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Duke University Press - Mullin Molly H. Mullin

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241 pages

English

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In the early twentieth century, a group of elite East coast women turned to the American Southwest in search of an alternative to European-derived concepts of culture. In Culture in the Marketplace Molly H. Mullin provides a detailed narrative of the growing influence that this network of women had on the Native American art market-as well as the influence these activities had on them-in order to investigate the social construction of value and the history of American concepts of culture.Drawing on fiction, memoirs, journalistic accounts, and extensive interviews with artists, collectors, and dealers, Mullin shows how anthropological notions of culture were used to valorize Indian art and create a Southwest Indian art market. By turning their attention to Indian affairs and art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she argues, these women escaped the gender restrictions of their eastern communities and found ways of bridging public and private spheres of influence. Tourism, in turn, became a means of furthering this cultural colonization. Mullin traces the development of aesthetic worth as it was influenced not only by politics and profit but also by gender, class, and regional identities, revealing how notions of "culture" and "authenticity" are fundamentally social ones. She also shows how many of the institutions that the early patrons helped to establish continue to play an important role in the contemporary market for American Indian art.This book will appeal to audiences in cultural anthropology, art history, American studies, women's studies, and cultural history.

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Cultural studies

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Publié par	Duke University Press
Date de parution	20 mars 2001
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780822380603
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1348€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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CULTURE IN THE MARKETPLACE

objects / histories

and Representation

Critical Perspectives on Art, Material Culture,

a series edited by Nicholas Thomas

CULTURE IN THE MARKETPLACE

Gender, Art, and Value in the American Southwest

MOLLY MULLIN

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESSDurham and London 2001

∫2001 Duke University Press

Printed in the United States of

America on acid-free paper$

Typeset in Dante by Keystone

Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-

in-Publication Data appear on the

last printed page of this book.

CONTENTS

Preface1

ONECulture and Cultures10

TWOElizabeth Sergeant, Buying and Selling the Southwest38

THREEShopping for a Better World in a ‘‘City of Ladies’’60

FOURThe Patronage of Di√erence: Making Indian Art ‘‘Art, not Ethnology’’91

FIVECulture and Value at Indian Market128

Epilogue: In the Dog Cemetery173

Abbreviations185 Notes187 References203 Index217

PREFACE

I ﬁrst visited Santa Fe in 1989, when I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Ethnological Society. While passing through a crowd of fellow conventioneers, I overheard a remark I would often recall when I went back to live there the following year. Mingling outside the art galleries and boutiques lining San Francisco Street, a woman turned to her companions and observed, in a tone suggest-ing a combination of wry amusement and mild embarrassment, that in Santa Fe, ‘‘you can hardly tell the anthropologists from the tourists.’’ It is still not entirely clear to me what particular commonalities were being remarked on, though at this point I could hazard a guess. A student at the time, I was working at the intersection of several academic disciplines (anthropology, history, literature), and it had never occurred to me that one might distinguish, on the basis of appearance, anthropologists from anyone else. But regardless of its ambiguity, the observation intrigued me in its suggestion of unusually blurred boundaries between anthropologists and other travelers, an academic discipline and a broader public, and the acad-emy and the marketplace. Apart from not wanting to be mistaken for tourists, there are a number of reasons why anthropologists might well be disconcerted by Santa Fe, a city where one is confronted with a striking degree of popular enthusiasm for ideas and sensibilities historically associated with anthropology and an-thropologists. Santa Fe, marketed to tourists and convention-goers as ‘‘the City Di√erent’’ and a ‘‘city of three cultures,’’ is a place where art galleries specialize in the ‘‘tribal’’ and the ‘‘primitive’’ and advertise ‘‘ethnographic weekends’’ and ‘‘the art of ethnographic peoples.’’ If, in other locales, where disdain for cultural di√erence of any kind remains alive and well, many anthropologists still imagine themselves rare specialists in the exotic, in Santa Fe they ﬁnd themselves in plenty of company. If they have mixed feelings about this company, the reasons are more complicated than a fear

Preface

of competition or loss of distinction, or even consternation at how words like ‘‘ethnographic’’ can be so distorted in their commercial deployment. I returned to Santa Fe after that conference and was most intrigued by a disjunction: the increasing popularity of ideas and sensibilities historically associated with anthropology, such as one is likely to see in Santa Fe tour-ism, at a time when anthropologists and scholars in related ﬁelds have been subjecting those very same notions to sustained critique and revision. A particularly striking example of this disjunction, and one of the primary concerns of this book, is the concept of culture. Whereas it was once suggested that one could deﬁne an anthropologist as ‘‘someone who uses the word ‘culture’ habitually’’ (Wagner 1981:1), in recent years many an-thropologists have become increasingly ill at ease with the concepts of culture most often associated with their discipline. Though long assumed to be a useful tool for characterizing di√erences among peoples in a non-hierarchical manner, over the past two decades the concept has been cri-tiqued by scholars as misleading in important ways, as potentially perpetu-ating stereotypes, and as inadequately simplistic in a world of contested, shifting, and permeable boundaries (e.g., Gupta and Ferguson 1992). Dis-cussing ‘‘cultures’’ as if they were static and homogeneous entities obscures power and change. InColonialism’s CultureNicholas Thomas (1994) situates anthropological notions of ‘‘cultures’’ and their ‘‘language of typiﬁcation’’ within the project of nineteenth-century colonialism, a project many con-temporary anthropologists have sought to document and critique, rather than reproduce. As Mary Margaret Steedly has written, ‘‘like other such ‘useful categories’ as ‘gender’ or ‘woman’ or ‘experience,’ the concept of culture can be an instrument of dangerous utility’’ (1996:22). For James Cli√ord, culture is ‘‘a deeply compromised idea,’’ but one that he ‘‘cannot yet do without’’ (1988:10). Lila Abu-Lughod has suggested that ‘‘the notion of culture (especially as it functions to distinguish ‘cultures’), despite a long usefulness, may now have become something anthropologists would want to work against in their theories, their ethnographic practice, and their ethnographic writing’’ (1991:138). More straightforwardly, Joel Kahn has proposed that anthropologists might well consider abandoning the con-∞ cept altogether (1989:21). Yet while anthropologists debate the relative merits of rehabilitating or abandoning the notions of culture once championed by their discipline, outside anthropology those same notions—or some semblance of them,

Preface

anyway—enjoy greater popularity than ever. In response to this disjunc-tion, this study examines some particular examples of the social history of concepts of culture, how notions of culture historically associated with anthropology have been put into practice outside the academy, and how the category of culture has been positioned in relation to other categories such as race, class, gender, and art. As Virginia Dominguez (1994) has noted, the recent popularity of an-thropological notions of culture can be considered part of a widespread ‘‘culturalization of di√erence’’—a phenomenon in which human di√er-ences that could be and have been ordered in other ways (ways that are not necessarily any more accurate or politically preferable) are recategorized in terms of ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘cultural di√erence.’’ Following lines of thought pursued by Cli√ord (1988) and others, in her discussion of what gets in-cluded and excluded from the purview of national ‘‘cultural policies’’ Do-minguez observes that what may appear to represent a progressive depar-ture from hierarchical and Eurocentric perspectives of what culture is may not indicate any such departure after all. Much contemporary usage of the termculture,Dominguez notes, stops short of the more holistic notion of culture used by many anthropologists. In a holistic perspective, ‘‘culture’’ is no more about things like art or literature or music than it is about cusswords, prisons or laboratories, what to do with a telephone, what gets tossed in the garbage, or, in the words of a classic title in anthropology, ‘‘how to ask for a drink’’ (Frake 1972). As Dominguez puts it, ‘‘An anthropo-logically holistic deﬁnition of culture would include economic organiza-tion, political processes, intergroup relationships, and technology as inte-gral components of a population’s culture, not separate from it’’ (241). But whether one accepts such a ‘‘holistic’’ deﬁnition, or one that privileges the realm of language and thought, representations of culture are necessarily partial. This book follows Virginia Dominguez’s suggestion that rather than quibbling over what does and does not belong in the category of culture, it is important to ask what purposes it serves (239). In the following pages, I examine the ‘‘culturalization of di√erence’’ and the social construction of value in relation to the patronage of American Indian art in New Mexico from the early twentieth century to the present day. In addition to consider-ing existing institutions such as Santa Fe’s annual Indian Market (the focus of chapter 5) and some signiﬁcant historical antecedents, including the 1931