The Filipino Primitive. Sarita Echavez See
child and adult visitor alike, the visual story unfolding before their eyes is that of nearly naked brown men wielding crude weapons and hunting other human beings for their flesh and teeth, the proof of which lies right in front of them. How so? The necklace is displayed at the bottom of the display case that reaches the lowest to the floor, and so it is perfectly positioned to capture the attention of shorter and presumably younger children. (In contrast, in each of the display cases, the text explaining the main theme is positioned at the eye-level height of a standing adult.) To the right of the boars’ teeth necklace is a photograph of Ibilao men with shields and spears; the accompanying caption explains, “Warfare was a part of most men’s lives.” An actual spear, shield, ax, and kris are displayed above the necklace, looming above the child’s head. To the left of the boars’ teeth necklace, in the adjacent display case labeled “The Body Adorned,” is a black box containing eight human teeth nestled in white padding.54 Along with photographs of a tattooed man and a grinning man showing decorated teeth, the eight teeth provide material evidence of the practice of cosmetic bodily ornamentation. There is, once again, no reference to cannibalism. But the juxtaposition of these images and objects conveys to the visitor a message about cannibalism, the most barbaric and depraved practice of all. The teeth pivot between victim and predator. On the one hand, the teeth easily can be interpreted as the leftover souvenirs from the victim of a flesh-eating manhunt. On the other hand, in the photograph of the man with a toothsome smile, the bared teeth easily can be taken as a sign of aggression.
Figure 1.8. Floor plan of the fourth floor of the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Image courtesy of John Klausmeyer.
This message of cannibalism is reinforced by the anthropology gallery’s architectural and lighting design. Primitivism is built into the very architecture of the museum’s fourth floor. The curved shape of the gallery—calling to mind a kidney or a digestive tract—marks it off from the rectilinearity of the previous rooms. Its brown wood fixtures and furnishings contribute to a basic theme of roundness and brownness, which together evoke a sense of the organic and the seamless and thus reinforce the idea of the primitive. Only the apertures of the exhibit cases are rectilinear and white, thus declaring that this is the way to see into the display and to make sense of the people and objects on exhibit. In other words, this is how the museum’s accumulation of the primitive works to create Western power/knowledge. A hodgepodge of objects greets the eye: a large ceramic urn, human teeth, spears, bracelets, and burial items. Alongside late nineteenth-century photographs of gun-toting University of Michigan faculty and students conducting zoological research in the Philippines, these artifacts narrate the daily life of the eternal primitive. These artifacts are visually accessible behind “transparent but impregnable partitions.”55 As I noted earlier, the visiting schoolchildren know that they are not allowed to touch. They get the message: Look but don’t touch. Indeed, the act of “seeing into” the display enables the replacement of the tactile by the visual. This substitution is reinforced by the way that some of the glass partitions cant forward—rather than stand vertical—thereby inviting the viewer to lean forward and almost touch these things from another world. (By contrast, some of the informational posters cant backward, indicating that they are designed for the taller, standing—and presumably adult—museum visitor.)
But even before visitors reach the Philippine exhibit, the museum has prepared them for the sight of savages. The UMMNH is a gray, four-story building, and the Philippine exhibit is tucked away in a corner of the top floor. Visitors enter the building on the ground floor and find themselves in a quite elegant if miniaturized rotunda. The miniaturized grandiosity of the rotunda echoes the architecture of national monuments, and this aura of monumentality is accentuated by the installation of the busts of six white men, including Steere’s, associated with the founding of the museum or its collections. Climbing up the staircase from the ground floor, visitors glimpse the very big and very small fossils inhabiting the Hall of Evolution on the second floor, and then the feathery and leathery skins of “Michigan wildlife” suspended behind glass on the third floor. A display case devoted to extinct or endangered animals stands on the landing between the third and fourth floors. The stretched, parched skins of various non-extant creatures thus form the prelude to the fourth floor, which used to display a series of fourteen Native American dioramas, including one devoted to Pocahontas. (I discuss the controversy surrounding the dioramas and their subsequent removal toward the end of the chapter.) Before the dioramas were moved into storage, visitors climbing up to the fourth floor moved from a display case about extinct animals to a series of Native American dioramas to the glittering rocks and minerals in the geology room before finally arriving at the Philippine exhibit in a corner of the anthropology room. The logics of extinction and petrification are thoroughly enmeshed with that of primitivism. In ways reminiscent of the spatiality of the 1904 World’s Fair, Filipinos are demarcated from the indigenous peoples of the Americas, yet primitiveness flows through the entire floor.
Figure 1.9. Display case exhibiting extinct and endangered animals. University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.
But who are the real primitives? Who are the real headhunters? As it turns out, the white American scientist is the real headhunter. As I discussed earlier, Carl Guthe exhumed burial grounds in the Philippines and collected, packed up, and transported human skeletal material back to the United States as part of the founding of the university’s anthropology collection. This foundational act of headhunting is indicated by the six busts displayed in the museum’s rotunda. While the busts of these six white American men are meant to represent intellectual and epistemological achievement, I argue that they also are a sign of American academia’s dependence on primitive accumulation. These six heads depend on the collection of Filipino skulls in order to tell a powerful story of invidious difference between bodies that can think and bodies that cannot think.
The UMMNH also primes its visitors with what Mieke Bal calls “museumtalk” about its collections and collecting.56 “Museumtalk” refers to the self-referential, museological messages that the museum, especially the large museum, conveys to its visitors. By paying attention to the “discourse of museum discourse,” in Bal’s phrase, we can learn about how the museum defines the purpose and goal of its collections and justifies the act of collecting, meta-messages that contribute to a larger discourse and common sense about accumulation.57 For example, during the 2009–2010 academic year, the University of Michigan’s twelve museums coordinated a range of programming open to the public that celebrated collections and collecting as part of its theme that year, “Meaningful Objects: Museums in the Academy.”58 Banners that advertised the UMMNH’s exhibition Collecting for Science: Collections, Science, and Scholarship flapped atop flagpoles all around campus.59 The exhibition highlighted collections research at the museums of anthropology, zoology, and paleontology, and at the herbarium. In its promotional material, the UMMNH justified and celebrated collections and collecting as a source of scientific reliability with museological claims like the following: “Museum specimens substantiate collecting events and provide a basis for scientific research.”60 The 2009–2010 exhibition echoed the permanent didactics on the UMMNH ground-floor rotunda that introduce visitors to the different collections—again, by anthropology, zoology, paleontology, and the herbarium—with pronouncements like the following: “Modern collecting is responsible collecting,” “Museums are MORE than just storage facilities,” “The U-M Museums contain vast amounts of information,” “Museum collections document changes,” and “The collections support research.”
These kinds of claim exemplify what I have been calling the accumulative epistemology that subtends the colonial project, not only in terms of the past (for example, Guthe’s foundational expedition to the Philippines), but also in terms of the representation of “specimens” in the museum today. In the case of the Philippines, the accumulated objects serve to “substantiate”—both materially and ideologically—the “collecting events” and “scientific research.” Seen through the lens of primitive accumulation, “foreign” objects are transported to and domesticated as evidence of racialized primitivity. And this is all for the educational