Visual Currencies: Reflections on Native American Photography

Visual Currencies in an edited collection of essays coming out of sessions held at the Native American Art Studies Association Conference, Phoenix, 2005. The seven contributors focus on the far-reaching influences of photography on Native American communities, and the possibilities that it currently presents. The essays present issues at the root of contemporary photographic practice, within and beyond Native American and First Nations communities, exploring the values, or currencies, attributed to to photographs by practitioners and institutions. John Tagg has memorably described the history of photography as that of an insistent practice, and this aptly and vividly conveys the legacy of Native American and First Nations photography in its varied perspectives presented by the authors and contemporary photographers who have contributed to this edited volume. By focusing on institutional repositories and contemporary photographic practice, Visual Currencies invites reflection into the 'material turn'; specifically addressing the significance of early photographs and the impact of digital media, the relationship between artistic practice and archival resources, the enactment of sovereignty and the performance of memory, operating at an individual and communal level

Special section: engaging anthropological legacies. Introduction : Engaging anthropological legacies towards cosmo-optimistic futures?

How to deal with the legacies of colonial and other problematic pasts is a challenge shared by most museums of ethnography and ethnology. In this introduction to the following special section on the same topic, the section editors provide an over- view and analysis of the burdens and potentials of the past in such museums. ey set out di erent strategies that have been devised by ethnographic museums, identifying and assessing the most promising approaches. In doing so, they are especially concerned to consider the cosmopolitan potential of ethnographic museums and how this might be best realized. is entails explaining how the articles that they have brought together can collectively go beyond state-of-the-art approaches to provide new insight not only into the di culties but also into the possibilities for redeploying ethnographic collec- tions and formats toward more convivial and cosmo-optimistic futures

Mild hobbies and their legacies

This paper looks at the nature and trajectory of Dr John Rae collection in the institutional context of the National Museums Scotland. In a letter of 1878, Rae noted that his hobby was ‘in a very mild way, natural history’. As Jonathan King notes, Rae’s collection is diverse reflecting changing circumstances and articulation of taste and purpose. The collection was gifted posthumously to the University of Edinburgh. Kate Rae, Rae’s widow, insisted on a catalogue, placing desires and requirements on the university. She wished to ensure Rae’s legacy by codifying it. When the collection was transferred to the museum, following the early transfer of the University’s collection, it was embraced as part of the larger corpus of material culture that came through links with the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was incorporated into the museum’s intellectual history and has been often displayed. This paper explores the manner in which collections become part of institutional identity how their abilities and potential change and how this legacy is an imbrication of object, person and institution, resulting in a growth in potency - a fulfilment of intent of the original gift

Surviving desires: making and selling native jewellery in the American Southwest

In its classic union of gleaming silver and blue turquoise, Native American jewellery of the Southwest is an iconic art form. Internationally recognized and locally significant, Native American jewellery has a compelling history—it represents the persistence of tradition while encapsulating the vitality of Native American communities and the continuously transforming nature of the jewellery makers’ art. Author Henrietta Lidchi focuses on jewellery in the cultural economy of the Southwest, exploring jewellery making as a decorative art form in constant transition. She describes the jewellery as subject to a number of desires, controlled at different times by government agencies, individual entrepreneurs, traders, curators, and Native American communities. Lidchi explores the jewellery as craft, material culture, commodity, and adornment. Considering the impact of tourism, she discusses fakes in the market and the artists’ desires to codify traditional styles, explaining how these factors can affect stylistic development and value. Surviving Desires suggests the complexity and reinvention innate to Native American jewellery as a commercial craft. Drawing on the author’s archival research and on interviews she conducted with Native American jewellers, traders, dealers, and curators, this volume examines British collecting, exchanges between British and American institutions, and the development of the British Museum’s contemporary collection. Lavishly illustrated with 300 color photographs of jewellery in the British Museum, the National Museums Scotland, and major collections in the United States, Surviving Desires presents many previously unpublished pieces and showcases works by twenty Native American jewellers, including the best-known names in the field today. The volume is a visually stunning exploration of the symbolic, economic, and communal value of jewellery in the American Southwest

Finding the right image

It may be difficult now to recall with what passion and persistence the question of imagery was discussed among development practitioners in the late 1980s and 1990s. The history of development is a comparatively short one; the largest and most prominent development organizations in the United Kingdom – Oxfam, Christian Aid, Save the Children Fund – have institutional histories confined to the last century. Conceived as small social justice organizations that emerged as a response to the need for peace and reconstruction in Europe, rather than elsewhere, they saw their role in development secured in the 1960s. Yet the proper use of images was a preoccupation that emerged only in the 1980s. This chapter examines the image of development – in visual and verbal terms – and considers why it became an issue of concern in the 1980s for British development NGOs. Focusing on an advertising campaign produced by the British-based Christian Aid, I explore how images of development mobilized and represented complex ideas about development process and practice in seemingly ingenuous ways. The first to address the question of representation and imagery was Jørgen Lissner in a thesis entitled The Politics of Altruism (1977). Radical for its time, this book effectively delineated the parameters of a debate that would subsequently emerge in the aftermath of the Ethiopian famine in the mid-1980s. Lissner’s argument was based on the following premises: (1) that development nongovernmental organizations in the North (NNGOs) were harboring a destructive internal conl ict between fundraising and education, (2) that this was symbolized in the images and messages these discrete groups of professionals produced, and (3) that the image of development fundamentally impacted on development practice: negative images of development encouraged negative development practice and vice versa

Afterword: material reckonings with military histories

Looking at European developments from 2017 to 2019, the Afterword situates the volume among the resurgent interest in questions of contested histories, calls for restitution, and the resurgence of provenance research. It argues that given the varied ways European nations are addressing questions of colonial collections, it seems contradictory that the collections of military museums are seemingly absent from the debate. The chapter consequently considers the affective values of objects, and the symbolic nature of return, arguing that there is a distinction to objects in UK military collections, linked to the idea of ‘sentiment’. Looking again at the conflict highlighted in the Introduction, it addresses two initiatives in 2018 in the UK which discussed the 1868 capture of the fortress at Maqdala and two items, again linked to Emperor Tewodros II, which over time have troubled their national custodians. It considers how such questions were addressed through display at the Victoria and Albert Museum and links this to the National Army Museum’s gesture of returning hair samples linked to Emperor Tewodros. Comparing these two initiatives it seeks to understand the historical moment in which such discussions, and therefore the issues addressed in Dividing the Spoils, can be more widely understood