A Turkish brooch returns: repatriation and recognition

This week it was reported that a 2500-year-old a brooch originally belonging to King Croesus will be returned to its homeland of Turkey.  The brooch, a golden winged seahorse, is one of several items in a collection known as the Lydian Hoard, looted from Turkey in 1965.  After circulating in the art market and finding itself exhibited in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1980s, the collection was repatriated to Turkey in 1993.  Yet, in 2006, it was discovered that the repatriated brooch was a fake.

Recently, the original was found and returned to Turkey.

The Guardian article describing this series of events also reports that the brooch's return to Turkey is one example of a larger trend within the country. The author, Constanze Letsch, states that Turkey has "launched what some call 'an art war' to repatriate antiquities from museums around the world that it says were stolen and smuggled out of the country illegally. According to official numbers, 885 artefacts were returned in 2011 alone."  

As Letsch highlights, certainly there are economic benefits to owning cultural treasures.  They will attract tourists and art historians to a particular place, as the article explains.  However, there is also a potential for this repatriation, which is, in a sense, a performative act of recognition, to initiate healing and solidify cultural history, presence and belonging.  

Scholarship in critical museology explores the relationship between politics, power, and material culture.  This work is particularly relevant for understanding the stakes involved in the repatriation of items that have ended up in museum collections, private collections, or the art market. Whether a call for ownership is physical in nature -- a desire for an object being returned to its source community, or epistemological -- a community claiming authority over the meaning, treatment, or interpretation of their material culture, it is, as James Clifford (2004: 9) has stated, a "powerful political act."  It is a way for people "long marginalized or made to disappear, physically or ideologically" to say "We exist."


Sources:
Constanze Letsch, "King Croesus's golden brooch to be returned to Turkey" http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/25/king-croesus-treasure-returning-turkey

Clifford, James.  "Looking Several Ways: Anthropology and Native Heritage in Alaska." Current Anthropology 45(1) (February 2004): 5-30.

Webs of Significance: Material Culture and Disciplinarity

For my second Comprehensive exam, I wrote about disciplinary differences in approaches to material culture.  I've pulled excerpts from my essay to create the post below.  Enjoy!

“... man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”

-- Clifford Geertz (1973, 5)

-  “Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider's web?"

-  “Oh, no," said Dr. Dorian. "I don't understand it. But for that matter I don't understand how a   

   spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they 

   were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle."

                                                            -- Fern and Dr. Dorian, Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White (1952)

If, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz proposes, man is “an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” then Fern and Dr. Dorian’s conversation over the appearance of the words “Some Pig” in a spider's web captures the essence of disciplinary differences in approaches to material culture.  Suspended in our own webs of significance, how do we approach understanding the things that find themselves entangled in our webs?  Do we notice the intricacies of the webs we’ve spun?  Do we seek to understand how the webs were spun?  Or do we focus on the things entangled within the webs and trace the paths they traveled to arrive at where they are now?  

Looking at approaches to material culture undertaken by scholars from art history, history, and anthropology reveals that while they share an appreciation for the relationships between webs of significance and the things within them, their disciplinary differences shape their approaches.  Disciplines engaged with material culture studies are engaged in conversations strikingly similar to Fern and Dr. Dorian’s.

Anthropology

As one of material culture studies’ home disciplines, anthropology has had a long time to think about how objects mean.[1]  Anthropology’s beginnings were rooted in collecting and classifying artifacts from Other peoples.  With practices guided by the evolutionist- and primitivist-infused salvage paradigm that understood Indigenous peoples as both less civilized than Europeans and on their way to extinction, for anthropologists, the act of collecting was also an act of preserving vanishing cultures.[2]  Artifacts remained central within the discipline throughout its 1920s shift towards functionalist frameworks, its interest in structuralist and symbolic anthropologies that came about in the 1960s, and its adaptation of Marxist-infused approaches popular since the 1980s which have tended to understand objects as either gifts or commodities, or both.[3]

More recently, the web of anthropology has extended in a variety of directions as researchers employ innovative interdisciplinary approaches to interpreting cultural and social phenomena.[4]   Such directions have included the anthropology of art, interested in the culturally-specific ways in which artifacts function and are valued artistically; visual anthropology, focused on different ways of seeing and valuations of the visual; the history of anthropology, concerned with reflecting on assumptions embedded in the discipline’s collecting and classification practices; and the anthropology of the senses, which seeks to account for meanings in non- or extra-linguistic elements material culture.[5]

Art History

Art historical approaches to material culture studies have been shaped by both connoisseurship and a related preoccupation with authenticity.  Connoisseurship, the assessment of an artwork’s physical characteristics to establish provenance or assess its value within established aesthetic hierarchies, is one well-established way art historians have, to borrow a phrase from art historian Donald Preziosi, made the visible legible.[6] This aim is guided by an assumption that artworks reflect the temporal and social context of their makers, and thus can be used as doorways into lived realities of their makers’ pasts.  Jules David Prown, an art historian who developed a model for material culture studies, applies this link between art and maker in terms of the artifact, claiming that an item’s style can reveal unconscious beliefs of an object’s maker and culture, hidden to the culture itself.[7]  This art historical emphasis on material culture’s essential ties to its maker, visible in aesthetic elements, is largely shared by historians.

History

While material culture plays many a supporting role in histories, particularly in narratives about trade, exhibitions, commemorations and tourism, “material history,” or histories in which objects take the lead, are less common.[8]  Traditionally, historians who focus on material culture tend to approach objects, as folklorist Henry Glassie explains, as supplements to the written record of the past.  They are understood as having the ability to open doors to study histories of non-literate groups, as well groups who may be literate but do not rely as much on the written word to transmit thoughts and ideas as our own culture does.[9]  It makes sense, then, that the historian’s interest in material culture has been characterized as growing out of interdisciplinary engagements with sociology and anthropology, which encouraged the previously omitted inclusion of cultural and social elements in historical narratives.[10]   Investigations of the explanatory power of objects became a tool for the historian to produce cultural histories that account for subtleties in the everyday lives of people in the past.[11]

Perhaps part of history’s increasing interest in material culture stems from a reaction to the linguistic turn in academia, which questioned both the limits and reliability of the historian’s main evidential source, the written text.  This skepticism about the communicability of language was articulated well by ethnohistorian Laurier Turgeon: “[w]ords, as we know, do not say everything; they frequently deceive, or conceal more than they show, or even deflect or alter meaning.”[12] For Turgeon, an object’s non-textual character gives it a reliability no longer assumed of the written word.  Furthermore, an object might evoke a feeling of proximity to the past when understood as an “historical event” that “continues to exist in our own time.”[13]  This assumed ability of objects to connect us to a past outside of words also underlies the historian’s idea that material culture is a useful source for writing histories about individuals and groups, as well as aspects of the past undocumented in written records.

Much like Fran and Dr. Dorian then, while different disciplines share an interest in webs and the things in them, their perspectives colour the questions they ask and their means of answering them.  Although the study of material culture is, increasingly, a project shared by scholars in a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, art history and history, disciplinary differences still shape scholars’ approaches.  While the authors’ works discussed above all share an interest in challenging established ideas and frameworks in their disciplines, each one’s particularities -- anthropology’s interest in the valuations of exchange, art history’s focus on the aesthetic, and history’s attention to change over time and the production of memory and heritage --  can be understood as offering productive vantage points from which to think about how objects are enmeshed in the webs of significance humans have created.

             

---

[1] Tilley, 1. Tilley cites archaeology as its other “home discipline.”

[2] Tilley, 2; Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion (New York: Routledge, 1988), 1.

[3] Tilley, 2-3.

[4] Morphy and Banks, 2.

[5] Fred R. Myers, "Introduction," in The Empire of Things:  Regimes of Value and Material Culture (School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series. New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 2001), 4; Howard Morphy and Marcus Banks, “Introduction: rethinking visual anthropology,” in Rethinking Visual Anthropology, Howard Morphy and Marcus Banks eds (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997), 24; James Clifford, "Objects and Selves -- an Afterword" in ed. George W Stocking Jr., Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 245; Elizabeth Edawrds et. al., “Introduction,” in Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture (New York: Berg, 2006), 8.

[6] Charles F. Montgomery, Some Remarks on the Science and Principles of Connoisseurship (reprinted in 1961); Donald Preziosi, “Art History: Making the Visible Legible,” in The Art of Art History: a Critical Anthology, Donald Preziosi, ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998): 13-18.

[7] Prown states, “Style is most informative about underlying beliefs where their expression is least self-conscious… the function of art is to communicate… The distinction between art and artifact is that artifacts do not lie” in "The Truth of Material Culture:  History or Fiction?" in American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture eds. Jules David Prown and Kenneth Haltman (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000), 15.

[8] For example of marginal references to material culture in histories, see George William Colpitts, “Vice, Virtue and Profit in the Indian Trade: Trade Narrative and the Commercialization of Indians in America, 1700-1840.” [PhD diss] department of History and Classics, University of Alberta, 2000, H.V. Nelles, The Art of Nation Building: Pageantry and Spectacle at Queen's Tercentenary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), and Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-century Nova Scotia (Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994).  Thomas J, Schlereth (1990) notes that the term “material history” was coined by a Canadian!

[9] Henry Glassie, “Studying Material Culture Today,” in ed Gerald L. Pocius, Living in a Material World: Canadian and American Approaches to Material Culture (St. John’s: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1991), 253-54.

[10] A.B. McKillop, "Disciplinary Tribes,” 27.

[11] Schlereth, “One Historian’s Craft: Manuscripts, Palimpsests, Artifacts,” in Cultural History and Material Culture:  Everyday Life, Landscapes, Museums (London: University Press of Virginia, 1990).

[12] Laurier Turgeon, “The Tale of the Kettle: Odyssey of an Intercultural Object,” Ethnohistory 44(1), 3.

[13] Jules David Prown, "The Truth of Material Culture,” 12.

Jules David Prown - Mind in Matter

My first real look at literature on material culture studies happened in a Historical Methods seminar during my M.A.  Each student chose a different type of historical source (travel writing, diaries, fiction, letters, etc.), and then we presented our little projects in the seminar.  I chose material culture because I had stumbled upon a large collection of feminist political buttons held at the University of Ottawa's archive and had decided I wanted to write about them for my Master's major paper, but I did not have the slightest clue how to approach them as historical sources.    I needed some sort of standardized methodology to use.  

In my search, one of the first articles I came across was Jules David Prown's  “Mind in Matter: an Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method."  

Basically, Prown's method has three steps: 

1. Description
2. Deduction
3. Speculation

Though since its 1981 publication, much more has been written about objects and how to 'read' them, I still find it a useful piece.  Most of all, I appreciate how Prown's method emphasizes starting from a close description of the object -- really looking, touching, seeing it on its own terms first -- before moving on to analysing or speculating (about what it is, when it was made, or who made it, for example).  In visiting museum collections with other researchers, I have found this approach to be the one we take intuitively, and it has led to clever insights and nuanced questions that would not have emerged had we not taken the time to really look closely at the object.

You can find Prown's article here:   blogs.ubc.ca/qualresearch/files/2010/09/Mind-in-Matter.pdf