BOOK REVIEWS 63

tion of folk traditions, especially of "underservedgroups," carves out niches within the public discourse.As Cantwell puts it, folk culture thus gets reframed asan element of a legitimate, polite, or elite culture.

Much exciting writing in the volume explores theexperiences of public folklorists in their collaborativerepresentational projects. Lest we believe that prob-lems of recontextualization can simply be resolvedthrough the employment of native ethnographers,Davis' contribution is witness to the tensions of theinsider/native folklorist. McCarl's essay points to theironies of power relations in representation. The folk-lorist, he warns, can inadvertently assist in the corn-modification of the artist's work, while expandingpublic awareness of it.

Indeed, Roach's contribution chronicles thechanges in the work of an African American canecarver as a result of being "discovered." Proschan'swork with Laotian Kmhmu refugees encourages folk-lorists to confront folk traditions practiced most com-pellingly at times of social stress. Here we find a pleafor fieldwork that reflects processes of conflict, dislo-cation, and urbanization.

This book is clearly an important contribution todiscussions of representation and ideology well be-yond the spheres of public folklore. My reservationshave to do with elements only hinted at, rather thanfully developed. While many of the articles expressconcern over questions of commodification and hier-archies of power/knowledge inherent in the encoun-ter between folklorist, cultural institution, and folkcommunity, few do more with than call for dialogueand sensitivity. These are essential requirements forresponsive work, yet greater theoretical and experi-ential elaboration might deepen the debate.2

American folklorists work with traditional or folkartists who inhabit the same world as MTV and DisneyWorld. Condemnations of the forces of modernity"tearing cultural life asunder" (p. 3) reinforce thelayperson's view of folklore as the celebration ofcultural survivals. A debate about what folklore/tra-ditional arts can and should include cannot beavoided, when folklorists are embedded in an eco-nomic system that rewards certain forms.

The issues are complex and pertinent to museumanthropologists. Spitzer makes a passing remarkabout the "anomaly of hearing [Zydeco] music in thebackground of commercials for hamburgers and Le-vis" (p. 80), the very music he had worked so hard tohelp revive. It is laudable that Spitzer has helpedinformants regain "a measure of control over the art

form," yet it would also be an anomaly if Zydecomusic, once popularized, were not appropriated forhamburger commercials. We are the ones who havehelped bring visibility to under-represented groups.Now, what are we folklorists and anthropologistsgoing to say about the consequences?

This volume puts public folklore on the map as apractice with its own serious writing, a venerablehistory, and a contribution to make to current debate.Public Folklore reflects on "issues of representation,ideology, and practice that face the social sciences andhumanities today" (p. 13). Perhaps in a follow-upvolume, the tough work that public folklorists do willbe reflected in ever greater depth. •

Notes

l . Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds. (1991) ExhibitingCultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display.Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press; IvanKarp, Christine Mulen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine,eds. (1992) Museums and Communities: The Politics ofPublic Culture. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institu-tion Press.

2. See, for example, Shalom Staub (1988) "Folklore andAuthenticity: A Myopic Marriage in Public Sector Pro-grams." In The Conservation of Culture. Burt Feintuch, ed.Pp. 166-79. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

The Etholen Collection: The EthnographicAlaskan Collection of Adolf Etholen and his con-temporaries in the National Museum of Finland.PIRJO VARJOLA, with contributions by JULIA P.

AVERKIEVA and ROZA G. LIAPUNOVA. Helsinki: Na-

tional Board of Antiquities of Finland, 1990. 336pp. 559 color and b/w illustrations; catalog; ap-pendix; bibliographies. Out of print ($96 in 1992).

MOLLY LEE

American Museum of Natural History

For decades northern anthropologists haveapproached the numerous ethnic groups in the cir-cumpolar region as cultural isolates with the resultthat the significant number of shared features amongtheir material cultures was minimized. The landmarkexhibition Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberiaand Alaska (Fitzhugh and Crowell 1988) changed all

64 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 18 NUMBER 2

that, restoring to northern scholarship the cross-cultural perspective that Franz Boas had advocated asthe intellectual thrust of his Jesup North Pacific Expe-dition (Freed, Freed and Williamson 1988). Onehappy result is that bodies of material culture fromthese ethnic groups' common borders, whose sharedfeatures often resist clear-cut classification, are nolonger swept under the rug for the sake of tidy house-keeping.

The Etholen Collection: The Ethnographic AlaskanCollection of Adolf Etholen and his Contemporaries inthe National Museum of Finland illustrates a case inpoint. Focusing on the material culture of the NorthPacific Rim, an area inhabited by Northwest CoastIndians, Aleuts, the Pacific and Bering Sea Eskimos(Yuit and Inupiaq), and, peripherally, by northernAthapaskans, this voluminous catalog, which accom-panied the National Museum of Finland's exhibitionby the same name to venues in Los Angeles andAnchorage in 1991 and 1992, is regrettably out ofprint. Fortunately, though, the book was acquired bya number of North American libraries, and hunting itdown is well worth the effort. Lavish with color andblack and white illustrations, it gives us access to oneof the most fascinating and complex regions of thecircumpolar North.

The Etholen Collection is much more than a check-list, however. Arvid Adolf Etholen (1799-1876), whogoverned Alaska from 1840-1845, and whose collec-tion forms the centerpiece of this catalogue, wasFinnish by birth. Pirjo Varjola, Curator of ForeignEthnographic Collections at the National Museum ofFinland,1 author and editor of The Etholen Collection,opens the volume with an informative essay about theFinnish contribution to Alaska's early history in gen-eral and Etholen's in particular. When he accepted thepost as administrator of the Russian-America Com-pany Etholen also became de facto governor ofAlaska. He was no stranger to Alaska nor to collecting.During the 1820s, on he had shipped extensive col-lections home to Finland, but these had beendestroyed in the disastrous Turku fire of 1827. Appar-ently undeterred, he began again while governor,though this time the actual collecting seems to havebeen done by agents. The collection is antiquarian inspirit: included were flora and fauna as well as eth-nographica. Many of the artifacts, which have neverbefore been exhibited, were still in their originalshipping barrels when work on the exhibit began.

The bulk of the volume is devoted to the Etholenobjects themselves. The material is arranged by ethnic

group, and each section opens with an essay introduc-ing the culture. Three of them are authored by Rus-sian ethnologists Roza G. Liapunova and Julia G.Averkieva.2 These essays, largely compilations fromsecondary sources, are nonetheless useful to moreserious scholars for including data from early Russianinformants unavailable in English. Within these sec-tions the three to four hundred artifacts in the Etholencollection are presented typologically. There are fulland useful catalogue notes; some types are even in-troduced by mini-essays covering not only ethno-graphic data but also relevant museographic infor-mation. Occasionally the organization is confusing.For instance, some sections have headings, others lackthem.

Nonetheless, the sheer beauty and interest of theobjects far outstrips minor quibbles about the text.Clear, sharp photographs abound throughout. Often,images of a whole object are enriched by one or moreclose-ups showing details. This is especially effectivein sections devoted to the lavishly decorated clothing.

Never has the extent of cross-fertilization amongNorth Pacific Rim peoples been more apparent thanhere. For example, in addition to Pacific Eskimo bas-kets showing Tlingit and Aleut designs (Lee 1981),there are covered baskets woven of spruce root inclassic Tlingit designs but with shapes and knobs thatare distinctly Aleut (pp. 94-5). Specialists in otheraspects of material culture undoubtedly would findequally confounding examples of cross-cultural bor-rowing and recombination.

Beyond illustrating cultural overlap, The EtholenCollection includes North Pacific artifacts that eitherare superb examples of well-known object types (e.g.,the spectacular Aleut bentwood hats pp. 172-76) orthose now rare3 or unknown . Examples are the Aleutkamleikas from Copper Island (pp. 166-70) theKoniag (?) basketry-covered sea otter and bird carv-ings (pp. 238-39) and the endearingly awkward,oversize ivory carvings of caribou from the AlaskaPeninsula Yuit (pp. 246-47). Taxonomist's nightmarethough it may be, The Etholen Collection, quite apartfrom illustrating one of the most extraordinary collec-tions of northern material culture, puts before us thetask of making sense out of an array of objects thatchallenge conventional categorization. *

Notes

1. Formerly Sweden, Finland was annexed by Czar Alexan-der 1 of Russia in 1809. It remained part of the Russian

BOOK REVIEWS 65

Empire as an autonomous grand duchy until its liberationin 1917.

2. Regrettably, liapunova, of the Museum of Archaeologyand Ethnography, St. Petersburg and Averkieva, of theInstitute of Anthropology and Ethnology, Moscow, bothwell-known experts in the ethnic populations of theNorth Pacific, died in 1989 and 1992 respectively.

3. Collections of comparable material are rare, especially inNorth America. One of the few 1 know of is the CalvinL. Hooper Collection at the Oakland Museum. Far smallerand more idiosyncratic, it nonetheless includes objectsfrom the same locations collected some forty years later.

References

Fitzhugh, William W, and Aron Crowell, eds.1988 Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and

Alaska. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.Freed, Stanley, Ruth S. Freed, and Laila Williamson

1988 The American Museum's Jesup North Pacific Expedi-tion. In Crossroads Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska.William W. Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell, eds. Pp.97-103.Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Lee, Molly1981 Pacific Eskimo Spruce Root Baskets. American Indian

Art 6(2) :66-73.

Art of Everyday Life in Ethiopia and NorthernKenya. From the Collection of Neil W. Sobania.Essays by NEIL W. SOBANIA, JOHN MONTGOMERY

WILSON, and RAYMOND W. SILVERMAN. Holland, Ml.

DePree Art Center and Gallery, Hope College,1992. 48 pp. 1 map; 8 color images; 9 line draw-ings; checklist of objects; suggested reading.

JON ABBINK

University of Nijmegen

This publication is a modest but well-producedguide to an exhibition of artifacts from a wide rangeof peoples in Ethiopia (and Kenya) where historianNeil Sobania has worked as a Peace Corps teacherand, later, as a researcher on oral historical traditionsamong a number of non-literate agro-pastoral groups.Many objects in this collection come from the peoplesof southern Ethiopia.

While this work contains two interesting essays, itis basically a sober, though stylish, catalog of thecollection. It contains a checklist of 315 items (pp.32-47), some color photographs of a few majorartifacts, and nine drawings of other objects (withcomments on their role and context); while the fron-tispiece and backpiece carry parts of an Ethiopian

magical painting and a scroll. The small number ofillustrations relative to the total number of items inthe collection shows that this work can only be fullyappreciated as an aid to the exhibition (held from 17October to 29 November 1992 at the DePree Gallery)and not primarily as a major publication on Ethiopianarts in itself. In view of the large checklist of objectsit is surely regrettable that not more of them could bedepicted.

It is important to note that included among theseventeen illustrations are not only the better knownartistic traditions of Ethiopia (such as paintings, silvercrosses, and the justly famous basketry of the city ofHarar), but also "everyday art" from the Gurage,Dassanetch, Sidama (item 146 on p. 39, which I thinkmay originate from the Wolayta in the former Sidamoregion), Oromo and Turkana: headrests, wooden cof-fee trays, necklaces, pipes, and gourd containers. Thechecklist enumerates many more such items, butthese are not commented upon except occasionally inthe essays. The following categories of objects aredistinguished: religious and folk paintings, gourds,basketry, textiles, leather objects, musical instru-ments, terra cotta, tobacco and snuff containers,woodwork, magic scrolls and manuscripts, crossesand church objects, adornment and weaponry. Fromthis list it is obvious that the Sobania collection is abroad and representative one for this culture area,and one which can show the multiple connectionsbetween the various material traditions, for example,in terms of formal characteristics and motifs, thehistorical dynamics of which have not been studiedin sufficient detail.

The latter point is further substantiated in the twoessays. These contain elements of a fresh approach tothe arts of everyday life in the Ethiopian-Kenyanregion, the study of which has long been overshad-owed by the mainstream attention to the "high arts"of religious painting, manuscript decoration, religiousobjects, architecture, and so on of Christian and Mus-lim groups—an attitude partly conditioned by theingrained Western views of what is attractive art.

John M. Wilson in his Introduction (pp. 7-10)emphasizes that making a distinction between "utili-tarian" and "artistic" works is often difficult. Even theutilitarian artifacts have often meaning referents be-yond their immediate "function." Also, artistic deci-sions are being made by the "craftsmen" producingthese objects for daily use. It follows that it is oftenproblematic to make a differentiation between "high"arts and "low" arts. There are also unexpected stylis-