Seeing hybridity in the anthropology museum: Practices of longing and fetishization

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Article

Seeing hybridity in theanthropology museum:Practices of longingand fetishization

Diana DiPaolo LorenPeabody 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: [email protected]

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Introduction

As a museum curator, I spend my days thinking about objects in anthropologymuseums. 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 accessionedinto a collection and comes to reside amidst a larger group of objects. Some objectsmove easily through the process, in that they almost seamlessly are incorporatedinto a collection. For example, an eighteenth-century octagonal sleeve buttonrecovered from the cellar hole of the Old College building at Harvard is a thingthat 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 intomuseum 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, aturtle 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 acoat (Figure 2). A close examination of the turtle suggests that the head andappendages of the turtle are actually incised into an impression originally carvedfor 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.

2 Journal of Social Archaeology 0(0)




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 Americansor English? Early twentieth-century museum documentation on this and similarmolds questions why Native American individuals would have needed or usedstone molds for casting buttons—items that would have then been worn byEnglish colonists. To whom should it be attributed? These uncertainties hauntmuseum 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 thesehybrid objects that attract our attention—they defy standardized description interms of museum categories or contexts of origin—and in our quest to interpretthem, they are often fetishized.

In drawing attention to acts of fetishization in the museum, I want to distinguishan act of impulse or desire around a material object—fetishization—fromanthropological definitions of fetish and fetishism. The origin of the term‘‘fetish’’ can be traced to the fifteenth century, when Portuguese colonists employedthe 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,

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).

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2005: 410; see Pietz, 1985, 1987, 1988 for detailed genealogy of the term). The fetishwas the object itself, religious in nature, which derived its power from a deity. Inthe nineteenth century, Karl Marx used the term when defining commodity fetish-ism: the naturalized forms of concealment inherent in the social order, whichseparated 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 fetishand fetish as ‘‘discursively promiscuous and theoretically suggestive’’ (see alsoApter 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 locatefetishization in more contemporary moments that occur in collection and curationby museum personnel. Fetishization is wrapped up with the stories we createaround an object (to paraphrase Stoller, 1985), how we define and categorize anobject and its history, how we use it to activate and fix a certain version of colonialhistories. In this way, ‘‘fetishism is, at root, our tendency to see our own actionsand creations as having power over us’’ (Graeber, 2005: 431). Here, it is the hybridobject that holds our attention.

Our contemporary engagements with collections have been influenced, not sur-prisingly, by historical museum ontologies and classification methodologies. I focusmy 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/buttonstone mold—differently than other, more familiar objects—the metal button. Theyare at once knowable and unknowable in the intermingling of strange and familiar.Such objects are unable to be categorized using standard museum typologies usedto categorize ‘‘Native American’’ and ‘‘European’’ elements and as such, they arefetishized 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 andproblematized 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 symmetricalapproaches (e.g. Olsen, 2010). In this turn, several contemporary scholars havedrawn attention to museum collections highlighting the limitations and legaciesof museum classification, object biographies, and current responsibilities of stew-ardship and curation (Appadurai, 1988; Gosden and Marshall, 1999; Gosden andKnowles, 2001; Gosden and Larson, 2007; Harrison, 2013; Hoskins, 2006; Meskell,2004; Phillips, 2011; Thomas, 1991, 1994). With regard to themes of longing andfetishization discussed in this paper, both Nicholas Thomas (1991, 1994) andRodney Harrison (2003, 2006, 2011, 2013) have previously outlined the ways inwhich objects have embodied colonial desires through past collection and currentmuseum practices. Thomas (1991, 1994) places focus on value, gift, and commodityin Pacific colonial contexts, emphasizing the mutability of material objects in





processes of appropriation and collection. Harrison’s (2003, 2006, 2011, 2013)numerous publications on museum assemblages (notably Kimberley points) havehighlighted not only agency in colonial collection practices but also contemporaryconcerns of captivation and enchantment in contemporary curatorial practice anddisplay.

In this paper, I address similar issues raised by Thomas and Harrison to elabo-rate on desires around museum collections of colonial objects, drawing inspirationfrom their work. My emphasis, however, is not on collection practices but rather isfocused on contemporary desires and longings that have impacted of museumclassification and curatorial interpretation; the new meanings which are producedoutside of the contexts in which these objects were made and collected. Usingexamples from the collections at Peabody Museum of Archaeology at HarvardUniversity, I consider how the hybrid was interpreted and defined as such throughcollections management care, curation, and display as well as how fetishizationoccurs through museum practice and our longing to find the hybrid. I also discusscurrent 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 historicaldefinitions 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 typologiesand categories that seek to identify the location of its cultural production. In thecase of colonial objects recovered from North America, this means an object thatcontains 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 wristornament (Figure 3). The provenance of this item is unknown other than it wascollected in the late nineteenth century from New York. A century-old museumlabel provides insight into the challenges of cataloging this object into a largercollection of Native American items: ‘‘there is a small metal cross attached toone of the thongs on the side of the specimen indicating that, at some point, itwas owned by a Christian. Whether this person was a white man or a convertedNative is uncertain’’ (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, HarvardUniversity (PMAE): 1915). This moment of interpretation captured in the archivalrecord highlights how museum categorization fixes certain interpretations ofobjects. The process locks in a specific definition of an object and suggests amoment of fetishization. In this case, the object that falls between museum classi-fication categories is tied to particular assumptions about what it meant to becolonial. These are the interpretations that have persisted through time at themuseum: in storage and display in the Native American Hall.

Theories of hybridity that emerge from contemporary archaeology provide adifferent perspective on the cultural production of this object. Drawing largelyfrom the work of Homi Bhabha (1994), hybridity has been defined as a continuousprocess that subverts the narratives of colonial power and dominant cultures.While hotly critiqued, hybridity has been used in archaeology to describe thenew 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; VanPelt, 2013; VanValkenburgh, 2013; see also Liebmann, Silliman, this issue). Intheir varied discussions about and uses of hybridity, these authors highlight thecentral importance of acknowledging social and material histories, exchanges, andtransformations between different social groups while simultaneously attending toissues of voice, power, identity, and ambivalence.

For some archaeologists, hybridity, and particularly Bhabha’s conceptualizationof hybridity, provides a way to think creatively about cultural interactions, coun-teract simplified views of colonization, and embrace material and social constructsthat do not fit neatly into historical classification categories and archaeologicaltypologies. Numerous authors espousing this viewpoint are quick to note thathybridity is not a simple fusion of new and old elements resulting in a crossbreedof ideology or practice; but rather colonial encounters resulted in something newand substantially different—contradictory and ambivalent spaces in which socialidentities and ideologies complete with ambiguity, misunderstandings, and uncer-tainties (see Tronchetti and van Dommelen, 2005: 193; Young, 1995; see alsoLiebmann, this issue). The more productive theories of hybridity, in my opinion,are those that problematize the term and seek to investigate the nuances and detailsin the entanglement of people and objects in specific historical contexts, whileattending to critiques regarding Bhabha’s oversight of intersections of space,things, and bodies as well as essentializing language (see Fahlander, 2007;





Palmie, 2013; van Dommelen, 2006: 112). In reference to museum collections, thisalso means that attention must be paid to human–object relationships, the legaciesof museum practice, as well as the multiple narratives of longing and desire thatreside in museum collections.

Materiality was certainly a central concern in the complicated operation ofcolonial consumption. Objects materialized cultural order, inculcated identity,and enabled people to locate others in their social world (Bourdieu 1984). Asnoted by Stahl (2010: 157), it is not enough to say that colonial peoples merelyassimilated the strange into the familiar, but rather that new goods remake thecontexts of human actors and impact lived experience. How colonial peoples livedor were forced to live in their material worlds and how material worlds shapedpeople suggest the materiality of hybridity in colonial entanglements; that is, themutually 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 smalldifferences of lived experiences of colonialism, changing social identities, andmaterial transformations and innovations. These same objects are transformed inthe later years of their life: in collection, storage, and display (Gosden andMarshall, 1999; Harrison, 2011, 2013; Pinney, 2005; Thomas, 1991) as well asthe 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 narrativecreation 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 creationof museum collections, historian Rachael Poliquin (2012) articulates the narrativesof longing that fuel the desire to collect and preserve, to order a group of items intoa collection. She describes these narratives in affective terms: the need to tell andpreserve a particular kind of story through objects; stories about others and our-selves that are replete with loss, remembrance, desire, and fetishization. WhilePoliquin’s focus is taxidermied collections, the narratives that underscore collectionand curatorial practices share similar histories with anthropology museums: tocollect an archive of the past, to commemorate an experience or event, to preserveknowledge, to fascinate and educate, to remember and wonder (Poliquin, 2012: 6–7). These moments in the collection, curation, and preservation of objects highlightdifferent temporal aspects of the subject/object relationship; that is, the time afterand spaces in between object creation, primary and later uses, collection, andaccession (Gosden and Marshall, 1999; Gosden and Knowles, 2001; Gosden andLarson, 2007; Harrison, 2003, 2006, 2011, 2013).

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When we consider the hybrid object, we often focus on that moment of creationand initial use. For example, when a Native American woman in the seventeenthcentury chose to clothe and adorn her body with wool produced in England andshell earpins that she made with her own hands. Or, perhaps, in the creation of anecklace that combined glass and shell beads. Yet it is important to project ourgaze to other points in the timeline of an object, to the time after creation andcolonial use, in collection and later in curation and interpretation, when hybriditywas defined, cataloged, and narrated. Susan Stewart (1993: 134–135) elaborates onthis noting that many objects speak to a concept of origin through a language oflonging in that objects serve as traces as authentic experience. The narrative thatexists—in this example, the hybrid colonial—is not the narrative of the object, butrather 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 thegrowth of the discipline of anthropology and had their roots in Renaissance cab-inets of curiosities and wonder rooms (Conn, 1998; Stocking, 1988). Wonder, andamazement about the Other, was certainly a guiding principle in the early museumas 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, thediscipline 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’scollection of archaeological, ethnographic, osteological, photographic, and arch-ival material quickly grew during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuriesto the current number of 1.2 million objects. Unlike earlier cabinets and wonderrooms, 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 textor discussion.

Exhibition strategies changed through the decades, moving towards displayswith 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 speaksto a certain kind of longing and desire to construct narratives about histories,peoples, and things and to authenticate a lived experience that lingers in materialresidues. In the museum, the transformation of objects into collection dependsupon description, catalog, and curatorial narrative. Artifacts acquire significancein the museum collection, where knowledge has been generated by the curator andthe institution. These acts have had lingering effects on how we view and interpretthe collections, how we understand colonial hybridity through the eyes and desiresof 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).





In archives and museums, knowledge of the hybrid colonial object is layeredthrough different narratives of longing. The work of making, ordering, and curat-ing a collection in a museum context constitutes an act of authority over objectsand the people who made and used them. It imposes a certain way of knowing theworld and understanding the past through rigid categorization (Byrne et al., 2011).How do archaeologists identify and interpret hybridized material culture whilerecognizing 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 isnot the hybrid object. The root of the problem is our classification systems, mostnotably Quimby and Spoehr’s identification and classification system, which hashad an enduring impact on the methodologies used to analyze colonial periodmaterial culture with regard to cultural attribution.

In 1951, George Quimby, Curator of Exhibits, and Alexander Spoehr, Curatorof Oceanic Ethnology, at the Field Museum in Chicago, designed a classificationsystem for museum collections that analyzed changes in material culture followingEuropean encounters with Native Americans. At the heart of this classificationscheme 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 kettlesthat were then fashioned into cones and hung from clothing) signaled a higherdegree of acculturation than simply the incorporation of European-manufacturedgoods by Native Americans. This object-based theory of acculturation was basedupon measuring the degree and rate of change by examining the transfer or accept-ance of different traits and, in archaeology, through the percentage of differentEuropean-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 andidentify artifacts as either ‘‘Native American’’ or ‘‘European’’ has persisted inmany American museums, especially in the categorization of ‘‘cultural attribu-tion.’’ These classificatory tendencies limit and narrow our interpretations of thenuanced ways in which colonial peoples acquired, used, and constituted identitywith material culture (see Lightfoot et al., 1998; Loren, 2008; Rubertone, 2001;Silliman, 2009; Voss, 2008). For example, seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuryglass beads recovered from New World contexts are almost unfailingly classifiedas Native American objects because they were traded to indigenous peoples, despitethe location of their production from factories in Venice or Amsterdam (seeSilliman, 2009; Thomas, 1991). This kind of interpretation assumes united, staticsocial 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 transformativenature of material culture, new meanings, functions, and significance were broughtto colonial objects; and perhaps, more importantly, the mechanisms by whichstrangeness was made ordinary.

Museums are slow to change their classification categories, despite furtherchanges in anthropological theory (Byrne et al., 2011). The schema for categorizingarchaeological collections, or more frequently objects themselves, as either ‘‘NativeAmerican’’ or ‘‘European’’ has remained almost unchanged in many museumssince the 1950s and we struggle to move past our categorization systems, both interms of the hybrid object and the hybrid assemblage. There is practicality indecisions 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 inthe twenty-first century. Yet the ways in which these museum practices fix andpreserve certain interpretive possibilities brook further discussion.

An early colonial period stone mold in the Peabody’s collection provides anexample of the power of museum classification categories on interpretation. In1892, James Baker, an avocational archaeologist, recovered a stone mold from afield in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and in 1924, he donated the object to the PeabodyMuseum (PMAE, 1924). One side of the stone is carved with hollows for a ring, asmall buckle (likely a knee buckle frame), and two convex buttons: one shallow1 cm button and the other a deeper 2 cm button (Figure 4). The reverse side of thestone is incised with an image of an individual wearing an English-style fitted frockcoat. 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 themold was ‘‘made by Whites and used by Indians’’ (see Figure 4). In 1984, Barber





(also an avocational archaeologist) published an image of the mold in the Bulletinof the Massachusetts Archaeological Society, arguing that, based on Putnam’s com-ments, a Native American was responsible for the manufacture of this object, aswell 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 themaker 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 southernNew England, predominately from seventeenth-century Native American sites,but also from English contexts (Loren, 2014). When re-cataloged in 1997 and2001, however, the mold was identified as Native American ground stone withEuropean attributes, while interpretations of the object in text and exhibitionhave spoken to the hybrid nature of the object. Again, it sits betwixt andbetween because of the limits of museum categorization that force objectsinto 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

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).

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(Hodge et al., in press; Loren, 2013b; Tronchetti and van Dommelen, 2005). At itsbroadest definition, mimicry is the desire for the colonized to adopt the colonizer’smaterial and cultural habits and values. As Lacan writes, ‘‘the effect of mimicry iscamouflage. . .it is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but againsta mottled background’’ (quoted in Bhabha, 1994: 85). Mimicry probes at powerimbalances that were at the heart of many colonial interactions, moving beyond thenotion 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 historicalprocesses of intentional and unintentional mimicry that may result in what isknown as the hybrid object, but also is attentive to the later processes of culturalproduction. A particular historical context defines and shapes the hybrid object,which then is redefined or reshaped and perhaps even fetishized as hybrid objectsby anthropologists in museums.

As I have argued throughout, our entanglements with collections are of par-ticular concern here. We construct museum classification categories, we scriptinteractions, 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 associatedhistories and engagements in a manner specific to each collector’s proclivitiesand biases. Benjamin (1969: 60) notes that ‘‘the most profound enchantment ofthe collector is the locking of the individual items within a magic circle in whichthey 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 leadingto fetishizations, occur in the entanglements of people and objects, through theagency of makers, audiences, collectors, and museum personnel (see Harrison2006).

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 considerhow biography in and of the museum can be used to become more reflexive aboutthe 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 isimportant to counter fixed identities imposed by museum practice: ‘‘objects are notwhat they were made to be but what they have become’’ and that ‘‘creative recon-textualization and reauthorship and indeed reauthorship may thus follow from thetaking, from purchase or theft.’’ At the Peabody Museum, we are moving awayfrom scripted lectures about the collections to explore and encourage other narra-tives about objects, focusing on museum histories and legacies, as well as momentsof silences in collection, catalog, and display.





Archaeological and ethnographic collections recovered from colonialMassachusetts provide avenues to exploring past narratives of longing and thepotential to construct new narratives of hybridity. The archaeological example Idescribe here was recovered from seventeenth-century contexts in Harvard Yard,while the ethnographic example is a seventeenth-century beaded wool sash. Thesetwo collections reside in different storage areas and are classified according todifferent museum schema, yet both were created in a colonial context repletewith hybrid identities and materialities. By the mid-1630s, English Protestantsknown as Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in present-day NewEngland amongst existing Massachusett, Narragansett, Niantic, Nipmuc, andWampanoag communities. Harvard University was founded in 1636 during thisperiod of settlement and conversion to create a bastion of Puritan ideology whereEnglish 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 theCollege’s seventeenth-century buildings. In the mid-seventeenth century, earlyHarvard’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 structurespurchased 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 firstpurpose-built structure and included study and lecture areas, rooms for students, aswell 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 NorthAmerica’s first printing press. In the mid-seventeenth century, however, the build-ing also housed English students when the Old College building was determined tobe structurally unsound (Morison, 1936). By the end of the seventeenth century,these four structures were torn down and dismantled, disappearing from Harvard’slandscape along with Puritanical ideals that were replaced when the Collegeembraced the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.

During the mid-seventeenth century, colonial Harvard was occupied by bothEnglish and Native American students. Cultural pluralism at Harvard is under-stood in the larger colonial context but the material record seemingly discounts anarrative of hybridity. In this institutional setting, there is no Native Americanmaterial culture to stand as an icon for hybridizing practices. Archaeological evi-dence indicates little difference in the material culture of daily life at the IndianCollege from the rest of the College, suggesting a homogeneity of practice andexperience (Hodge, 2013; Hodge et al., in press; Stubbs et al., 2010; see alsoSilliman, 2009). There are no material or documentary residues of non-Europeanpractices as popularly recognized. Similar tableware, tobacco pipes, dress andclothing artifacts, and other items of English and European manufacture arefound 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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who could be identified through dress, language, and comportment. College arch-ives have not recorded the details of individual acts of mimicry, which could beinterpreted as mockery in this period, however, this is not to say that NativeAmerican and European students actively sought to subvert College ideals(Hodge, 2013; Hodge et al., in press). The materiality of this particular colonialexperience that was created by both Native American and English students usingEuropean 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 wasstitched together with hand-spun milkweed thread. It is attributed toWampanoag leader Metacom (also known as King Phillip). Metacom is knownto have led a major resistance against English colonists in 1675. The resulting warwas in some ways based on the fear of hybridity. The English were worried thatthey were losing their piety and becoming ‘‘Indianized;’’ while many NativeAmericans had come to suspect the reverse, worrying that they themselves hadbecome 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,

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).





known as Metacom’s Rebellion or King Phillip’s War, which had long-lastingconsequences for the people of southern New England (Lepore, 1999).

Peabody Museum archives indicate that this sash was obtained from theAmerican Antiquarian Society, who acquired the sash in the nineteenth century,around the time of the Wounded Knee Massacre when popular interest in what wasseen as ‘‘vanishing’’ Native American life was renewed. While materials used tomake the sash date to the seventeenth century, the attribution to Metacom is farfrom secure and is only identified through a paper labeled affixed to the backindicating 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 museumpractice: the longing to document a certain vision of colonial life and materialhybrids. We often emphasize museum biography to contextualize the sash in colo-nial and contemporary histories. The attribution speaks to a moment of imperialistnostalgia, the longing to catalog a colonial hybrid object from a named individual,considered separate from the more mundane objects of seventeenth-century lifelocated in the archaeological collections. In the present, it is a powerful object interms of remembrance of personal and tribal histories alongside objects from theIndian College. And when viewed in this way, a more nuanced narrative of the livesof 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 thedisorders and complexities of colonial life, we often struggle with the materiality ofhybridity. In museums, colonial objects live uneasily between rigid categorical sys-tems where we script narratives of colonial hybridity. The tendency to fetishizeobjects of hybridity emerges from practices of longing as hybrid objects serve astraces of the authentic experience—in this case, colonial hybridity—that we seek tonarrate. ‘‘We equate the object to the experience and they become what we needthem to be’’ (Poliquin, 2012: 203). In this way, hybrid objects are a lodestone forthose seeking to define a certain story of past hybridity, often to the detriment ofother colonial objects and assemblages that also emerge from decidedly plural andcomplex colonial engagements but which are ‘‘drowned out by the silence of theordinary’’ (Stewart, 1993: 14). As noted by Benjamin (1969) and others, theseenchantments with certain objects and certain collections often reveal moreabout our own interpretative histories and proclivities. Our academic identitiesare shaped and reshaped by colonial objects. They are part of our lived experienceof colonialism in the modern world, and are used to create our own postcolonialnarratives.

Descriptions of the material world in museum collections often conceal tempor-ality, while simultaneously attending to history. Collections replace history withclassification. As Stewart (1993: 150) argues, an object ‘‘must be removed from itscontext 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 untouchedby 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 canwe know of colonial peoples, their experiences, and anxieties? Attention to themateriality 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 waysin which the remnants of those daily practices are represented or not in archaeo-logical, textual, and visual records. Through critical reflection on museum historiesand legacies, we can acknowledge new narratives of the complex entanglements ofhumans 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 AliciaJimenez who organized the 2014 workshop on hybridity at the Joukowsky Institute atBrown, 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, continueto 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 atHarvard University. Caroline and her students provided the spark for this paper, and theycontinue 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 AcademicPartnerships and Museum Curator at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology andEthnology, Harvard University. She is a North American archaeologist specializ-ing in the colonial period Southeast and Northeast. Loren is the author of InContact: Bodies and Spaces in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century EasternWoodlands (2007) and The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment inColonial America (2010).




Documents

Seeing hybridity in the anthropology museum: Practices of longing and fetishization