Diana DiPaolo Loren - Seeing Hybridity in The Anthropology Museum

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Article
Journal of Social Archaeology
0(0) 1–20
Seeing hybridity in the ! The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1469605315574789
Practices of longing jsa.sagepub.com
and fetishization
Diana DiPaolo Loren
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard
University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Abstract
Hybrid colonial objects are potent. Simply stated, hybrid colonial objects in museum
contexts are defined as those items that contain material characteristics of both col-
onizer and the colonized. These objects are constituted in complex colonial contexts,
resulting from the adoption and fusing of elements of style, manufacture, material, and
meaning from distinct intellectual and cultural legacies, which were themselves hybrids.
While hybridized material culture was used alongside more familiar, perhaps non-hybrid
objects, archaeologists encounter hybrid colonial objects differently. They seemingly
encapsulate in material form a certain lived experience of colonialism, allowing valid-
ation that the concepts of hybridity we argue were real and tangible in the past. In this
paper, I turn a critical mirror on collections of colonial material from eastern North
America at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University
to discuss not only how hybrid artifacts from the colonial world were documented,
cataloged, and preserved, but also to interrogate the processes of longing and fetish-
ization that impact the collection and interpretations of these objects.
Keywords
Museum, fetishization, hybridity, longing, colonial, New England
Corresponding author:
Diana DiPaolo Loren, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 11 Divinity
Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Email: dloren@fas.harvard.edu
Downloaded from jsa.sagepub.com at Harvard Libraries on May 4, 2015

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2 Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)
Introduction
As a museum curator, I spend my days thinking about objects in anthropology
museums. How they are measured, identified, cataloged, stored, researched, inter-
preted; all of the points in time of an object’s unique history after it is accessioned
into a collection and comes to reside amidst a larger group of objects. Some objects
move easily through the process, in that they almost seamlessly are incorporated
into a collection. For example, an eighteenth-century octagonal sleeve button
recovered from the cellar hole of the Old College building at Harvard is a thing
that neatly fits into museum classification categories: European, metal, personal,
button, flat, octagonal face, incised design (Figure 1). There are established pro-
cedures for describing, measuring, and identifying the button, placing it into
museum storage, and considering it beside other eighteenth-century material recov-
ered from that context.
Of course, not all objects fit smoothly into museum categories. For example, a
turtle is incised on one side of this colonial stone mold recovered from Natick,
Massachusetts, while the reverse includes impressions for making cast lead but-
tons that would presumably be attached to a European-style garment, such as a
coat (Figure 2). A close examination of the turtle suggests that the head and
appendages of the turtle are actually incised into an impression originally carved
for casting a button. The original object label (also pictured in Figure 2) raises
Figure 1. Screenshot of Peabody Museum, Harvard University online catalog for PM 987-22-
10/100223. (c) President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology
and Ethnology.

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Figure 2. Turtle incised on one side of a stone mold from Natick, MA; impressions for cast-
ing buttons from lead on the other side; and original catalog label. (c) President and Fellows of
Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, PM# 10–47–10/79953
(digital file# 99200039, 99200037, 99200026).
questions as to the identity of the creator and user of the mold, stating that it was
‘‘supposed to be used by Natives.’’ This ambivalent language complicates col-
lections and curatorial processes: was it made and/or used by Native Americans
or English? Early twentieth-century museum documentation on this and similar
molds questions why Native American individuals would have needed or used
stone molds for casting buttons—items that would have then been worn by
English colonists. To whom should it be attributed? These uncertainties haunt
museum classification of this and similar items that do not fit neatly into immut-
able classificatory schema. The object then becomes hybrid: in material attri-
butes, style, provenance, and, more importantly, cultural attribution. It is these
hybrid objects that attract our attention—they defy standardized description in
terms of museum categories or contexts of origin—and in our quest to interpret
them, they are often fetishized.
In drawing attention to acts of fetishization in the museum, I want to distinguish
an act of impulse or desire around a material object—fetishization—from
anthropological definitions of fetish and fetishism. The origin of the term
‘‘fetish’’ can be traced to the fifteenth century, when Portuguese colonists employed
the term in their descriptions of West African material life (Meskell, 2004: 46).
Fetishism was used by nineteenth-century anthropologists (notably Edward Tylor)
to describe ‘‘what were considered weird, primitive, and rather scandalous cus-
toms,’’ usually referring to West African ritual and religious practices (Graeber,

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2005: 410; see Pietz, 1985, 1987, 1988 for detailed genealogy of the term). The fetish
was the object itself, religious in nature, which derived its power from a deity. In
the nineteenth century, Karl Marx used the term when defining commodity fetish-
ism: the naturalized forms of concealment inherent in the social order, which
separated the producer from the object of his/her work while masking social rela-
tionships between individuals. More recently, William Pietz (1995, 1987, 1988)
historicizes the term, distinguishing between actual objects cataloged as fetish
and fetish as ‘‘discursively promiscuous and theoretically suggestive’’ (see also
Apter and Pietz, 1993).
Fetishization, distinguished from these historical and contemporary descrip-
tions, denotes captivation or enchantment with a certain object or activity
(Graeber, 2005: 427; Meskell, 2004: 47–48). In the life story of an object, I locate
fetishization in more contemporary moments that occur in collection and curation
by museum personnel. Fetishization is wrapped up with the stories we create
around an object (to paraphrase Stoller, 1985), how we define and categorize an
object and its history, how we use it to activate and fix a certain version of colonial
histories. In this way, ‘‘fetishism is, at root, our tendency to see our own actions
and creations as having power over us’’ (Graeber, 2005: 431). Here, it is the hybrid
object that holds our attention.
Our contemporary engagements with collections have been influenced, not sur-
prisingly, by historical museum ontologies and classification methodologies. I focus
my gaze on the place of the colonial North American hybrid object in the anthro-
pology museum. We encounter hybrid colonial objects—such as the turtle/button
stone mold—differently than other, more familiar objects—the metal button. They
are at once knowable and unknowable in the intermingling of strange and familiar.
Such objects are unable to be categorized using standard museum typologies used
to categorize ‘‘Native American’’ and ‘‘European’’ elements and as such, they are
fetishized as artifacts that seemingly authenticate a lived experience of colonialism
(cf. Harrison, 2003, 2006, 2011; Thomas, 1991, 1994).
The broadly defined ‘‘material turn’’ in anthropology has renewed focus on and
problematized the myriad of relationships formed between objects and individuals;
as found in actor-network theory (e.g. Latour, 2005), materialist approaches (e.g.
Miller, 2005), entanglement theory (e.g. Hodder, 2012), and symmetrical
approaches (e.g. Olsen, 2010). In this turn, several contemporary scholars have
drawn attention to museum collections highlighting the limitations and legacies
of museum classification, object biographies, and current responsibilities of stew-
ardship and curation (Appadurai, 1988; Gosden and Marshall, 1999; Gosden and
Knowles, 2001; Gosden and Larson, 2007; Harrison, 2013; Hoskins, 2006; Meskell,
2004; Phillips, 2011; Thomas, 1991, 1994). With regard to themes of longing and
fetishization discussed in this paper, both Nicholas Thomas (1991, 1994) and
Rodney Harrison (2003, 2006, 2011, 2013) have previously outlined the ways in
which objects have embodied colonial desires through past collection and current
museum practices. Thomas (1991, 1994) places focus on value, gift, and commodity
in Pacific colonial contexts, emphasizing the mutability of material objects in

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processes of appropriation and collection. Harrison’s (2003, 2006, 2011, 2013)

numerous publications on museum assemblages (notably Kimberley points) have
highlighted not only agency in colonial collection practices but also contemporary
concerns of captivation and enchantment in contemporary curatorial practice and
display.
In this paper, I address similar issues raised by Thomas and Harrison to elabo-
rate on desires around museum collections of colonial objects, drawing inspiration
from their work. My emphasis, however, is not on collection practices but rather is
focused on contemporary desires and longings that have impacted of museum
classification and curatorial interpretation; the new meanings which are produced
outside of the contexts in which these objects were made and collected. Using
examples from the collections at Peabody Museum of Archaeology at Harvard
University, I consider how the hybrid was interpreted and defined as such through
collections management care, curation, and display as well as how fetishization
occurs through museum practice and our longing to find the hybrid. I also discuss
current goals of confronting museum legacies towards the creation of new narra-
tives about objects and people through the acknowledgement of museum biogra-
phies and practices of longing.
Two definitions of hybridity

In this discussion, I want to make the important distinction between historical
definitions of hybridity used in anthropology museums and contemporary theor-
etical understandings of hybridity. Within museum contexts, an object is under-
stood as hybrid when it cannot be accurately located within museum typologies
and categories that seek to identify the location of its cultural production. In the
case of colonial objects recovered from North America, this means an object that
contains both European and Native American material components or properties.
Figure 3. Wampum wrist ornament, Iroquois artist. (c) President and Fellows of
Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, PM# 15–22–10/
86069.

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For example, a small iron cross hangs from the side of this eighteenth-century wrist
ornament (Figure 3). The provenance of this item is unknown other than it was
collected in the late nineteenth century from New York. A century-old museum
label provides insight into the challenges of cataloging this object into a larger
collection of Native American items: ‘‘there is a small metal cross attached to
one of the thongs on the side of the specimen indicating that, at some point, it
was owned by a Christian. Whether this person was a white man or a converted
Native is uncertain’’ (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard
University (PMAE): 1915). This moment of interpretation captured in the archival
record highlights how museum categorization fixes certain interpretations of
objects. The process locks in a specific definition of an object and suggests a
moment of fetishization. In this case, the object that falls between museum classi-
fication categories is tied to particular assumptions about what it meant to be
colonial. These are the interpretations that have persisted through time at the
museum: in storage and display in the Native American Hall.
Theories of hybridity that emerge from contemporary archaeology provide a
different perspective on the cultural production of this object. Drawing largely
from the work of Homi Bhabha (1994), hybridity has been defined as a continuous
process that subverts the narratives of colonial power and dominant cultures.
While hotly critiqued, hybridity has been used in archaeology to describe the
new identities, ideologies, and practices that resulted from colonial engagements
(see Card, 2013; Cipolla, 2013b; Fahlander, 2007; Hayes, 2013; Hodder, 2012;
Liebmann, 2013; Loren, 2013; Silliman, 2009, 2013; Stahl, 2010; Stockhammer,
2011; Tronchetti and van Dommelen, 2005; van Dommelen, 2005, 2006; Van
Pelt, 2013; VanValkenburgh, 2013; see also Liebmann, Silliman, this issue). In
their varied discussions about and uses of hybridity, these authors highlight the
central importance of acknowledging social and material histories, exchanges, and
transformations between different social groups while simultaneously attending to
issues of voice, power, identity, and ambivalence.
For some archaeologists, hybridity, and particularly Bhabha’s conceptualization
of hybridity, provides a way to think creatively about cultural interactions, coun-
teract simplified views of colonization, and embrace material and social constructs
that do not fit neatly into historical classification categories and archaeological
typologies. Numerous authors espousing this viewpoint are quick to note that
hybridity is not a simple fusion of new and old elements resulting in a crossbreed
of ideology or practice; but rather colonial encounters resulted in something new
and substantially different—contradictory and ambivalent spaces in which social
identities and ideologies complete with ambiguity, misunderstandings, and uncer-
tainties (see Tronchetti and van Dommelen, 2005: 193; Young, 1995; see also
Liebmann, this issue). The more productive theories of hybridity, in my opinion,
are those that problematize the term and seek to investigate the nuances and details
in the entanglement of people and objects in specific historical contexts, while
attending to critiques regarding Bhabha’s oversight of intersections of space,
things, and bodies as well as essentializing language (see Fahlander, 2007;

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Palmié, 2013; van Dommelen, 2006: 112). In reference to museum collections, this
also means that attention must be paid to human–object relationships, the legacies
of museum practice, as well as the multiple narratives of longing and desire that
reside in museum collections.
Materiality was certainly a central concern in the complicated operation of
colonial consumption. Objects materialized cultural order, inculcated identity,
and enabled people to locate others in their social world (Bourdieu 1984). As
noted by Stahl (2010: 157), it is not enough to say that colonial peoples merely
assimilated the strange into the familiar, but rather that new goods remake the
contexts of human actors and impact lived experience. How colonial peoples lived
or were forced to live in their material worlds and how material worlds shaped
people suggest the materiality of hybridity in colonial entanglements; that is, the
mutually constitutive relationship between agents and their material worlds
(Ingold, 2007; Robb, 2010, 2013; see also Crossland, 2010; Crossley, 2001;
Gosden, 2005; Thomas, 1991).
So while attending to colonial materialities, we must also recognize contempor-
ary practices of longing. Strange and familiar material culture was used, created,
and reimagined in colonial arenas of power, manipulation, resistance, and ambiva-
lence. Being attentive to colonial contexts acknowledges the nuances of the small
differences of lived experiences of colonialism, changing social identities, and
material transformations and innovations. These same objects are transformed in
the later years of their life: in collection, storage, and display (Gosden and
Marshall, 1999; Harrison, 2011, 2013; Pinney, 2005; Thomas, 1991) as well as
the points in time where objects are forgotten and then re-enchanted in new nar-
ratives (Hoskins, 2006; Hill, 2007). Yet it is in these later moments of narrative
creation that the tendency to fetishize the hybrid object exists.
Moments of longing in the museum

While there are any number of desires, biases, and motivations behind the creation
of museum collections, historian Rachael Poliquin (2012) articulates the narratives
of longing that fuel the desire to collect and preserve, to order a group of items into
a collection. She describes these narratives in affective terms: the need to tell and
preserve a particular kind of story through objects; stories about others and our-
selves that are replete with loss, remembrance, desire, and fetishization. While
Poliquin’s focus is taxidermied collections, the narratives that underscore collection
and curatorial practices share similar histories with anthropology museums: to
collect an archive of the past, to commemorate an experience or event, to preserve
knowledge, to fascinate and educate, to remember and wonder (Poliquin, 2012: 6–
7). These moments in the collection, curation, and preservation of objects highlight
different temporal aspects of the subject/object relationship; that is, the time after
and spaces in between object creation, primary and later uses, collection, and
accession (Gosden and Marshall, 1999; Gosden and Knowles, 2001; Gosden and
Larson, 2007; Harrison, 2003, 2006, 2011, 2013).

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When we consider the hybrid object, we often focus on that moment of creation
and initial use. For example, when a Native American woman in the seventeenth
century chose to clothe and adorn her body with wool produced in England and
shell earpins that she made with her own hands. Or, perhaps, in the creation of a
necklace that combined glass and shell beads. Yet it is important to project our
gaze to other points in the timeline of an object, to the time after creation and
colonial use, in collection and later in curation and interpretation, when hybridity
was defined, cataloged, and narrated. Susan Stewart (1993: 134–135) elaborates on
this noting that many objects speak to a concept of origin through a language of
longing in that objects serve as traces as authentic experience. The narrative that
exists—in this example, the hybrid colonial—is not the narrative of the object, but
rather the narrative of the collector or curator, influenced by the history and iden-
tity of the museum and its principles of organization (Gosden and Larson, 2007).
Public anthropology museums emerged in the nineteenth century as part of the
growth of the discipline of anthropology and had their roots in Renaissance cab-
inets of curiosities and wonder rooms (Conn, 1998; Stocking, 1988). Wonder, and
amazement about the Other, was certainly a guiding principle in the early museum
as collections were brought together without order in one place to disorient, pro-
voke, and excite. The Peabody Museum at Harvard University, established in 1866,
is the oldest museum of anthropology in the Western hemisphere. At that time, the
discipline of anthropology belonged to museums, rather than academic depart-
ments (Conn, 1998: 102–103; Stocking, 1988). Designed as an institution for know-
ledge creation and dissemination for the Harvard community, the Peabody’s
collection of archaeological, ethnographic, osteological, photographic, and arch-
ival material quickly grew during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
to the current number of 1.2 million objects. Unlike earlier cabinets and wonder
rooms, objects in early Peabody exhibition halls were ordered to create a specific,
curated narrative of the past through objects. Specifically, a culture-area represen-
tation of the Other achieved through a density of displayed objects, with little text
or discussion.
Exhibition strategies changed through the decades, moving towards displays
with greater amounts of text and contextualization for objects and assemblages.
Today, the collection at the Peabody Museum includes spectacle and the mundane,
the small things of daily life. Yet, the creation and curation of the collection speaks
to a certain kind of longing and desire to construct narratives about histories,
peoples, and things and to authenticate a lived experience that lingers in material
residues. In the museum, the transformation of objects into collection depends
upon description, catalog, and curatorial narrative. Artifacts acquire significance
in the museum collection, where knowledge has been generated by the curator and
the institution. These acts have had lingering effects on how we view and interpret
the collections, how we understand colonial hybridity through the eyes and desires
of past collectors, archaeologists, and museum staff (Byrne et al., 2011; Conn, 1998,
2011; Gosden and Knowles, 2001; Gosden and Larson, 2007; Harrison, 2006, 2011;
Hill, 2007; Phillips, 2011; Stewart, 1993; Thomas, 1991, 1994).

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In archives and museums, knowledge of the hybrid colonial object is layered

through different narratives of longing. The work of making, ordering, and curat-
ing a collection in a museum context constitutes an act of authority over objects
and the people who made and used them. It imposes a certain way of knowing the
world and understanding the past through rigid categorization (Byrne et al., 2011).
How do archaeologists identify and interpret hybridized material culture while
recognizing the innovative ways in which these objects were used with more famil-
iar, perhaps non-hybrid objects? The truth is, we struggle with it. We are uncom-
fortable with objects that do not neatly fit into classification categories. The issue is
not the hybrid object. The root of the problem is our classification systems, most
notably Quimby and Spoehr’s identification and classification system, which has
had an enduring impact on the methodologies used to analyze colonial period
material culture with regard to cultural attribution.
In 1951, George Quimby, Curator of Exhibits, and Alexander Spoehr, Curator
of Oceanic Ethnology, at the Field Museum in Chicago, designed a classification
system for museum collections that analyzed changes in material culture following
European encounters with Native Americans. At the heart of this classification
scheme was a binary distinction: an object was categorized as ‘‘European’’ or
‘‘Native American’’ based on form, style, and level of mimicry. In their system,
distinctions were made between European-manufactured and Native American-
manufactured items. European-style objects produced by Native Americans
(such as brass tinkling cones that were made from pieces of European kettles
that were then fashioned into cones and hung from clothing) signaled a higher
degree of acculturation than simply the incorporation of European-manufactured
goods by Native Americans. This object-based theory of acculturation was based
upon measuring the degree and rate of change by examining the transfer or accept-
ance of different traits and, in archaeology, through the percentage of different
European-manufactured or native-manufactured objects found in an archaeo-
logical assemblage or in the museum.
Quimby and Spoehr’s system for categorizing museum collections was incorpo-
rated into museum cataloging practice in the mid-twentieth century (cf. Collier,
1962; Fenton, 1960). Their schema to quantitatively measure acculturation and
identify artifacts as either ‘‘Native American’’ or ‘‘European’’ has persisted in
many American museums, especially in the categorization of ‘‘cultural attribu-
tion.’’ These classificatory tendencies limit and narrow our interpretations of the
nuanced ways in which colonial peoples acquired, used, and constituted identity
with material culture (see Lightfoot et al., 1998; Loren, 2008; Rubertone, 2001;
Silliman, 2009; Voss, 2008). For example, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
glass beads recovered from New World contexts are almost unfailingly classified
as Native American objects because they were traded to indigenous peoples, despite
the location of their production from factories in Venice or Amsterdam (see
Silliman, 2009; Thomas, 1991). This kind of interpretation assumes united, static
social groups while at the same time, fundamentally ignoring emerging social diver-
sity in colonial contexts and the way that new forms of material culture were

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utilized in concert with more familiar forms. By recognizing the transformative

nature of material culture, new meanings, functions, and significance were brought
to colonial objects; and perhaps, more importantly, the mechanisms by which
strangeness was made ordinary.
Museums are slow to change their classification categories, despite further
changes in anthropological theory (Byrne et al., 2011). The schema for categorizing
archaeological collections, or more frequently objects themselves, as either ‘‘Native
American’’ or ‘‘European’’ has remained almost unchanged in many museums
since the 1950s and we struggle to move past our categorization systems, both in
terms of the hybrid object and the hybrid assemblage. There is practicality in
decisions to maintain classification categories. It is an overwhelming task to re-
catalog collections in storage and databases. Immediate demands of conservation,
collections care, and stewardship propel daily activity in museums more than the-
oretical discussions regarding the relevancy of certain classification categories in
the twenty-first century. Yet the ways in which these museum practices fix and
preserve certain interpretive possibilities brook further discussion.
An early colonial period stone mold in the Peabody’s collection provides an
example of the power of museum classification categories on interpretation. In
1892, James Baker, an avocational archaeologist, recovered a stone mold from a
field in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and in 1924, he donated the object to the Peabody
Museum (PMAE, 1924). One side of the stone is carved with hollows for a ring, a
small buckle (likely a knee buckle frame), and two convex buttons: one shallow
1 cm button and the other a deeper 2 cm button (Figure 4). The reverse side of the
stone is incised with an image of an individual wearing an English-style fitted frock
coat. Documentation in the museum archives provides some insight into the prob-
lems of categorization and interpretation for hybrid objects.
Brookline, Mass. Jan. 13, 1892

James E. Baker
So Lincoln, Mass.
Friend Baker:
I have just received an answer to my letter to Prof. Putnam concerning the flat stone
with the markings on it which you have. He says, ‘‘I think the excavations rings etc are
really moulds. There probably was another flat stone to cover this one. I found two
parts of a similar stone in an Indian grave & with it a lot of ornaments of lead which
had been cast in the mould. I think that the Indians had no knowledge of melting lead
until after contact with the whites. It is possible that the stone was made by the white
man. The etching shows the cast of the white man either original or by copy.’’
I hope you are all well.
Yours truly,
Warren H. Manning
In the mid-twentieth century, an exhibition label for the object indicated that the
mold was ‘‘made by Whites and used by Indians’’ (see Figure 4). In 1984, Barber

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Loren 11
Figure 4. Both sides of a slate mold from Lincoln, MA and exhibition label. (c) President and
Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, PM# 24–7–10/
94279 (digital file# 98600025, 98600026, 99200027).
(also an avocational archaeologist) published an image of the mold in the Bulletin

of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society, arguing that, based on Putnam’s com-
ments, a Native American was responsible for the manufacture of this object, as
well as its adornment. Curators at the Peabody took issue with this interpretation,
stating that because of the unclear provenience of the object, the ethnicity of the
maker could not be determined (PMAE: 1924).
Confusion over the object lingers. Stone button molds such as the one col-
lected by Baker have been recovered not only from other locations in southern
New England, predominately from seventeenth-century Native American sites,
but also from English contexts (Loren, 2014). When re-cataloged in 1997 and
2001, however, the mold was identified as Native American ground stone with
European attributes, while interpretations of the object in text and exhibition
have spoken to the hybrid nature of the object. Again, it sits betwixt and
between because of the limits of museum categorization that force objects
into limiting binary distinctions.
Contemporary longings
With regard to hybrid material culture, some have drawn from Bhabha’s articula-
tion of mimicry to explore colonial engagements and hybrid material culture

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(Hodge et al., in press; Loren, 2013b; Tronchetti and van Dommelen, 2005). At its
broadest definition, mimicry is the desire for the colonized to adopt the colonizer’s
material and cultural habits and values. As Lacan writes, ‘‘the effect of mimicry is
camouflage. . .it is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against
a mottled background’’ (quoted in Bhabha, 1994: 85). Mimicry probes at power
imbalances that were at the heart of many colonial interactions, moving beyond the
notion of simple entanglements of people and culture to acknowledge purposeful,
laden acts in colonial contexts (see Liebmann, this issue; Loren, 2013, 2014).
Bhabha (1994: 130) notes that ‘‘mimicry rearticulates presence in terms of its
‘otherness,’ that which it disavows.’’ He (1994: 128) highlights not only historical
processes of intentional and unintentional mimicry that may result in what is
known as the hybrid object, but also is attentive to the later processes of cultural
production. A particular historical context defines and shapes the hybrid object,
which then is redefined or reshaped and perhaps even fetishized as hybrid objects
by anthropologists in museums.
As I have argued throughout, our entanglements with collections are of par-
ticular concern here. We construct museum classification categories, we script
interactions, and we narrate hybridity. We unmoor the object from its context;
we fetishize the hybrid as we recontextualize it in museum spaces through clas-
sificatory systems. In Walter Benjamin’s theory of enchantment, it is the collec-
tor who creates new contexts for objects, narrating them and their associated
histories and engagements in a manner specific to each collector’s proclivities
and biases. Benjamin (1969: 60) notes that ‘‘the most profound enchantment of
the collector is the locking of the individual items within a magic circle in which
they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them.
Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedes-
tal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property.’’ Enchantments, often leading
to fetishizations, occur in the entanglements of people and objects, through the
agency of makers, audiences, collectors, and museum personnel (see Harrison
2006).
Stewart (1993: 162) emphasizes the role of the collector and curator stating that
‘‘the ultimate term in the series that marks the collection is the ‘self,’ the articula-
tion of the collector’s own ‘identity’.’’ In museum contexts, desire is ordered, cata-
loged, and arranged. There is no room for fluidity here. The challenge is to consider
how biography in and of the museum can be used to become more reflexive about
the nineteenth-century inheritances to develop new ways of knowing (Byrne et al.,
2011; Phillips, 2011; Harrison, 2006, 2011). As Thomas (1991: 4–5) suggests, it is
important to counter fixed identities imposed by museum practice: ‘‘objects are not
what they were made to be but what they have become’’ and that ‘‘creative recon-
textualization and reauthorship and indeed reauthorship may thus follow from the
taking, from purchase or theft.’’ At the Peabody Museum, we are moving away
from scripted lectures about the collections to explore and encourage other narra-
tives about objects, focusing on museum histories and legacies, as well as moments
of silences in collection, catalog, and display.

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Archaeological and ethnographic collections recovered from colonial

Massachusetts provide avenues to exploring past narratives of longing and the
potential to construct new narratives of hybridity. The archaeological example I
describe here was recovered from seventeenth-century contexts in Harvard Yard,
while the ethnographic example is a seventeenth-century beaded wool sash. These
two collections reside in different storage areas and are classified according to
different museum schema, yet both were created in a colonial context replete
with hybrid identities and materialities. By the mid-1630s, English Protestants
known as Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in present-day New
England amongst existing Massachusett, Narragansett, Niantic, Nipmuc, and
Wampanoag communities. Harvard University was founded in 1636 during this
period of settlement and conversion to create a bastion of Puritan ideology where
English and Native American students could be trained in ‘‘knowledge: and god-
liness’’ to become ministers for the growing colony (Stubbs et al., 2010).
Excavations in Harvard Yard since the 1980s have focused on three of the
College’s seventeenth-century buildings. In the mid-seventeenth century, early
Harvard’s campus was comprised of four buildings: the President’s lodging,
Goffe House, the Old College, and the Indian College. The President’s lodging
(also known as Peyntree House) and Goffe House were pre-existing structures
purchased by the College when it was established to house students and a master
(Stubbs et al., 2010). The Old College building (completed in 1644) was the first
purpose-built structure and included study and lecture areas, rooms for students, as
well as a kitchen. The 1655 Indian College was Harvard’s first brick building
(Morison, 1936). Meant to house Native American students who were to be edu-
cated alongside English students, the Indian College building also housed North
America’s first printing press. In the mid-seventeenth century, however, the build-
ing also housed English students when the Old College building was determined to
be structurally unsound (Morison, 1936). By the end of the seventeenth century,
these four structures were torn down and dismantled, disappearing from Harvard’s
landscape along with Puritanical ideals that were replaced when the College
embraced the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.
During the mid-seventeenth century, colonial Harvard was occupied by both
English and Native American students. Cultural pluralism at Harvard is under-
stood in the larger colonial context but the material record seemingly discounts a
narrative of hybridity. In this institutional setting, there is no Native American
material culture to stand as an icon for hybridizing practices. Archaeological evi-
dence indicates little difference in the material culture of daily life at the Indian
College from the rest of the College, suggesting a homogeneity of practice and
experience (Hodge, 2013; Hodge et al., in press; Stubbs et al., 2010; see also
Silliman, 2009). There are no material or documentary residues of non-European
practices as popularly recognized. Similar tableware, tobacco pipes, dress and
clothing artifacts, and other items of English and European manufacture are
found without spatial distinction across the Old College and Indian College build-
ings. Mimicry was definitely at play in the College’s goal to create Puritan ministers

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Figure 5. Wool sash ornamented with glass beads and label on reverse. (c) President and
Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, PM# 90–17–10/
49333 (digital file# 60743285, 98540140).
who could be identified through dress, language, and comportment. College arch-
ives have not recorded the details of individual acts of mimicry, which could be
interpreted as mockery in this period, however, this is not to say that Native
American and European students actively sought to subvert College ideals
(Hodge, 2013; Hodge et al., in press). The materiality of this particular colonial
experience that was created by both Native American and English students using
European material culture.
Practices of longing have implicated a different interpretation for a seventeenth-
century beaded sash from New England (Figure 5). Made from European-
produced red and blue wool and nearly 3000 white glass beads, the sash was
stitched together with hand-spun milkweed thread. It is attributed to
Wampanoag leader Metacom (also known as King Phillip). Metacom is known
to have led a major resistance against English colonists in 1675. The resulting war
was in some ways based on the fear of hybridity. The English were worried that
they were losing their piety and becoming ‘‘Indianized;’’ while many Native
Americans had come to suspect the reverse, worrying that they themselves had
become too much like their new European neighbors in religion, desire, and com-
portment. More than 3000 Native American and English were killed in the war,

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Loren 15
known as Metacom’s Rebellion or King Phillip’s War, which had long-lasting

consequences for the people of southern New England (Lepore, 1999).
Peabody Museum archives indicate that this sash was obtained from the
American Antiquarian Society, who acquired the sash in the nineteenth century,
around the time of the Wounded Knee Massacre when popular interest in what was
seen as ‘‘vanishing’’ Native American life was renewed. While materials used to
make the sash date to the seventeenth century, the attribution to Metacom is far
from secure and is only identified through a paper labeled affixed to the back
indicating that this item is the ‘‘Belt of the Indian King Phillip from Col. Keyes’’
(Figure 5). But its collection and preservation speak to a past moment of museum
practice: the longing to document a certain vision of colonial life and material
hybrids. We often emphasize museum biography to contextualize the sash in colo-
nial and contemporary histories. The attribution speaks to a moment of imperialist
nostalgia, the longing to catalog a colonial hybrid object from a named individual,
considered separate from the more mundane objects of seventeenth-century life
located in the archaeological collections. In the present, it is a powerful object in
terms of remembrance of personal and tribal histories alongside objects from the
Indian College. And when viewed in this way, a more nuanced narrative of the lives
of Native American students at Harvard and in colonial New England is recog-
nized and commemorated.
Conclusions
While we are closer to theoretical approaches that enable better understand the
disorders and complexities of colonial life, we often struggle with the materiality of
hybridity. In museums, colonial objects live uneasily between rigid categorical sys-
tems where we script narratives of colonial hybridity. The tendency to fetishize
objects of hybridity emerges from practices of longing as hybrid objects serve as
traces of the authentic experience—in this case, colonial hybridity—that we seek to
narrate. ‘‘We equate the object to the experience and they become what we need
them to be’’ (Poliquin, 2012: 203). In this way, hybrid objects are a lodestone for
those seeking to define a certain story of past hybridity, often to the detriment of
other colonial objects and assemblages that also emerge from decidedly plural and
complex colonial engagements but which are ‘‘drowned out by the silence of the
ordinary’’ (Stewart, 1993: 14). As noted by Benjamin (1969) and others, these
enchantments with certain objects and certain collections often reveal more
about our own interpretative histories and proclivities. Our academic identities
are shaped and reshaped by colonial objects. They are part of our lived experience
of colonialism in the modern world, and are used to create our own postcolonial
narratives.
Descriptions of the material world in museum collections often conceal tempor-
ality, while simultaneously attending to history. Collections replace history with
classification. As Stewart (1993: 150) argues, an object ‘‘must be removed from its
context in order to serve as a trace of it, but it must also be restored through

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narrative.’’ We detach an object from temporal contexts to live, almost untouched

by time, in museum storage. Objects are categorized, cataloged, and preserved;
processes that place objects into certain definitions or categories. Processes of cur-
ation fix certain visions of an object, effectively stopping interpretive trajectories,
even as they are reintroduced back into historical and cultural narratives. What can
we know of colonial peoples, their experiences, and anxieties? Attention to the
materiality of hybridity provides some insights into lived experiences of colonial-
ism. It is also found in those objects and stories that are not present, and the ways
in which the remnants of those daily practices are represented or not in archaeo-
logical, textual, and visual records. Through critical reflection on museum histories
and legacies, we can acknowledge new narratives of the complex entanglements of
humans and objects in the colonial world and in the contemporary museum.
Acknowledgments
I extend my sincerest gratitude to Steve Silliman and Matt Liebmann for their support,
comments, and critiques on this work. Many thanks also to Peter von Dommelen and Alicia
Jiménez who organized the 2014 workshop on hybridity at the Joukowsky Institute at
Brown, where I first presented a version of this paper. Bob Pruecel, discussant at the work-
shop, gave important insight in his commentary. Several anonymous reviewers provided
thoughtful critiques and suggestions. My museum colleagues, especially Trish Capone,
Christina Hodge, Emily Pierce, Lainie Schultz, Jessica Desany, and Viva Fisher, continue
to offer support and feedback on the ideas and images presented in this paper. Finally, I am
utterly grateful to Caroline Light and her brilliant students in the American Fetish course at
Harvard University. Caroline and her students provided the spark for this paper, and they
continue to challenge and enlighten my ideas about the Peabody and its collection. As
always, any mistakes in this paper are entirely my own.
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Author Biography
Diana DiPaolo Loren (PhD, SUNY Binghamton) is currently director of Academic
Partnerships and Museum Curator at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and
Ethnology, Harvard University. She is a North American archaeologist specializ-
ing in the colonial period Southeast and Northeast. Loren is the author of In
Contact: Bodies and Spaces in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Eastern
Woodlands (2007) and The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in
Colonial America (2010).

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processes of appropriation and collection. Harrison’s (2003, 2006, 2011, 2013)

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utilized in concert with more familiar forms. By recognizing the transformative

Brookline, Mass. Jan. 13, 1892

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(also an avocational archaeologist) published an image of the mold in the Bulletin

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Archaeological and ethnographic collections recovered from colonial

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known as Metacom’s Rebellion or King Phillip’s War, which had long-lasting

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narrative.’’ We detach an object from temporal contexts to live, almost untouched

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Hodder I (2012) Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and

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Phillips RB (2011) Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums.

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