Berghahn Books

ARTEFACTS IN THEORY: ANTHROPOLOGY AND MATERIAL CULTURE

Author(s): AMIRIA HENARE
Source: Cambridge Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2003), pp. 54-66
Published by: Berghahn Books
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54

ARTEFACTS IN THEORY:
ANTHROPOLOGY AND MATERIAL CULTURE1

AMIRIA HENARE

Abstract

Artefacts in Theory is a project to explore hoiv anthropological analysis is

developed through engagement with artefacts, both in thefield and in museums.
It will involve workshops, an exhibition and a conference designed to illuminate
how such engagements are instrumental in shaping anthropological theory. The
focus is on contemporary work as well as that of keyfigures in the history of the
discipline. The exhibition, to be held at the University of Cambridge Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology in 2005, will examine analytic frameworks
made possible by working with artefacts, among other things, and how these are
and might be conveyed through text, three-dimensional display, and other
exhibitionary media. This paper outlines key issues to be explored in the project,
which seeks to dissolve the 'division of labour' in anthropology between those
who study 'systems' of society and culture and those who work on material
culture and museums.

In her 1990 article 'Artefacts of History', Marilyn Strathern reflected on

what she called the 'current division of labour between social / cultural
anthropologists and those concerned with material culture of the kind
that finds its way to museums'. This split, she argued, derives from the
epistemological preoccupations of a modernist anthropology that takes
as its task the elucidation of social and cultural 'contexts'; systems or
frameworks used to make sense of social life. In this scheme, the primary
task of anthropologists is to slot ethnographic 'data' (in the form of
objects, performances and events, among other things) into the social

Acknowledgments
This paper was presented as a seminar at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford
on 24 Janaury 2003.1 am very grateful to Haidy Geismar, Anita Herle, Martin
Holbraad and Marilyn Strathern for their advice on various drafts of this
here were stimulated by discussions with
paper. Many of the ideas presented
these colleagues as well as Jeremy Coote, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Sari
Wastell.

Cambridge Anthropology, 23: 2, 2003

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Artefacts in Theory 55

and historical systems (e.g. 'society' or 'culture') that give them

meaning. One effect of this procedure, she noted, is that the system itself
becomes the of study, and artefacts are reduced to mere
object
illustration. 'For if one sets up social context as the frame of reference in

relation to which meanings are to be elucidated', she wrote, 'then

explicating that frame of reference obviates or renders the illustrations
superfluous: they are become exemplars or reflections of meanings
which are produced elsewhere. It was in this sense that social
anthropology could proceed independently of the study of material
culture' (1990: 38).
More recently, Tim Ingold has made similar reference to an
'overriding academic division of labour between the disciplines that
deal, on the one hand, with the human mind and its manifold linguistic,
social and cultural products, and on the other, with the structures and
composition of the material world' (2000:1). In pointing out this
disciplinary apartheid, the concern of both writers was not to defend
material cultural research from its detractors, but rather to draw

attention to the limitations placed by the 'division of labour' upon social

anthropological analysis at large. The project 'Artefacts in Theory' is
driven by similar concerns. A key premise of this initiative is that our
understandings are constrained less by a failure to take account of
'material aspects of social life', than by the very act of maintaining a
position from which materiality can only be a grounding corrective to a
discursively oriented discipline. Cultivating 'material culture' as a sub
discipline, in other words, may be part of the problem.
Strathern referred to the 'epistemological preoccupations' of
modernist anthropology. Perhaps what can blind us to the various
continuities through nature and culture, mind and matter, however, is
less a preoccupation with the nature of knowledge per se, and more a
focus on particular ways of knowing and communicating meaning that
are categorically distinct from their objects. 'Understood as a realm of
discourse', Ingold notes, '...culture is conceived to hover over the
material world but not to permeate it' (2000: 340). Meaning is laid over
objects or imputed into them, but an object cannot be its meaning, a
linguistic axiom that arose in specific opposition to the idea that
significance is embedded in objects 'out there' in the world. It is easy to
see why such a model should appeal to social anthropologists, who, like
most academics in the social sciences and humanities, are primarily
readers, writers and talkers. Much of their professional lives are taken
up with activities centred on language, and their productivity is
increasingly measured in the amount of writing and talking they do. It is
not surprising, therefore, that they should take up the tools that are to

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56 Amiria Henare

hand, using the 'affordances'2 of language to interpret and make sense of

their own and others' worlds.
This preoccupation with language, however, has encouraged
anthropologists to regard not only their subjects but also the past and
present of their discipline in linguistically oriented terms. When social
anthropologists moved from 'the armchair to the field', it is said, they
adopted the notebook as a signature tool. Although they collected a
of artefacts - made by local people as well as those
multiplicity things
-
they produced themselves, such as films, drawings and photographs
the focus was on learning local languages and collecting notes, tapes,
vocabularies and descriptions - linguistic and literary data more easily
translated into ethnographic monographs, building blocks of the newly
professional discipline. With the advent of structuralism, to these
primary methodologies were added analytic models imported from
linguistics and semiotic theory. Every aspect of social life could thus be
rendered through a filter of language, every phenomenon accorded its
place in a system of signification. Then, as post-structuralism and
hermeneutics filtered through into anglophone scholarship,
anthropologists turned upon their own discourse, mining each phrase
and utterance for meanings gleaned through textual deconstruction and
interpretation.
The problem with this account is that it obscures several key
methodologies and approaches to social and cultural analysis which, I
will argue, have provided social anthropology with some of its most
interesting and important insights. Rather than abandoning the study of
artefacts, their production and collection in the field, anthropologists
have continued to explore multiple modes of engagement, learning to
make things, observing performances and entering into relations of
exchange. The 'division of labour', in other words, has never been
concerned
complete, at least in the field. Although in this paper I am
with the study of artefacts, the activities this entails have long
primarily
been integral aspects of fieldwork, crucial ways of engaging with
informants and gaining insights into social life. It often involves
collecting, which may be a motivating factor or an incidental
consequence of such activity. In either case, collections thus assembled,
with the notes, and other records the
along photographs produced by
fieldworker, form part of a corpus of ethnographic 'evidence' to be
in writing, 'talk' and other media. Like notes,
deployed anthropological
these are artefacts of analysis, not 'raw data', and the
already simply
involved in assembling them yield particular kinds of
processes
Yet while a great deal of attention has been directed
understandings.
toward examining the nature of written material produced in the context

2 Tim Ingold, 'Culture and the perception of the environment', 1992.

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Artefacts in Theory 57

of ethnography, the peculiar analytic affordances of other kinds of

artefacts have gone largely unexamined in the 'mainstream' of the
discipline.
It might be argued, of course, that scholars of visual and material
culture have already addressed these issues, having studied collections,
'entangled objects' (Thomas 1991), and the social life of things
(Appadurai 1986). The implication of artefacts, their producers, and
appropriators in concomitant processes of knowledge production and
the exercise of political power have been well explored, often within the
historical context of colonialism. Here, however, the properties of objects
and the relations they engender between (rather than within) groups of
people are often regarded negatively as elements which facilitate
regimes of cultural and political expropriation. Objects are reduced to
pawns in the schemes of people, and are thus symptomatic of an
increasingly anthropocentric anthropology no longer concerned with
how people fit into the 'scheme of things'. While many have examined
the sociality of objects discursively, therefore, few have explicitly
addressed the methodological questions I have in mind. On the contrary,
practitioners of material culture studies and visual anthropology have
been among the most enthusiastic in embracing models and
methodologies derived from the study of language. Scholars have
spoken of 'reading material texts', sometimes constructing formal
'grammars' through which to unlock the meanings encoded in images
and artefacts, though recent linguistic analogies have been more attuned
both to the subtleties of post-structuralist theory and the distinctive
affordances of language and things (e.g. Tilley, 1999). These strategies
have provided insights of their own, but in likening artefacts to speech,
writing and semiologically-structured thought, it is easy lose sight of
- their substance, their
qualities that make objects special being in one
place at one time, their complex sensuality. By identifying the realm of
representation as the place where all significant action happens,
furthermore, such accounts have, often despite themselves, served to
police a boundary between subject and object, art and artefact, meaning
and materiality.
To put it another way, a certain conflation has occurred whereby
the 'message' of anthropology is often indistinguishable from its
primary expressive medium, that of language. A consensus seems to
have emerged in some quarters, either that the limitations of writing and
speaking are such that they cannot be used to engage with
epistemologies that operate on different terms, or that language and
language-like systems of meaning encompass all anthropologically
significant modalities. I beg to differ from both views, on the following
grounds: First, that language is sufficiently flexible to articulate at least
some aspects of epistemologies that transcend it; secondly, that social

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58 Amiria Henare

life involves all kinds of activities in which 'language' in any sense plays
only a minor role; and thirdly, that anthropology does not and has not
-
always confined itself to linguistic methodologies studying and
collecting artefacts, and exhibiting them in museums, being a case in
point.
Indeed,for anthropologists of earlier generations, such
methodologies were ubiquitous elements in ethnographic research.
Among the principal motivations for embracing fieldwork as a signature
methodology was a need to create distance between the new 'social
science' and an older, more speculative anthropology that drew on
textual accounts as its primary resource. No longer content to take the
word of missionaries, explorers, colonial nabobs or traders at face value,
scientists like Alfred Cort Haddon, Franz Boas, and Bronislaw
Malinowski took to the field in order to study cultures empirically
through direct observation and personal experience. In moving the
discipline 'from the armchair to the field', in other words, they sought to
supplement textual analysis with closer and more intimate forms of
engagement. An integral aspect of this research was the study of
artefacts in use and in circulation, and participation in these processes
enabled ethnographers not only to gain specific insights into social life,
but also to form collections for museums. Haddon's Torres Strait
material, for example, is held in the British Museum and at Cambridge.
Boas' Northwest Coast collections are in the American Museum of
Natural History, and Malinowski's Kula valuables are now in the British
Museum, Museum Victoria in Australia and the Phoebe A. Hurst
Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley (Young 2000).
One reason for studying artefacts in situ, and for collecting them,
was the development of a holistic approach to the study of social
relations whereby culture was seen to inhere in all aspects of 'the field'.
For these anthropologists, 'society' or 'culture' as objects of study existed
not just in people's minds nor in their relations with each other but in a
total social fabric incorporating environment, people and things. In
order to study these complex systems, sometimes likened to organisms
or machines, it was necessary to employ a variety of methodologies and
tools, each of which enabled distinctive modes of engagement. The
notebook was but one of these technologies, albeit an important one, and

was used for jotting down drawings, maps and diagrams as well as
notes and vocabularies. Objects produced by local people were acquired
both as a means of access into socio-economic relations, and as a form of

evidence to be in museums. The sheer volume of artefacts

analysed
shipped back to Britain suggests the importance accorded this material
in practice if not in theory. There was also a great deal of interest in the
possibilities of more 'modern' technologies, notably the camera, and the
ethnographic fieldnotes and collections of Haddon, Boas and

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Artefacts in Theory 59

Malinowski were all complemented by a wealth of photographic

material - artefacts of a different kind.3
Having laid down a precedent for this type of fieldwork, these
scholars each went on to teach whole generations of anthropologists the

principles of ethnographic research. Many of their students collected

prolifically in the field, and a number went on to work in museums.
Among Boas' proteges were of course Alfred Kroeber, curator then
director of the University of California Anthropology Museum4 for
nearly forty years, Robert Lowie, for whom the same Museum was later
named, and Margaret Mead, who worked at the American Museum of
Natural History from 1926 until her death in 1978.5 Even the linguist
Edward Sapir spent part of his early career in museums.6 In Britain,
Malinowski was assisted by Haddon as a young man, and among
Haddon's students who collected as part of their fieldwork were A.R.
Radcliffe-Brown, Gunnar Landtman, John Layard and Gregory Bateson,
all of whom gave large collections to the Cambridge anthropology
museum (CUMAA). Similarly, among Malinowski's students, Meyer
Fortes, E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Audrey Richards all donated material

Malinowski's photographs, many of which are held in the British

Library of
Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics, appear to
have attracted little scholarly attention until recently. A selection of his
Kiriwina photographs was published in 1999, and a collection held by
Malinowski's daughter, Helena Wayne, was exhibited at the National
Museum of Poland in Krakow in 2000. See Malinowski—Witkacy,
Photography: between Science and Art, special issue of the journal Konteksty,
2000, No. 1-4. See also M. Malinowski's Kiriwina - Fieldwork
Young,
Photography 1915-1918, University of Chicago Press, 1999. Similarly,
photographs taken during Haddon's Cambridge Expedition to the Torres
Strait in 1898 were largely neglected by scholars until 1998, when a centennial
exhibition was mounted at the Cambridge University Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology and an edited compilation of scholarly essays
was produced. See A. Herle and S. Rouse, Cambridge and the Torres Strait
(1998), especially E. Edwards, 'Performing Science:Still Photography and the
Torres Strait Expedition', pp.106-135. Boas, on
the other hand, is an
acknowledged pioneer of ethnographic photography, and his images have
been studied in depth at least since the early 1980s. See M. Banta and C.M.
Hinsley, From Site to Sight: Anthropology, Photography, and the Power of Imagery,
1986, and J. Ruby, 'Franz Boas and the Early Camera Study of Behavior',
Kinesics Report, 1980, pp.7-16.

This is now the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum at the University of Berkeley.

Mead's arrangements of Oceanic material in the Museum's Hall of Pacific

Peoples remain largely unaltered today.

Sapir took up a Harrison Fellowship, which involved teaching and research at

the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, in 1908. R. Darnell and J.T.
Irvine, 'Edward Sapir', in Biographical Memoirs, Vol.71, National Academy
Press, Washington D.C., 1997, p.284

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60 Amiria Henare

to Cambridge. Raymond Firth's Tikopian collection is held in the

Australian Museum (Bonshek, 2001). Even Claude Levi-Strauss, the
father of structural anthropology, was an avid collector of indigenous
artworks (purchased mostly from dealers rather than in the field) which
he deployed in the development of his theories. It is also a little known
fact that Marilyn Strathern's first academic appointment was at the
Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology
where her tasks included the cataloguing of some four hundred artefacts
she and Andrew Strathern had amassed during Melanesian fieldwork.
Her writing, and that of others, on personhood in Melanesia, built on
participant-observation of social relations involving persons and things,
has been extended into other areas of research including actor-network
theory and biotechnology. A brief perusal of the accession register at
CUMAA, furthermore, confirms that nearly all the anthropological
artefacts accessioned during the last ten years were collected by doctoral
students and members of the department while in the field. The wealth
of recent publications on the anthropology of art and exchange further
demonstrates that artefact-oriented research continues to flourish in the
discipline.
Other anthropologists have developed innovative methodologies
centred on artefacts that are less empirical in orientation. The work of
Marcel Mauss, for example, grounded in archival study of ceremonial
gift-giving in various societies, has opened several productive avenues
of enquiry which continue to be explored today. More recently, theorists
including Alfred Gell, Bruno Latour, Daniel Miller, Christopher Pinney,
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, as well as Ingold and Strathern, have
tackled the philosophical foundations of debates about relations
between people and things, offering new theoretical tools with which to
approach these questions. These writers have drawn upon their own
ethnographic experiences in the field and (in some cases) study of
artefacts in museums to develop theoretical insights that have had
impact across the discipline. While we might be familiar with the
elaboration of their ideas through writing, however, little emphasis is
informed through their
placed on the ways in which their work has been
engagement with things.
The point of this brief and partial survey is to note that collecting
and artefacts (in the field and in museums) have endured as
studying
at which anthropology is
key ethnographic strategies well past the point
said to have turned, in the words of WHR Rivers, 'away from the
physical and material towards the psychological and social aspects of
the life of mankind' (1917). Notwithstanding Malinowski's oft-quoted
view of collecting and photography as 'secondary occupations' (Young
2000), or Boas' scepticism about the ability of artefacts to represent
culture, have continued to study, collect and produce a
ethnographers

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Artefacts in Theory 61

wide range of artefacts which inform their work and which typically end
up in museums. What is striking is that we know so little about how and
why they do so, and the ways in which these activities contribute to our
understandings of social life. Although a great deal of energy has been
expended on the careful analysis of anthropological writings, and rather
less on photography and film-making, the nuances of other ways of
-
engaging among them drawing, exchange and collecting for museums
- have
only just begun to attract scholarly attention (e.g. Herle and
Rouse, 1998; O'Hanlon 2000). Part of the purpose of this project is to give
this debate momentum - to identify what anthropologists thought they
might derive from these methods, the theoretical insights they gained in
the process, and the difficulties they experienced in translating these into
writing and other media.
Yet Artefacts in Theory is more than an exercise in historical
revision. Most importantly, it is intended to explore the ways in which
anthropologists can gain new insights from artefact-based research. Let
me give some examples of ways in which various methodologies that
focus on or produce artefacts may allow one to arrive at particular
theoretical understandings:
As a student in New Zealand, I was instructed in the techniques of
Maori cloak weaving by Maureen Lander and Hinemoa Harrison, both
expert in the art. I learned to strip muka fibre from the flax leaf, roll a
two-ply cord and whatu the strings together through finger weaving to
make a tauira, a sampler constructed like the body of a cloak. Later, in
the course of doctoral fieldwork, I travelled with Maureen to a number
of Scottish museums to view and handle old Maori cloaks in their
collections. Having practised weaving ourselves, Maureen and I had a
particular way of regarding the cloaks, an awareness of the skill that
produced such fine threads and knots, the complex mathematical
designs of the taniko borders. This allowed us to appreciate the kinds of
knowledge deployed by the weaver in an activity that at once combined
what might otherwise be separated out as 'manual' and 'intellectual'
skills. Although the cloaks were often lacking in documentation, the
movements of the weaver's hands were still there, embodied in the
fabric of the cloak and therefore available to us long after the weaver
had died. The cloaks could thus be understood as a kind of record,
perhaps intended, as are many Maori taonga or treasured artefacts, to
last beyond the weaver's lifespan in order to reach out to future
generations. Maureen recorded these movements, held in suspended
animation in the body of the cloak, using notes, drawings and her digital
camera. She then took this information back to New Zealand where she

passed it on to her students who would in turn learn the techniques

recorded in the cloak all those years ago. This allowed them to pick up a
thread from an ancestor and weave it into the kaupapa or body of their

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62 Amiria Henare

own lives. The cloak thus enabled a kind of continuity to be maintained,

demonstrating one way in which ancestors can maintain a presence that
transcends the limitations of biological mortality.
For me the practice of weaving also illuminated certain aspects of
Maori kinship and cosmology. The aho or weft thread is also the aho
tipuna, the line that links the papa or generational layers in genealogy. A
zvhariki takapau, the sleeping mat that was also used give birth upon, is
built up in sections, or papa. The aho or main threads gd from one papa to
another, binding the pattern together. To whiri is to plait, and whiriwhiri
is to deliberate, discuss or debate. Tukntuku are woven panels lining the
interior of the communal meetinghouse, often made by two weavers
who pass the threads through to each other from either side, building up
the pattern. Tuku is a term of exchange, signifying the release of
something important into the keeping of another, with the expectation of
an ongoing relationship. This knowledge, combined with the skills of
weaving, threw into relief aspects of the ways in which Maori ontologies
are framed and relations between people come into being. Similar points
about the 'conceptual purchase'7 of knotting and weaving have been
made by Suzanne Kuchler (2002) and Alain Babadzan (1993) in reference
to Malanggan carvings and Tahitian to'o (bound wooden deities)
respectively.
A second example: Martin Holbraad, in his doctoral thesis on Ifa
divination in Cuba, draws attention to the 'physical' properties of
powder used in the ritual. In observing and participating in seances
during fieldwork, he became aware that the 'malleability' and
'perviousness' of ache powder spread on the divining board enables it to
record the movements of the diviner's hands in the form of marks made
by his fingers. The powder thus creates a zone in which the dynamic
trajectories that intersect in a divination are rendered visible, a crucial
aspect of the process. Added to this, its 'partibility' 'allows ache as a
trajectile field of motion to extend beyond the 'icon' of the divining
board, so as to encompass some of the key dramatis personae of the seance'
as it is spread onto people, objects, and around the ritual space (2002:
117). Holbraad then deploys these observations as part of a complex
argument that 'parts of the world (like moving hands and divining
can be meanings - not as that 'have' but as
chains) signs meaning,
instantiations of meaning pure and simple'. The 'paths' drawn on the
divining board are thus both lines in the powder and 'trajectories of
meaning' whose meetings constitute divinatory verdicts per se. This is a
convincing riposte to the argument that divinatory verdicts are little
more than ambiguous truth-claims designed to be interpreted in a

7 The is Kiichler's
phrase (2002: 67).

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Artefacts in Theory 63

variety of ways (explanations of what, according to Evans-Pritchard, we

would dismiss as coincidence).
A third example: Alfred Gell has described how the activity of
making drawings and diagrams can be instrumental in anthropological
analysis. In his article 'Strathernograms, or, the semiotics of mixed
metaphors' (an effort to use diagrams to grasp arguments put forward in
Strathern's Gender of the Gift), he laments the fact that 'anthropology is
'
going through a non-diagrammatic phase, after the excesses of diagram-
making which marked the heyday of structuralism'. He also notes that
'Levi-Strauss, Leach and... Fortes, were masters of graphic means of
expression' (1999: 31). In the introduction to The Art of Anthropology, Gell
describes his own artistic bent, noting that for him, 'the graphic channel
of expression is as natural - in fact, rather more natural - than writing....
When I write, I see pictures in my head and I write accordingly; the
diagrams come first and the text later' (1999: 8-9). Applications of his
diagrammatic approach to anthropology, Gell notes, may be found in his
Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries (1975), and Wrapping in Images: Tattooing
in Polynesia (1993). (Holbraad too makes use of this analytic technique.)
Finally, in The Perception of the Environment, Tim Ingold employs
the process of basket-weaving to interrogate analytic distinctions drawn
between artefacts and organisms. Countering the assumption that
artefacts are 'made' through the imposition of abstract, intellectual
designs onto 'raw' materials through the application of 'manual' skills,
he demonstrates that the basket rather 'comes into being through the
gradual unfolding of that field of forces set up through the active and
sensuous engagement of practitioner and material'. This argument
forms the basis for a discussion of skill and its inter-generational
acquisition, the way in which knowledge of how to make things is
handed down from mother to daughter, father to son. Here Ingold
draws on Mackenzie's (1991) ethnography on the weaving of string-bags
or bilum in Melanesia to show that skill is a form of knowledge that is
'grown into' through the 'gradual attunement of movement and
perception' rather than transmitted at some 'higher' level (the level of
culture) in the form of abstract rules or formulae for action. These
arguments are used as grist to the mill of his meta-argument, that 'the
entire edifice of Western thought and science' fractures along a fissure
that derives from 'a single, underlying fault... namely that which
separates the 'two worlds' of humanity and nature' (2000:1). 'Instead of
trying to reconstruct the complete human being from two separate but
complementary components, respectively biophysical and sociocultural,
held together with a film of psychological cement', he notes, 'it struck
me that we should be trying to find a way of talking about human life
that eliminates the need to slice it up into these different layers.
Everything I have written since has been driven by this agenda' (2000:3).

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64 Amiria Henare

The project Artefacts in Theory has similar aims, although I would

frame it somewhat differently. Rather than seeking to avoid the 'slicing
up' of life altogether, the project seeks to investigate how life is sliced up
differently for different peoples, and how some may not slice it up at all,
at least in some senses, emphasising continuities and parallels over
distinctions and difference. The central point is this: Artefacts in Theory is
designed less to generate interest in material methodologies than to
contribute to the growing body "of work in anthropology that seeks to
get past the dichotomisation of subjects and objects, nature and culture,
matter and meaning. (Or at least restore these useful oppositions to their
proper place as one analytic tool among many.) In pointing out the
particular affordances of different modalities of engagement, the aim is
not to divorce one from the other but to gain further knowledge of their
potential in order to use them more intelligently within the discipline as
a whole. Hardly anyone in the world spends as much time dealing in
language as we scholars do, so it makes sense to explore other ways of
engaging in social relations and expressing ideas in the study of social
life and culture. The idea is to expand the repertoire of ethnography by
promoting greater fluency in a variety of methodologies and media
among which writing takes a central but not transcendental role.

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I'epoque de la decouverte. Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de

l'Homme.

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