The Filipino Primitive. Sarita Echavez See
university pays tribute to Guthe’s expedition with the display in the UMMNH’s anthropology room of the reconstruction of one of the burial caves that Guthe excavated. That is to say, this accumulated material is narratively spatialized in the museum’s Philippine exhibition. Any walking tour of any museum exhibition tells a story, and this exhibition tells a story of primitive accumulation. (I provide a more detailed tour, so to speak, of the exhibition later in the chapter.) Most of the objects in Guthe’s collection were offerings to the dead collected from mortuary sites. According to the accompanying didactic, the display includes “a range of materials common to mortuary sites throughout the Philippines” and “a page from one of Guthe’s field notebooks, dated February 1924.”24 But Guthe’s “period of gathering the material,” as he called it, also included the amassing of human remains.25 In a 1927 article about the expedition that he published in the journal American Anthropologist, which is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, Guthe wrote that “several old burial grounds were dug by the writer” and that his “tremendous collection of material” included ninety-five human skulls.26 All of this ceramic, shell, stone, metal, glass, textile, and skeletal material was packed into crates and shipped to Ann Arbor, where, upon his return to the United States, Guthe became the Museum of Anthropology’s first director. The university’s first attempt at anthropological knowledge was built upon a foundation, literally, of the dead, and, in undertaking the task of founding the university’s anthropology museum, Guthe configured himself as the author-cum-undertaker of knowledge.27 When it comes to the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan, the establishment of knowledge as an acquisitive and expansionist practice proceeds through the “dispossession by accumulation” of the exhumed Filipino. The university museum is a mass grave.28 The rational scientist—and not the savage Filipino—turns out to be the headhunter.
Guthe’s account of his fieldwork shows no self-conscious reflection about the routinization of the desecration of indigenous graves. Instead, Guthe was concerned about any damage to the sites that would hamper his collection and preservation of material for future research, and he literally and figuratively swept aside evidence of ongoing reverence for the dead. For example, he noted that, because flooding caused the “greatest destruction of evidence,” “repeatedly, masses of sherds, bones, and ornaments were found washed into a pocket, or into a depression in the floor, then partly covered with earth” (emphasis added).29 Guthe uses the passive voice here: the human remains and offerings are “then partly covered with earth.” Rendering invisible the grammatical subject of the sentence, Guthe’s elision leaves the indigenous or local people unmarked in a way that affirms their primitivism while it renders the American scientist unmarked in a way that affirms Guthe’s objectivity.
Guthe goes on to refer to “native shamans” and to blame them, along with animals and the weather, for the “havoc” he found at the sites: “Animals and native shamans added to the havoc created by the elements. Empty half shells of cocoanuts, remains of candles and palmleaf torches, and small offerings of money and ornaments gave ample evidence of the recent use of many caves.”30 Here Guthe documents evidence of what contemporary archaeologists have identified as ongoing indigenous traditions characterized by the open and collectivist nature of interment. Mortuary sites were used by “generations of native peoples to bury their dead.”31 The open-air graves and burial caves that Guthe excavated were “likely used and added to over multiple generations.”32 However, rather than honor or at least investigate the potentially sacred nature of these sites, Guthe relegated the presence of indigenous belief systems to the status of nature by cataloging indigenous shamans with animals and the climate, forces of nature that have no respect for or concept of preservation. Moreover, Guthe is implying that indigenous mortuary practices disrupt the study of those very same practices. Shaped by the idea of the Filipino as racial primitive, Guthe’s method is grounded in a fairly breathtaking series of logical fallacies that exemplify an American epistemology of primitive accumulation: Not only is the Filipino capable of being only the object and never the source of knowledge, Filipino practices hamper the study of those practices.
Guthe did note that “locals” expressed “fear” of the burial sites: “As a rule they stand in fear of the spirits of the dead, a fear which is occasionally strong enough to cause the abandonment of fertile farming land.”33 But he dismissed this evidence that the sites were sacrosanct by concluding that any pre-Christian traditions or beliefs had disappeared from memory: “The Filipinos have been under Christian influence for such a long period that all recollection of pre-Spanish inhumations has passed. They vaguely associate bones and vessels found in the course of plowing and excavating, with ancestors, but never in a personal sense.”34 Perceiving the primitive as outside time, Guthe feared that, “due to foreign influences, the data are gradually disappearing” and would “in a few years be entirely non-existent unless trained ethnologists do field work in this area.”35 He concluded that this “period of gathering the material” would yield “abundant opportunity” for future research, but during the expedition, “little more than keeping the field records in order could be accomplished.”36 This anxious rhetoric of loss and disappearance functions to justify the accumulative nature of the expedition.
What really was at stake for Guthe was the establishment of knowledge in the form of the museum and the academic department. Guthe stated that his research goal was “gathering additional data upon [sic] the commercial relations between the Filipinos and Asiatic civilizations.”37 But he imposed conditions on his agreement with the University of Michigan that make explicit the connection between primitive accumulation and the founding of American academic institutions like the museum, the department, and the journal. Guthe agreed to direct the expedition only if the University of Michigan promised to create an anthropology museum and an academic department of anthropology, promises that apparently “sustained Guthe throughout his fieldwork” and that were fulfilled upon his return to the United States.38 A decade later, in 1935, Guthe became one of the founders of the Society for American Archaeology and its flagship journal, American Antiquity.39 The Guthe collection exemplifies how the period of “gathering” material—again, what I am calling primitive accumulation—may announce itself in the language of research, but in fact functions to legitimate the founding of academic institutions. So while it is now commonplace to speak of discourse as constituting its objects, I instead am showing here how the discourse or the discipline literally has to accumulate its objects first, and then figure out how to order them discursively.
Moreover, the “establishment of the archive,” as Mark Rice puts it, instantiates an accumulative epistemology, an unceasing and foundationally violent quest for accrued knowledge that unceasingly disavows its foundational violence.40 The university’s Philippine archive exists as a result of a series of scientific conquests, so to speak, beginning with Steere’s 1870s expedition, that preceded the military conquest of the Philippines. In her work on the Smithsonian National Museum’s preservation and display of Native Americans as primitive and disappeared peoples, Jacqueline Fear-Segal argues that “these ‘memorials’ not only contributed to the sequence of the evolutionary narrative, but also to the creation of a system of knowledge that legitimated the national political structures on which the institution rested.”41 As I outlined in my introductory chapter, following Derrida’s reading of the Greek roots of the word “archive,” we see that the Guthe collection exemplifies how the archive stands for both commencement and commandment, the beginnings of the University of Michigan’s anthropology museum and department and the authorization of these institutional entities’ power to rule.
American academic institutions and scholars have shown little capacity for recognizing or reflecting upon the epistemological, political, or ethical ramifications of the process of establishing the archive. Any self-consciousness about the origins of the colonial archive is a fairly recent phenomenon. Historians and other scholars are “relative latecomers in questioning the objectivity of colonial archives,” as Mark Rice puts it.42 The Guthe collection proves no exception. As I already have noted, Guthe showed little capacity for self-reflection about his fieldwork methods and ethics, and this failure to interrogate the colonial origins of the archive continues to shape contemporary scholarship on the Guthe collection. For example, a 2013 special issue of the journal Asian Perspectives is devoted to the Guthe collection, including an introduction by Carla Sinopoli, who has been the curator of the Guthe