A Paean to the Epistemological Potency of Artifacts

Over the past two decades, material culture has once again become fashionable in sociocultural anthropology. This book by Amiria Henare, a museum anthropologist at Cambridge, is both a product of and an argument for this renewed interest in objects’ potential for yielding insights into cultural dynamics. It is simultaneously a historical and a material ethnography. Henare’s focus is on the shifting significances and movements of artifacts in New Zealand and Scotland from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Within this historical framework, she explores how objects and collections both constitute and instantiate social relations. In so doing, she offers a meticulously researched, object-centered historical account of changing tides in both anthropology and museums. She also shows that certain theoretical trends in anthropology have sometimes obfuscated the ways in which museums and their collections have served compound aims and purposes, often embodying myriad and opposing agendas. As one might imagine, Henare’s work is grounded in a theoretical perspective in which objects’ meanings are generally in flux. However, she is careful to articulate that her endeavor is distinct from anthropological work that conceptualizes objects as vehicles for human agency, as well as from work that views objects as “texts” with encoded meanings awaiting anthropological unpacking. As she observes, such studies tend to eclipse the sensuality of objects and the ways in which their physicality can instantiate meaning. In this sense, she is arguing for a view of objects similar to that proposed by Robert Plant Armstrong, although he is missing from her extensive bibliography. Armstrong (1971) pioneered a vision of art as an “affecting presence,” arguing that certain material objects, by way of their physicality, their repeated appearances at significant events, or their associations with cultural codes, become imbued with emotive force. As Henare’s book and other recent works attest, this approach to material and expressive culture is enjoying renewed popularity in anthropology (see Adams 2006; Krantz 1994). Likewise, while Henare nods to studies that highlight the social lives of objects and applauds scholars’ recognition of the parallels between people and objects (our corporeality in the world, etc.), she underscores that while our presence in the world is limited by death, artifacts are able to perform their unique roles in social life precisely because of their potential longevity—they “collapse spatial and temporal distance, bringing people together who would otherwise remain quite literally out of touch” (p. 6). Henare returns to this point throughout her book, offering compelling historical and ethnographic examples drawn from New Zealand and Scotland. By the end of her book, readers will most likely appreciate her corrective to critiques likening museums to prisons that remove artifacts from communities (thereby severing flows of exchange). As she surmises, a view of museums as enclaving objects from social life obscures the fact that museum artifacts still enable social ties. Museums, she argues, bring together researchers, descendants, curators, and others to study their collections. Although they certainly restrict the mobility of objects in space, in so doing museums ensure the ability of these artifacts to move through time. While Henare’s perspective may seem conservative to advocates of repatriation, she offers her intervention with delicacy and finesse. Still, I wish that her position had been presented in tandem with a broader array of the voices of peoples whose objects inhabit these museum collections. Henare strengthens her argument concerning the social potency of museum artifacts by interweaving her historical analysis with brief excerpts from her field notes. These excerpts recount her experiences on research visits to collections in Scotland and New Zealand. Sometimes she is joined by the Maori artist Maureen Launder, whose creative works grow out of her own studies of Maori artifacts. Through these personal vignettes, readers gain additional glimpses of the ways in which museum artifacts make possible social ties and indirect dialogue between people from distant times and places. Henare’s first substantive chapter traces the movements of some of the artifacts acquired by Captain Cook and his men in New Zealand. Acknowledging and engaging with the prior work of scholars such as Nicholas Thomas (1991) and Adrienne Kaeppler (1978), Henare recounts how Maori and early European explorers used these objects, in tandem with verbal exchanges, as the basis of engagements, challenges, and seductions. She also explores the shifting significances attached to these “artificial curiosities” in eighteenth-century Britain. Her second chapter traces Joseph Banks’s journey to the Scottish highlands shortly after his travels on Cook’s first voyage, noting the comparisons he drew between Scottish highlanders and groups such as the Maori. As Henare observes, Banks and other Enlightenment thinkers relied heavily on objects, as well as language, as keys to understanding these “hinterland” cultures: artifacts in this era were emerging as valuable scientific specimens that could yield insights into the nature of their creator peoples. In her words, “Like their makers, they were objects not only of measured curiosity and detached speculation, but of sensuous engagement. . . . [Thus] the treatment of artifacts epitomized the entanglement of reason and the passions in the Enlightenment, the coupling of sense and sensibility” (p. 73).