Fair, 64-68. The quote is from Edward B. McDowell, "The
World's Fair Cosmopolis," Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, 36 (October 1893).
260 DAVID JENKINS
such as Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, which was performed outside
official fairgrounds, reenacted on a sham battlefield the disposse
native Americans.59
Built by anthropologists or entrepreneurs, exhibitions of non-Western

peoples were all extraordinarily popular. It is unclear, however, whether the
millions of fair goers distinguished anthropological from entrepreneurial pre-
sentations of other cultures or, if they did, whether it mattered for their
understanding of those cultures. Nevertheless, by the World's Columbian
Exposition, anthropologists had begun to stabilize the meanings of eth-
nographic displays, sorting out among themselves the arrangement of eth-
nographic objects that best suited competing theoretical claims. In the context
of new and emerging institutional structures that made large-scale anthro-
pological science possible, the anthropologists' ongoing theoretical debates
reflected divergent visions of proper anthropological science.
TWO TRENDS IN EXHIBITION PRACTICES
Two organizational trends are apparent in late-ninet

and exhibition practices that partially account for the
meaning of ethnographic displays. The first shares fe
organizational impulse that marked the changes in s
nomic life associated with the industrial revolution. O
specialization, experts, a quest for efficiency, and bu
creasingly characterized archives and museums after
late-nineteenth-century business and government, m
into bureaucratic hierarchies and assigned a definite c
retary of the Smithsonian Institution Joseph Henry w
organizational hierarchies. In an 1850 letter to Sp
prospective assistant, Henry wrote that
the assistants are responsible to the Secretary and the Secret
all communications intended for the Regents or the Pub
59 One failed display of the social promise of native American

realism of the Exposition. In contrast to the keen interest in va
fairgoers showed little enthusiasm for the Bureau of Indian Affair
in which, in commissioner Daniel Browning's words, "the new co
American citizenship" were visibly apparent: "Indian youth actually
work bench, the kitchen stove, and the sewing machine." The fa
exhibit attests to the interest in the exotic Indian as worthy of ins
guise of the civilized white man. See Robert A. Trennert, Jr.,
World's Fairs and Expositions, 1893-1904," American Indian Qua
60 For reviews of the work on the late-nineteenth- and early-twe
impulse, see Louis Galambos, "The Emerging Organizational Syn
History," Business History Review, 44:3 (Autumn 1970); "Techno
Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesi
57:4 (Winter 1983). For an account of the structural shift in gov
Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion
Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
MUSEUMS AND AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY 26I
hands. These restrictions I am convinced are for the good of the whole and no
would tend sooner to destroy the usefulness of the institution than the division of it
a number of separate interests. The whole establishment must be a unit and the effor
every one connected with it must be directed to the development of every part o
plan.61
Sounding curiously like his understanding of the integration of the natural

world ("Nothing in the whole system of nature is isolated or unimportant. The
fall of a leaf and the motion of a planet are governed by the same laws"62),
Henry's notion of proper institutional organization was indicative of the gen-
eral bureaucratization of museums throughout the United States. Indeed,
"Cabinets of Curiosities" became museums as museum employees profession-
alized themselves and their place of work according to distinct lines of author-
ity.63
A second and, for anthropological theory, more important organizational
trend affected the collections themselves. Museum objects, however dis-
played, increasingly came to exemplify categories that preserved the hier-
archical structure of scientific classification. Thus, as Goode noted in the
Annual Report of the United States National Museum: Year Ending June 30,
1897, "the people's museum should be much more than a house full of
specimens in glass cases. It should be a house full of ideas, arranged with the
strictest attention to system."64
The attention to system, however, had been a matter of some controversy,
both for museum employees and anthropologists concerned with ethnological
collections. Ten years before Goode's report and five years before the World's
Columbian Exposition, Otis T. Mason, the director of the ethnological collec-
tion at the National Museum, entered into a debate with Franz Boas over the
61 Quoted in Washburn, "Joseph Henry's Conception of the Purpose of the Smithsonian

Institution," 137.
62 Joseph Henry, Annual Report of the Board of Regentsfor 1855 (Smithsonian Institution), 20;
quoted in Washburn, "Joseph Henry's Conception of the Purpose of the Smithsonian Institution,"
133.
63 H. H. Frese, Anthropology and the Public: The Role of Museums (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960),
8. See also Ira Jacknis, "Franz Boas and Exhibits," and Curtis M. Hinsley, "From Shell-Heaps to
Stelae: Early Anthropology at the Peabody Museum," both in Objects and Others: Essays on
Museums and Material Culture, George W. Stocking, Jr., ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1985). By the 1980s, the professionalization of museums began to pose problems for some
curators. Museum exhibits
could be exciting work ... but they are not because they are collective endeavors performed
within an hierarchical organization that operates according to established standards and sched-
ules. The intellectual freedom the individual scholarly entrepreneur has been taught to expect as a
natural right does not prepare such a person for the kind of team work and public responsibility
required in museums today.
Ames, Museums, The Public and Anthropology, 20.

64 George Brown Goode, "The Museums of the Future," Annual Report of the United States
National Museum: Year Ending June 30, 1897 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,
1898), 58.
262 DAVID JENKINS
proper arrangement of ethnographic artifacts.65 Mason had suggested a b

logical analogy for the construction of museum displays. Ethnographic ar
facts, in particular what he called inventions, "may be divided into famil
genera, and species":
They may be studied in their several ontogenies (that is, we may watch the unfo
of each individual thing from its raw material to its finished production). They m
regarded as the products of specific evolution out of natural objects serving h
wants and up to the most delicate machine performing the same function. They m
modified by their relationship, one to another, in sets, outfits, apparatus, just as
insect and flower are co-ordinately transformed. They observe the law of change u
environment and geographical distribution.66
A logical corollary to the biological analogy is that similar inventions

long bow, say, and a crossbow-found in different geographic areas have
underlying and fundamental connection.67 There are three possible cause
this connection: "the migration of a certain race of people who made th
invention; the migration of ideas-that is, an invention may be made by
certain race or people and taught or loaned to peoples far removed in time
place"; and exposure to the same stress and resources resulting in the sa
inventions because "in human culture, as in nature elsewhere, like ca
produce like effects."68
65 On this debate see Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, ch. 4; George Stocking, Jr., "Introd
tion," in The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911 (New York: Basic Books, 1
and "From Physics to Ethnology," in Race, Culture, and Evolution (Chicago: University
Chicago Press, 1982); Regena Diebold Darnell, The Development of American Anthropol
1879-1920: From the Bureau of American Ethnology to Franz Boas (Ph.D. dissert., Unive
of Pennsylvania, 1969 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms); Joan Mark, Four Anthropologists
American Science in its Early Years (New York: Science History Publications, 1980), 32-
Marshall Hyatt, Franz Boas-Social Activist: The Dynamics of Ethnicity (New York: Green
Press, 1990), 18-21; John Buettner-Janush, "Boas and Mason: Particularism versus Generaliza-
tion," American Anthropologist, 59:2 (April 1957). This debate about proper classification
not new or exclusively anthropological. See Daniels, American Science in the Age of Jack
102-3, for an earlier example concerning minerals.
66 Quoted in Franz Boas, "The Occurrence of Similar Inventions in Areas Widely Apa
Science, 9 (May 1887), 485.
67 Claude Levi-Strauss nicely characterizes the incoherence of the biological analogy to hu-
man inventions.
For even if the concept of species should be discarded once and for all in the development of
genetics, what made-and still makes-the concept valid for the natural historian is the fact that
a horse indeed begets a horse and that, in the course of a sufficient number of generations, Equus
caballus is the true descendant of Hipparion. The historical validity of the naturalist's reconstruc-
tions is guaranteed, in the final analysis, by the biological link of reproduction. An ax, on the
contrary, does not beget another ax. There will always be a basic difference between two identical
tools, or two tools which differ in function but are similar in form, because one does not stem
from the other; rather, each of them is the product of a system of representations.
"Introduction: History and Anthropology," Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books,
1963), 4.
68 Quoted in Boas, "The Occurrence of Similar Inventions in Areas Widely Apart," 485. See
Mason's reply, "The Occurrence of Similar Inventions in Areas Widely Apart," Science, 9 (May
1887), 534-5. See also 0. T. Mason, "Migration Of Things And Memories," Science (n.s.),
6:132 (July 1897), for an explication of the second cause. With regards to the migration of ideas,
This way of thinking about inventions, to which Boas objected, produced a

method of arranging ethnographic artifacts according to evolutionary and
typological (one is tempted to say bureaucratic) criteria. For Mason, it was
crucial to arrange artifacts-for example, hunting implements-from the
most primitive to the most advanced, in order to facilitate the study of their
evolution. Spears, throwing sticks, bows and arrows, crossbows, flintlocks,
late-nineteenth-century rifles, and so on, gathered from a diverse group of
peoples, were placed in a series which stressed the "natural history" of the
invention while demonstrating the "law of evolution" of material objects.69
"The series should begin," Goode wrote, "with the simplest types and close
with the most perfect and elaborate objects of the same class which human
effort has produced."70 This often meant that nineteenth-century society
achieved an exalted status in museum displays, a status which naturally pro-
moted what one historian has called "a logic of superiority by virtue of
evolutionary transcendence."71 For scholars, as well as for the public, muse-
ums tended reciprocally to confirm the ideas that they sought to display.
Boas, however, objected. "Classification," he insisted, "is not explana-
tion." The arrangement of similar artifacts into a series "does not serve the
purpose of ethnological collections." He illustrated his point with an example
from music: "From a collection of string instruments, flutes, or drums of
'savage' tribes and the modem orchestra, we cannot derive any conclusion but
that similar means have been applied by all peoples to make music." In other
words, no necessary connection of migration, like cause, or evolutionary
progress, should be postulated as undergirding the unity of the collection.
Indeed, "the only object worth studying," the "character" of various people's
music, "cannot be understood from the single instrument, but requires a
complete collection of the single tribe." To do otherwise results in particular
loss: "By regarding a single implement outside of its surroundings, outside of
other inventions of the people to whom it belongs, and outside of other
phenomena affecting that people and its productions, we cannot understand its
meaning. "72
In the search for the meaning of inventions, Boas argued that another
Mason notes that "all who have studied the arts of primitive races know how quickly their plastic
minds respond to a congenial suggestion."
69 See Otis Tufton Mason, Primitive Travel and Transportation, Report of the United States
National Museum for 1894 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896), and Otis T. Mason,
The Origins of Inventions: A Study of Industry Among Primitive Peoples (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1899). In the conclusion to this latter work (p. 413), Mason noted that
finally, in contemplating the exalted position to which acquired knowledge and experience have
brought the favoured race, we are apt to forget how many have helped to place them there. The
many patents and inventions now on the earth are only a "handful to the tribes that slumber in its
bosom."
70 Goode, United States National Museum, Annual Report (1884); quoted in Hinsley, Sav
and Scientists, 94.
71 Hinsley, Savages and Scientists, 91.
72 Franz Boas, "The Occurrence of Similar Inventions in Areas Widely Apart," 485, 486.
264 DAVID JENKINS
criterion needed to be added to the three Mason proposed: "unlike causes

produce like effects." Rather than merely complicating the existing arrange-
ment of museum collections, however, this criterion "overthrows the whole
system" advocated by Mason.73 For Boas, "in ethnology, all is individuality."
Consequently, the museum must demonstrate, through its collections, not
only the culturally specific history of a set of artifacts but also the fact that
"civilization is not something absolute . . . that it is relative, and that our
ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes."74 Museum
displays that culminated in the evolutionary superiority of nineteenth-century
society were thus seriously in error.
In contrast to Mason's evolutionary and typological scheme, Boas advo-
cated arranging objects according to tribes, "in order to teach the peculiar
style of each group," stressing especially geographical and historical determi-
nants. Mason replied that "in a museum properly constructed," one could
arrange objects according to tribe, at the same time that the evolutionary
sequences were preserved:
It is possible to arrange the cases in the form of a checkerboard, so that by going in a

certain direction the parallels of cases represent races or tribes or locations. By inspect-
ing the same cases in a direction at right angles to the former, the visitor may study all
the products of human activity in classes according to human wants.75
Powell defended part of Mason's scheme but argued against Boas's sugges-
tion that museum displays be constructed according to tribe, believing that
such an arrangement of artifacts was impossible. Indeed, "there is no science
of ethnology, for the attempt to classify mankind in groups has failed on every
hand." Arts, technologies, institutions, opinions, and philosophies "may be
classified, but the results thereof are in no proper sense a classification of
peoples." In a passage that prefigures many contemporary anthropological
and historical orientations, Powell suggested that the impossibility of classify-
ing peoples into more or less stable tribal groups and, hence, the impossibility
of a science of ethnology was the direct result of historical contingency76:
73 Ibid.
74 Franz Boas, "Museums of Ethnology and their Classification," Science, 9 (June 1887),
589.
75 Mason, "The Occurrence of Similar Inventions in Areas Widely Apart," 534. Goode
offered a variation on this theme:
Unable to decide whether the correct classification for cultural material was by function or by
cultural association, he arranged such items according to a double classification in the halls of his
museum. He carefully equipped his exhibit cases with casters and, in a matter of an hour or two,
could have the entire display rearranged by either function or cultural association as the need
required. However, the triumph of scientific influence is apparent in the fact that he regarded the
functional classification as the "permanent" arrangement, and the cultural one as only temporary.
G. Carroll Lindsay, "George Brown Goode," in Keepers of the Past, Clifford L. Lord, ed.
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 138.
76 See Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1982); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great
Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Unlike, however,
On the discovery of America there were probably many more than twenty-five thou-
sand tribes inhabiting the country, each a little band of people organized into a body-
politic, and autonomous, at least for all domestic purposes. But probably within the
first year, changes were made in some of these bodies-politic: some coalesced by treaty
or conquest, others divided through disagreement, individuals from some tribes took
up their abode and became incorporated with other tribes: and so, by various methods
from time to time, all these bodies-politic were in a flux; so that a hundred years after
the discovery of America it is not probable that there existed any one tribe which could
claim to be the pure and simple descendant, without loss, mixture, or change, of any
tribe existing at the time of the discovery.77
The consequences for museums were clear. Any collection "properly repre-
sentative" of American Indian tribes "would have to be collected . . . all in
one day, by an army of collectors." Any other collection of tribal artifacts
"would have no proper significance." Yet such a properly representative collec-
tion, impossibly huge, "would have very little scientific value." Powell con-
cluded that "an anthropological museum, therefore, is an impossibility..
The scientific or technological classification is all that remains."78
This was not, for Powell, a rejection of a science of anthropology. Such a
science, however, must be based on other "subsidiary sciences," including
the biology of man, which is the study of the animal man, and may be considered as
belonging to biology proper, or anthropology; . . . psychology, which is a part of
anthropology; . . . technology, which includes all the arts of mankind; . . . sociology,
which includes all the institutions of mankind; . . . philology, which includes the
languages of mankind; and . . . philosophy, which includes the opinions of mankind.79
What Powell clearly rejected were tribal classifications of peoples and any
museum arrangements based on such classifications. Powell further made his
point with an analogy to zoology:
It is said that prairie-dogs, owls, and rattlesnakes successively occupy certain under-
ground habitations on the plains, but they are not thereby classed as one group in
systematic zoology; and he who supposes that the multifarious tribes in one region of
America are of the same stock, or can in any proper way be classified as one, has failed
to understand the ethnology of the American races.80
The point at which one culture leaves off and another begins, Powell implied,
becomes the arbitrary construct of the analyst.
Boas responded to Powell's criticisms by noting that, as a practical matter,
the question of the tribal arrangement of artifacts "has been solved by numer-
ous museums, even much larger than the national museum." Boas went on to
suggest that the ideal museum arrangement should in fact be organized by
these moder orientations, Powell maintained an evolutionary perspective that relied on Lewis
Henry Morgan, Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress From Savagery
Through Barbarism to Civilization (New York: Henry Holt, 1877).
77 John Wesley Powell, "Museums of Ethnology and Their Classification," Science, 9 (June
1887), 612-4.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid.
266 DAVID JENKINS
tribe, exhibiting "a full set of a representative of an ethnical group

showing "slight peculiarities in small special sets." Moreover, Boas's a
ments of ethnographic specimens by tribe based on "ethnic similaritie
"not at all intended to be classifications." Once again he stressed the
understand the singular nature of culturally specific artifacts, conclu
The principal difference between the plan advocated by Major Powell and adop
Professor Mason, and that of other museums, is, that the latter exhibit the i
phenomenon, while the former make classifications that are not founded on t
nomenon, but in the mind of the student.81
In order to avoid what he saw as a fundamental error, Boas promo

cultural relativism and pluralism that was to become one of the hallm
American anthropology after the turn of the century. His museum and
tion displays, especially the "life group" displays, reflected his belief
other cultures should be presented as much as possible in their own
Lifelike mannequins were arranged not in evolutionary sequence but,
to show "a family or several members of a tribe, dressed in their
costume and engaged in some characteristic work or art illustrative of
life and particular art or industry."82 In order to emphasize the impor
cedar to Kwakiutl crafts, for example, a display was set up in w
woman is seen making a cedar-bark mat, rocking her infant, which is
in cedar-bark, the cradle being moved by means of a cedar-bark rope a
to her toe."83
Boas was ambivalent, however, about the artifactual nature of these dis-
plays. He tried to disguise the artifice but recognized the impossibility of
doing so:
It is an avowed object of a large group to transport the visitor into foreign surround-
ings. He is to see the whole village and the way the people live. But all attempts at
such an undertaking that I have seen have failed, because the surroundings of a
Museum are not favorable to an impression of this sort. The cases, the walls, the
contents of other cases, the columns, the stairways, all remind us that we are not
viewing an actual village and the contrast between the attempted realism of the group
and the inappropriate surroundings spoils the whole effect.84
81 Boas, "Museums of Ethnology and their Classification," 614. The emphasis upon the
singular in nature of course predates Boas. See Barbara Maria Stafford, "Toward Romantic
Landscape Perception: Illustrated Travels and the Rise of 'Singularity' as an Aesthetic Category,"
Art Quarterly (n.s.), 1 (Autumn 1977), 89-124, and Voyage Into Substance: Art, Science,
Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1740-1860 (Cambridge: The Massachusetts Institute
of Technology Press, 1984).
82 American Museum of Natural History, Department of Anthropology, quoted in Ira Jacknis,
"Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museum Method of Anthropology," in
Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, George Stocking, Jr., ed. (Mad-
ison, 1985), 100.
83 Franz Boas, Ethnological Collections from the North Pacific Coast of America: Being a
Guide of Hall 105, quoted in Jacknis, "Franz Boas and Exhibits," 100.
84 Frederic Ward Putnam Papers (Correspondence. Harvard University Archives), quoted in
Jacknis, "Franz Boas and Exhibits," 101.
Despite the importance of the visual display of artifacts and the lifelike
arrangement of appropriately clothed and oramented mannequins (however
spoiled the ultimate effect), these, for Boas, were "subordinate to the mono-
graphic interpretation of the scientist."85 Displayed objects do not offer up
their own narratives; labels and texts, based on scientific reports, must accom-
pany and explain the nature of the artifacts:
The specimens are only illustrations of certain scientific facts .... The specimens
from the North Pacific Coast are interesting, but their vital interest lies in their
interpretation. . . . The collections will remain dead letters until this interpretation
which is indicated on the labels is substantiated in a report.86
By thus assigning priority to discursive language, to labels and texts, Boas

was already caught up in a classificatory scheme which, as part of the emer-
gence of late nineteenth century collections world-wide, "challenged the pre-
eminence of emotive, nonverbal forms of experiencing objects, as was the
case with the wonder cabinets, and favored the more disciplinary languages
concerned with authenticity, connoisseurship, provenance and patronage that
drew some closure on knowledge."87 Thus, for Boas, ethnographic specimens
illustrated scientific facts and not the other way around, despite his insistence
on the singularity of cultural objects and despite his disclaimers to the con-
trary.88 Hence, Boas was reluctant to label artifacts in cases until the appropri-
ate monographs had been completed because the scientific language of au-
thenticity outweighed the evident tangibility of any artifact.89
The privileging of discursive language heralded a shift in anthropological
techniques of fact construction. At the same time that evolutionary concerns
gave way to an interest in detailed local studies, the reliance on images which
late-nineteenth-century anthropology shared with geology and geography
gradually gave way to a greater reliance on discursive language. Sketches,
lithographs, woodcuts, photographs, and so on, which dominated the pages of
ethnographic reports, figured into the construction of museum displays, and
made evolutionary sequences visible, became devalued. They were increas-
ingly used as evidentiary support of scientific determination, not as new
objects that offered a non-linguistic way of understanding the world and its
inhabitants. Still, Boas relied no less than Mason and Powell upon scientific
methods of visualization to understand and exhibit other people-to show
them not as they were to themselves but as they were able to be pictured or
displayed according to museum techniques. Such techniques are, after all,
85 Jacknis, "Franz Boas and Exhibits", 104.
86 Franz Boas, Frederic Ward Putnam Papers, quoted in Jacknis, "Franz Boas and Exhibits,"
104.
87 Carol A. Breckenridge, "The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World
Fairs," 212.
88 For example, Franz Boas, "Some Principles of Museum Administration," Science n.s.,
25:650 (June 14, 1907), 924.
89 Jacknis, "Franz Boas and Exhibits," 105.
268 DAVID JENKINS
Western inventions, just as the institutions themselves, the need to col

classify, and the reliance on visual displays are Western inventions.
becomes obscured by the rather arid debate about proper classification
ever, is the way in which dominant visual displays were constitutive
thropological science, not merely its logical outcome.
THE IMPLICIT USE OF METONYMIC SUBSTITUTION
The constitutive nature of ethnological displays, as Boas f

upon attaching an explanatory text when the object was r
context in which it originated. The scientific authority of
plays, in other words, depended upon the implicit use of me
tion and objectification, both of which resulted from plac
new context, as well as upon classification, a linguistic ph
context, and text-metonymic substitution, objectificat
cation-characterized museum exhibits and provided the basi
ity of visual displays. Despite Boas's assertions to the cont
collections and displays inevitably substituted part for whol
that they substituted the position of an object in a classificato
context of origin. Instead of an evolutionary sequence
perfection of nineteenth-century technology or that showed t
savagery to barbarism to civilization, Boas arranged object
the putative completeness of another culture. His arrangem
less grand than the evolutionary typology advocated by M
classificatory or objective in their intention or construction
The double substitution of part for whole and classificatio
several consequences. The set of objects any museum di
genio Donato,
is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representation-
al universe. The fiction is that a repeated metonymic displacement of fragment for
totality, object to label, series of objects to series of labels can still produce a represen-
tation which is somehow adequate to a nonlinguistic universe. Such a fiction is the
result of an uncritical belief in the notion that ordering and classifying, that is to say,
the spatial juxtaposition of fragments, can produce a representational understanding of
the world. Should the fiction disappear, there is nothing left of the Museum but "bric-
a-brac," a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects which are incapable
of substituting themselves either metonymically for the original object or meta-
phorically for their representations.91
90 Indeed, displays based on Boas's principles were as much typifications and idealizations as
displays based on evolutionary principles. On this point, see Dorsey's letter to the editor, Science,
641 (April 12, 1907) and Boas's reply, "Some Principles of Museum Administration," Science,
650 (June 14, 1907). See also Mark, Four Anthropologists, 48-50.
91 Eugenio Donato, "The Museum's Furnace: Notes toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard
and Pecuchet," in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structural Criticism, Josue V. Harari,
ed. (New York: Cornell University Press, 1984), 233.
Metonymic displacement, by substituting part for whole, makes a collec-

tion physically and conceptually manageable. In the same way that a lump of
gneiss represents a mountain range or an insect represents a species, a Hopi
basket can be made to represent Hopi culture, a photograph of a Sioux Ghost
Dance can be made to represent Sioux religion, and a life-group display can
be made to represent Kwakiutl domesticity. This is a particularly powerful
fiction, implicated in the "objective," "true-to-life" rendering of the world in
museum displays, displays in which late-nineteenth-century curators took
increasing pride and in which audiences found great delight.92
A second consequence of substituting part for whole and classification for
origin, as Susan Stewart has made clear, is that in a collection an object's
history becomes tacitly reified by "making temporality a spatial and material
phenomenon."93 In a museum collection, the history and tangible reality of
another culture is constructed out of fragments and pieces of the world placed
in static spatial juxtaposition. In this way, the thingness of objects objectifies
time and further reinforces the naturalness of both. This is true whether arti-
facts-axes, agricultural tools, baskets, or musical instruments-are placed
in evolutionary sequence or are arranged vis-a-vis specific cultures. Common
sense notions of temporality are thus reinforced by techniques of spatial and
material juxtaposition, however supported by defining labels and scientific
monographs. This is a fundamental method of classification that Boas's histor-
icism failed to address or, perhaps, even recognize.
Metonymic displacement, objectification, classification-together these
features allow museums and other kinds of collections to appear self-sufficient
and autonomous, as they suppress the historical processes of their own devel-
opment. Together they produce a context in which objects exist devoid of their
history. Nineteenth-century museum audiences seldom or never knew under
what circumstances a particular artifact was obtained. It was unimportant to
know, to pick one example, that the physical anthropologist, Ales Hrdlicka,
together with Boas, endeavored to obtain the remains of exhibited people-
"Filipinos and other tribes"-who had died at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase
Exposition in Saint Louis, intending to send skeletons and "soft parts" to the
American Museum and Columbia University while sending the brains to the
United States National Museum.94 The acquisition and destination of skele-
tons and brains of these exhibited people was, after all, unnecessary informa-
tion for the museum goer; what was critical was the representation, the "life-
group," the "evolutionary sequence," not the manner of their acquisition and
92 Jacknis, "Franz Boas and Exhibits."

93 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 153.
94 Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 165.
270 DAVID JENKINS
construction nor the historically contingent motives that produ

ent reverence for organization animating museum collections.95
To give up the historical contingencies, however, is to divorce
ment of late-nineteenth-century American anthropology from w
trends and, thus, to relegate its development to a museum-like
objectified, juxtaposed with later theoretical postures (structur
cal anthropology, cultural materialism, ethnoscience, and so for
oughly displaced from the cultural world whence it came. And t
visual display of ethnographic artifacts as merely illustrative
based concepts is to relegate the visual to a secondary status in
cognition: an epiphenomenon to be explained through languag
Rather than reducing anthropological practice to language, i
prudent, complex, and interesting to explore the historically
contingent relationships between the discursive and the nondi
tween, in this case, what is said and what is visually depicted
peoples. It is the complex dynamic of the interaction of the disc
nondiscursive that needs to be understood. We may thus begin
Michel Foucault's intriguing observation that "natural history is
than the nomination of the visible."96
95 Such a reverence for organization is apparent in other nineteenth-century collections, such

as fairs and department stores. See Neil Harris, "Museums, Merchandising, and Popular Taste:
The Struggle for Influence," in Material Culture and the Study of American Life, Ian M. G.
Quimby, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978).
96 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York:
Vintage Books, 1973), 132.

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Object Lessons and Ethnographic Displays: Museum Exhibitions and the Making of

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In the early nineteenth century, many private, well-to-do

Acknowledgments: The initial research for this article was supported in

of classification, spurred by the Darwinian reorganization of ev

studies of Timothy Mitchell; Donna Haraway; Nicholas Thom

THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century,

the Treatment of Historical Objects and Museums of History (1750-

ment Printing Office, 1905), 324; Sheets-Pyenson, "Civilizing by Nature's Example," 3

Ames, Museums, The Public And Anthropology, 13.

"The Occurrence of Similar Inventions in Areas Widely Apart," Science, 9 (May

With the public in mind, curators presented museum displays as spectacles

[that] can be grasped at once as in a picture," and they were indicativ

The apparent realism of these sorts of displays-whether adm

The late-nineteenth-century museum and exhibition thus defined a new

Dorsey went on to suggest that "the student . .. might be reconciled t

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY AND GATHERING ARTIFACTS

American anthropology developed in relation to the worl

22 George A. Dorsey, "Letter to the Editor," Science (n.s.), 25:641

and geography, which were not content merely to produce

cation made of linguistic stocks; map of United States prepared to show

5. Habits and customs, especially mortuary customs and religious c

Notwithstanding Powell's insistence on the importance of lin

gious ceremonies and games, fabrics, paints, dye stuffs, medicines

Despite the danger (Cushing simply moved on to collect at another less

37 Leonhard Stegneger, "Directions for Collecting Reptiles and Batrachians," United

employees. One method of systematization was to transform

This information, written out in duplicate and placed in a "stout envelope,"

Next, specimens were "transferred to the department inventory books under

41 George A. Dorsey, "Notes on the Anthropological Museums of Central Europe," American

Dorsey ends his summary of six years of anthropological collecting with a

UNPACKING THE HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS

Given the practices of anthropological expeditions, the

techniques of visualization that functioned to stabilize certain culturally

Norton goes on to mention how cases containing the North American

49 I am here borrowing Latour's felicitous phrase, "Visualization And Cognition: Thi

51 Frank H. Norton, Illustrated Historical Register of the Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia,

through these displays was sufficient to encompass several thousand y

Built by anthropologists or entrepreneurs, exhibitions of non-Western

TWO TRENDS IN EXHIBITION PRACTICES

Two organizational trends are apparent in late-ninet

59 One failed display of the social promise of native American

Sounding curiously like his understanding of the integration of the natural

61 Quoted in Washburn, "Joseph Henry's Conception of the Purpose of the Smithsonian

Ames, Museums, The Public and Anthropology, 20.

proper arrangement of ethnographic artifacts.65 Mason had suggested a b

A logical corollary to the biological analogy is that similar inventions

This way of thinking about inventions, to which Boas objected, produced a

criterion needed to be added to the three Mason proposed: "unlike causes

It is possible to arrange the cases in the form of a checkerboard, so that by going in a

tribe, exhibiting "a full set of a representative of an ethnical group

In order to avoid what he saw as a fundamental error, Boas promo

By thus assigning priority to discursive language, to labels and texts, Boas

Western inventions, just as the institutions themselves, the need to col

THE IMPLICIT USE OF METONYMIC SUBSTITUTION

The constitutive nature of ethnological displays, as Boas f

Metonymic displacement, by substituting part for whole, makes a collec-

92 Jacknis, "Franz Boas and Exhibits."