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December 29, 2004
Pastoral
Few people are more suspicious of anthropology and anthropological rhetoric than I am but it sounds as though a traditional curator or two among all the First Nations' perspectives would not have gone amiss at the Museum of the American Indian. The New York Times comments on "an astonishing uniformity in the exhibits' accounts of religious beliefs" and "a kind of warm, earthy mysticism with comforting homilies behind every facade, reviving an old pastoral romance about the Indian."
The notion that tribal voices should ''be heard'' becomes a problem when the selected voices have so little to say. Moreover, since American Indians largely had no detailed written languages and since so much trauma had decimated the tribes, the need for scholarship and analysis of secondary sources is all the more crucial.
But the museum almost seems afraid of distinctions. There are display cases of objects made with beads, organized with no particular logic; a beaded horse-head cover from 1900 North Dakota appears near a mid-19th-century sea-otter hat from the Aleutian Islands. One wall holds ''star'' objects, whose only connection is that they have pictures of stars on them. Some tribes are asked to present 10 crucial moments in their history; the Tohono Oodham in Arizona choose, as their first, ''Birds teach people to call for rain.'' Their last is in the year 2000, a ''desert walk for health.''
But the museum almost seems afraid of distinctions. There are display cases of objects made with beads, organized with no particular logic; a beaded horse-head cover from 1900 North Dakota appears near a mid-19th-century sea-otter hat from the Aleutian Islands. One wall holds ''star'' objects, whose only connection is that they have pictures of stars on them. Some tribes are asked to present 10 crucial moments in their history; the Tohono Oodham in Arizona choose, as their first, ''Birds teach people to call for rain.'' Their last is in the year 2000, a ''desert walk for health.''
Posted by Ghost of a flea at December 29, 2004 10:21 AM
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