Jon, Nick, people...

I used to teach a course which involved looking at the Columbus 
counter-quincentenary movement in 1992, and found a great paper in 
which a performance artist called Coco Fusco not only reviewed the 
history of these 'ethnographic' set-ups and their role in shaping 
colonisers' imaginations of colonised people and places, but also set 
herself up in a cage (with Guillermo Gómez-Peña) as 'undiscovered 
Ameridians' on display public spaces in US, UK, Australian and Spanish 
cities to see how these imaginations had (not) changed over the 
centuries. Here's a taster:

"Our plan was to live in a golden cage for three days, presenting 
ourselves as undiscovered Amerindians from an island in the Gulf of 
Mexico that had somehow been overlooked by Europeans for five 
centuries. We called our homeland Guatinau, and ourselves Guatinauis. 
We performed our 'traditional tasks', which ranged from sewing voodoo 
dolls and lifting weights to watching television and working on a 
laptop computer. A donation box in front of the cage indicated that, 
for a small fee, I would dance (to rap music), Guillermo would tell 
authentic Amerindian stories (in a nonsensical language), and we would 
pose for polaroids with visitors. Two 'zoo guards' would be on hand to 
speak to visitors (since we could not understand them), take us to the 
bathroom on leashes, and feed us with sandwiches and fruit"

Coco Fusco (1994) The other history of intercultural performance. The 
Drama Review 38(1), 143-167.

I thought Fusco's account of, and reactions to, the reactions that 
these performances generated was horribly fascinating and disturbing.  
I don't know how this could directly relate to what's being set up in 
the zoo but, if anyone is going to use that example as part of some 
teaching on post/colonial geographies, Fusco's paper could be essential 
reading.

Cheers

Ian



On Monday, June 13, 2005, at 03:11 PM, Jon Cloke wrote:

> Nick,
>
> I have to confess that I was thinking of this less from the televisual 
> point-of-view, and more towards looking at this as a form of affective 
> colonialism. Zoos, museums, art galleries all do this from different 
> angles, taking the object of attention out of the complex mesh of 
> cultural, political and emotional ties surrounding its’ creation or 
> prior existence, and putting it in a suitably ‘scientific’ environment 
> in which guilt-free consumption can take place. As one example, the 
> museums of the UK are full of the lootings of empire which, having 
> been transcribed by the passage of time and their positioning within a 
> scientific, ethnographic discourse, are now neutral objects under 
> careful guardianship – witness the Elgin Marbles, which despite the 
> damage done to them through various ‘restoration’ initiatives by the 
> trustees of the British Museum, are kept ‘safe’ in a ‘suitable 
> environment’, away from the people of Greece, who plainly lack the 
> knowledge and ability to maintain them.
>
> I think (as to the engineering of artificial situations) that these 
> site-specific interpretations do just that, really, and that just as 
> these situations are the products of certain changeable social and 
> cultural processes, so is the ethnographist or sociologist. As 
> Bourdieu said of Bernard-Henri Levy: “It is vital to understand that 
> he is only a sort of structural epiphenomenon, and that, like an 
> electron, he is the expression of a field. You can’t understand 
> anything if you don’t understand the field that produces him and gives 
> him his parcel of power.” (Bourdieu, P. (1998) On Television and 
> Journalism, Pluto Books, p.54).
>
> With the African exhibition in the zoo, there is a further overarching 
> structure which provides a suitable setting for such behaviours, what 
> you might call a meta-discourse of psycho-imperialism. As a German 
> best-seller of 1912, German Thought in the World, had it: “it is only 
> when the indigenous peoples have learned to produce something of value 
> in the service of the superior race… that they can be said to have a 
> moral right to exist.” (quoted in Kotek, J. and Rigoulet, P. (2001) Le 
> siecle des camps, Paris, p.92). For me there is more than a ghost of 
> this persuasion in the placing of a cultural exhibition in such a 
> setting; in this particular instance the ‘indigenous peoples’ 
> themselves are the product which is of value to the ‘superior race’.
>
> If you think this is a bit far-fetched, then there’s another example 
> from Germany that might persuade you; the continuing use of medical 
> specimens in German medical institutes that were taken from victims of 
> the Nazis: “In 1988, it was revealed that the Tübingen anatomical 
> institute still had in its collections the remains of victims of Nazi 
> terror. Despite the assertions of the then director of the anatomical 
> institute that only two microscopic slides may have been derived from 
> "possible" victims of the Nazis, 18 inquiries revealed that the 
> Institute of Anatomy had received the cadavers of over 400 victims.”  
> (William E. Seidelman, Medicine and Murder in the Third Reich, Jewish 
> Virtual Library, 
> http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/medmurder).
>
> So far from being an isolated instance, it seems that there are quite 
> a few institutions involved, and that the experimentation done at that 
> juncture continues to inform medical knowledge and research: “The 
> Institute of Anatomy of the University of Vienna was headed by the 
> noted anatomist -- and Austro-Fascist -- Professor Dr. Eduard 
> Pernkopf. Pernkopf, who was appointed dean of medicine at the 
> university after the Anschlus was the founding editor of a major text 
> on human anatomy, a text that is still considered a "masterpiece" and 
> the "standard by which all other illustrated anatomic works are 
> measured."22 The book continues to be published under the imprint of 
> the original publisher, Urban and Schwarzenberg. In the book's 
> illustrations, artists graphically expressed their Nazi sympathies: 
> The artists Franz Batke, Eric Lepier and Karl Entresser incorporated 
> Nazi iconography (swastikas or SS symbols) into their signatures.… 
> Current editions of Pernkopf's Anatomy include paintings from the 
> original editions, but Nazi iconography has been airbrushed out -- 
> with two exceptions.” (Seidelmann, Op. cit.)
>
> Not only that, but the practice of using nazi-era specimens for 
> display or teaching purposes carries on to this day: “In March 1995 
> the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority of Israel, Yad 
> Vashem, formally requested that the Universities of Vienna and 
> Innsbruck undertake an independent inquiry… a report was issued on 
> October 1, 1998. The investigation revealed that the Institute of 
> Anatomy received almost 1,400 cadavers from the Gestapo execution 
> chamber in the Vienna Regional Court (Landesgerichte). While the 
> anatomical institute and its collection were destroyed by a bomb near 
> the end of the war, the investigation did identify approximately 200 
> institute specimens from the Nazi era that were still in other 
> universities' collections….The University of Innsbruck has refused to 
> undertake any investigation..” (Seidelmann, Op.cit.)
>
> Since then, other universities and institutions, the Max Planck 
> Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, the Max Planck Institute 
> for Psychiatry in Munich, the Humboldt University, the Berlin Charité 
> Hospital, the University of Heidelberg and the Ludwig-Maximillian 
> University of Munich have been asked to conduct similar enquiries but, 
> mind-bogglingly enough, have refused. The pathetic remains of human 
> beings, torn from their owners in the midst of overwhelmingly violent 
> acts constituting an utter denial of all that enlightened science 
> might reasonably claim to stand for, have been cleansed and purified 
> by their transcription to scientific institutions and, thus purified, 
> they may now be used in a truly progressive manner for the advancement 
> of benign medical knowledge – forgetting the horrible, malignant 
> medical knowledge that produced them. This speaks to my original 
> point, the assignation of objects of affection and emotion, remains, 
> to a value-free location, in the same way that the remains of 
> Australian and Tasmanian aborigines, murdered by the settlers, came to 
> form an interesting and exciting part of modern ethnographical 
> collections in Britain……
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jon
>
___________________________________________

Ian Cook
Senior Lecturer in Human Geography
School of Geography, Earth & Environmental Sciences
The University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT
UK

Tel:  0121 4146262     Fax: 0121 4145528
http://www.gees.bham.ac.uk/people/index.asp?ID=118