The Filipino Primitive

Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum

Sarita Echavez See

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781479825059
• eBook ISBN: 9781479827121
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

How museums’ visual culture contributes to knowledge accumulation





Sarita See argues that collections of stolen artifacts form the foundation of American knowledge production. Nowhere can we appreciate more easily the triple forces of knowledge accumulation—capitalist, colonial, and racial—than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The Filipino Primitive takes Karl Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation,” usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must understand it as a project of knowledge accumulation.



Taking us through the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan Natural History Museum and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, also in Michigan, See reveals these exhibits as both allegory and real case of the primitive accumulation that subtends imperial American knowledge, just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American capitalist colonialism. With this understanding of the Filipino foundations of the American drive toward power and knowledge, we can appreciate the value of Filipino American cultural producers like Carlos Bulosan, Stephanie Syjuco, and Ma-Yi Theater Company who have created incisive parodies of this accumulative epistemology, even as they articulate powerful alternative, anti-accumulative social ecologies.

PART I

The Archive

Dispossession by Accumulation

1

Progress through the Museum

Knowledge Nullius and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History

The giant canoe stands still. The small child is shy. She approaches the canoe. Carved by Jim Pashegoba (Ojibwe) in the 1890s, the dugout canoe is landlocked on the floor of the anthropology gallery in the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History (UMMNH). Located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the museum is visited by about eighty thousand people every year, including twenty thousand schoolchildren.1 Pashegoba’s canoe stretches across the length of the museum’s anthropology gallery and divides the Native American display cases along one side of the room from the Philippine display cases along the other side. Nothing stops the child from walking up to the canoe. There is no glass partition. No rope-off stands. She knows she is not supposed to touch anything here. She knows she is not supposed to run or shout. This is a museum. But her arm cannot help stretching forth. Her fingers point at the boat that in turn points itself forward. The grownup standing beside her reads aloud from the sign posted high above her head: “Please sit carefully in the dugout canoe. Have fun!” The grownup nods, and the child clambers into the canoe. She runs her fingers wonderingly across the wood.

Figure 1.1. Dugout canoe carved by Jim Pashegoba (Ojibwe). University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.

Touch. Do Not Touch. Desire and prohibition. These are the two drives that confront and divide the school-age children who are the typical visitors along with their families to educational museums today like the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History. The first drive consists of a desire to touch what they see. The second drive consists of a prohibition against that desire. Children repeatedly are schooled in the lesson of not touching and of successfully suppressing their desires, especially in institutional spaces. But on the UMMNH’s fourth floor, in the anthropology room, Pashegoba’s dugout canoe provides children with a rare release from that prohibition. During my several visits to the museum, I have witnessed the sheer joy of children clambering into the deep canoe, momentarily freed from the rules and etiquette that typically govern the display of things, animals, and people in the natural history museum. The children’s delight stems from the absence of the glass screen that usually serves as partition, dividing them from objects in display cases.

Even as Pashegoba’s canoe offers to children a momentary freedom from the museum’s rules of exhibition, it embodies the museum’s crisis of representation about the politics of its collections and their display. Made over into a child’s plaything, the canoe becomes an example of how indigenous cultures or first nations are made to “last” for others, as Jean O’Brien has put it, an instance of what Gustavo Verdesio calls “epistemic violence.”2 The museum, moreover, provides little to no context—historical or otherwise—for the appearance of the Philippines in proximity with Native America. It has no narrative to account for the American conquest of the Philippines, let alone the university’s role in founding and administering the colony.3 The proximity between the Native and the Filipino is left entirely unexplained by the museum. But the spatial design of the exhibition speaks volumes. As it is experienced by the museum’s visitors, the canoe comes to mark the boundary and proximity between the Native and the Philippine and the Child. Sitting in the canoe, the child mediates between the Indian and the Filipino.4 If we understand the child as a kind of primitive within the family, as yet untutored in the mores of civilized behavior, she triangulates the primitives in the anthropology room. But if the child ever asked her grownup about the relationship between herself, the Ojibwe canoe, and the Visayan burial items, neither child nor grownup would receive help from the museum. The relationship between the museumgoer and the exhibitions that they have come to see and learn about is left unexplained. This lack of explanation indexes the museum’s larger crisis of representation about the politics of its collections, even as this lack also allows the racist and colonial ideology of the backward or disappeared primitive to occupy that space and thus become self-evident, a form of unquestioned common sense.

Figure 1.2. Sign posted in the anthropology room at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.

This chapter addresses the museum’s crisis of representation by addressing two questions: What is the nature of the relationship between these two instances of the racial primitive, the Native and the Filipino and, hence, between these two instances of primitive accumulation, the material, literal collecting of artifacts and the ideological collecting of knowledge? I propose that the university is an exemplary site for the investigation of the politics of knowledge production and that the literal and ideological foundations of knowledge production are most visible in the university’s museum. I focus on the collection and display of the Filipino in the university museum, and I take up this problematic of the proximity of the Filipino to the Native to show how these primitive proximities—and the distinct kinds of colonial and settler colonial structures of domination that they index—play a crucial role in facilitating how the university advances its commitment to knowledge. These kinds of primitive proximities are created by the university museum’s commitment to two processes of accumulation: the material and the epistemological. The material accumulation of the backward or disappeared primitive forms the epistemological foundation of Western knowledge production. In pedagogical spaces like the UMMNH’s anthropology exhibition, the collections of the “primitive” symbolize both the racial origins that (white European) Man has transcended and the ideological origins of the accumulative drive toward power/knowledge. In short, the literal accumulation of the primitive instantiates an accumulative epistemology, the endless and violent quest for accrued knowledge. As I elaborate toward the end of the chapter, the colonial fantasy of terra nullius—the creation of empty land by the genocidal emptying of land—is accompanied by what I call “knowledge nullius.” The university’s commitment to knowledge turns out to be rhetorical cover not only for the construction of accumulative epistemology as knowledge but also for the will to power.

Filipino Foundations

The contemporary display of Philippine things and peoples in the UMMNH serves as a powerful allegory and a “real” case of the primitive accumulation subtending imperial knowledge. The University of Michigan established its natural history and anthropology collections in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by sponsoring circumglobal zoological, archaeological, and ethnographic expeditions with a special focus on the Philippines. These collections formed the material and epistemological foundation of the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology as they emerged at Michigan’s flagship public university. According to Carla Sinopoli, the director of the Museum of Anthropology and the Museum Studies Program at the University of Michigan, there is “no denying that the anthropology museum and department are direct products of United States colonialism.”5 Three Michiganders are associated with these founding collections: the explorer Joseph Beale Steere (1842–1940), the anthropologist Carl Guthe (1893–1947), and the zoologist and colonial administrator Dean Conant Worcester (1866–1924). Their biographies provide us with the tale of how accumulation takes place.

A graduate of the University of Michigan’s law school, Joseph Beale Steere collected about sixty thousand specimens—botanical, zoological, and anthropological—during a circumglobal expedition that included the Philippines in the 1870s and then an expedition solely to the Philippines in the 1880s.6 These expeditions were sponsored by the University of Michigan, and they make up a significant part of the founding collection for the university’s natural history museum.7 In a 2012 lecture about Steere, the curator of the University of Michigan’s herbarium described the explorer as a “great old man, as it were, of the university museums.”8 Much of the museum’s rhetoric about Steere’s expedition follows a narrative of adventurous discovery and the accomplishment of firsts and foundations. Steere’s bronze bust stands in the entrance to the UMMNH, and the bust’s inscription and other informational posters about him note that Steere received the university’s first honorary doctorate and that his donation of over sixty-two thousand specimens “prompted U-M to build its first natural history museum in 1881.” Indeed, a display case about the museum building’s history informs us that the erection of the museum building was the “first for any public university in America.” The didactic—the museum label with historical, interpretive, and narratological material—about Steere adds that he collected “representatives of a multitude of plant and animal species and human cultural artifacts previously unknown to science” (emphasis added).9 Here we see the museum making an explicit connection between exploration, accumulation, discovery, and knowledge. Ironically, the proclamation constitutes a confession that what is being discovered is not so much the unknown non-Western world as the Western scientific way of knowing. Far from building knowledge about the Filipino, the accumulation of the Filipino enabled the American university to establish and legitimate its epistemology of science, or what Sylvia Wynter has called the “overrepresentation” of Man. The UMMNH founding collection exemplifies how, as Wynter phrases it, a “present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man … overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself” even as it also creates a “secular slot of Otherness as a replacement for the theocentric slot of Otherness.”10 Moreover, Steere’s achievement is not that the non-Western world becomes known to science, but rather that Western science no longer is “unknown to science.” Science can become known to itself. Science can discover itself, but only at the price of discounting non-Western epistemology and value systems.11

Figure 1.3. Bronze bust of Joseph Beal Steere by sculptor Carlton W. Angell, on display in the rotunda of the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.

One of Steere’s undergraduate students, Dean Conant Worcester would go on to establish himself as one of the few Philippine experts in the United States at the time, a reputation based on his publication of highly popular books about the Philippines.12 Worcester first traveled to the Philippines as a member of Steere’s second 1887 expedition, also sponsored by the University of Michigan. In the 1890s Worcester headed his own expedition to the Philippines, sponsored by the Minnesota Academy of Natural Sciences. Upon returning to the United States, he taught zoology at the University of Michigan and published a number of scholarly and popular books about the Philippines during the U.S. conquest. Worcester then transitioned to service as a colonial administrator in the Philippines with positions on the first and second Philippine Commissions and then, for over a decade starting in 1901, as secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which included governance over non-Christian tribes and peoples. After resigning from colonial governance, Worcester remained in the Philippines to pursue lucrative agribusiness interests, which included the development of large tracts of land he previously had acquired as secretary of the interior and investments in coconut products and cattle.

Worcester’s influence in the United States has lived on to the present moment because of the monumental size and controversial nature of his collection of photographs of the Philippines. Worcester was a zealous amateur photographer who also eventually turned to the movie camera. According to Mark Rice, during his years in the Philippines, Worcester took more than fifteen thousand photographs and more than two miles of film footage with the singular goal of authorizing and disseminating a particular “truth” about Philippine incapacity and the resulting need for a strong civilizing A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Accumulating the Primitive
• Part I. The Archive: Dispossession by Accumulation
• Part II. The Repertoire of Dispossession
• Conclusion: Accumulation Now and Then
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author