Hey podcast fans, this is Chris Webster, founder of the APN and I just want to thank you for downloading this episode. Please consider becoming a member of the APN if you're not already and helping us make more great shows and get them out to the world. Head over to arcpodnet.com/members or click the link in the show notes onto the show. You're listening to the archaeology podcast network. Hiya friends, it's me, Anna from The Dirt. Inviting you to a live show where do an R-annual, anthro day, live show in conjunction with the American Anthropological Association. This year we're doing you are what you eat. We're going to be talking about food, my favorite stuff. It's going to be at 7 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, February 17th, so we hope you can come and join us. We will be sitting down with a smorgasbord of examples from the archaeological record that teach us about food and cooking in the past. So we are going to talk about evidence for the oldest recipe. Discuss the evolution of spiciness. Rummage around in the pots and pans of ancient history and chew on the idea that cooking changed human faces. It's going to be a whole bunch of fun. You're going to get to see the goofs and jokes and silliness and possibly the pets that don't make it into the main feed recording. But don't worry if you can't make the show. We'll miss you, but we will be releasing audio of that live show for the main feed a little later on in the year. So come to our live show. You can go register. It is totally free. All you have to do is go and click the link at the dirt pod dot com slash anthro day 2022. That's the dirt pod dot com slash anthro day 2022. Come listen to us talk about our favorite things. So we can see our favorite people. You the listeners. One more time that is Thursday, February 17th at 7 p.m. Eastern and to register for free, go to the dirt pod dot com slash anthro day 2022. I'm with the show. Hello and welcome to the dirt. A podcast about archaeology, anthropology, and our shared human past. I'm Anna and I'm Amber. Allow me to introduce today's guest Samuel J. Redman is a historian who studies the history of museums, anthropology and archaeology. He's the author of three books, bone rooms, profits and ghosts, and the upcoming the museum. Colin, a short history of crisis and resilience. He's also an associate professor at UMass Amherst. So thank you so much for being with us today. Hey, thank you so so much for having me. Yeah. So today we are focusing on your book, profits and ghosts and the subject of salvage anthropology. So we're also very excited. This is a fun new thing we're doing to announce a sweet, sweet giveaway in partnership with Harvard University Press. And so listeners, beginning the day, this episode premieres, which is a Monday, you can head over to at the dirt pod on Instagram and at dirt podcast on Twitter for instructions on how to win one of three copies of profits and ghosts if you like what you hear today. So it's super simple, open to anyone with a mailing address anywhere and we aren't collecting any kind of information of any sort about you. And so we will contact the winners via Twitter or Instagram. But first thing first, we have an interview to do. So Sam, how did you come to be a historian of anthropology and what has your trajectory looked like, your education, your path? Wow. Well, I know a lot of historians probably say this. I've always been interested in history. My dad was a history major. That bug caught me early. I didn't know what I wanted to major in going to college. When I went to my first year in college, I of course, dutifully signed up for a history class. And I thought archaeology also sounded kind of cool. My smaller, well arts college did not have an archaeology class, but they had an anthropology class. And sort of uniquely, I came to learn later, my intro to anthropology class was taught by Dr. Julie Peltier, who's a native scholar, a native anthropologist. So right from the jump, when I was 17, 18 years old, I got a taste of history of anthropology and learned it from, I think, a different perspective from a perspective that brought forward some of the native voices in the story. My history professor learned that I was interested in history of archaeology handed me a book by Bruce Cookelec, an intellectual history of archaeology called Puritans and Babylon. And man, I was hooked. And so from there, did you just go straight through? You're like, I got it and nailed it, figured it out. No, I really wanted to be a great question. I wanted to work in a museum and started doing internships working in museums. And to me, what became one of the most exciting tasks that any intern could be given was to try to find collections or objects in these vast collections. I worked at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, which has millions and millions of archaeological objects and ethnographic objects. And what happens, understandably, is that sometimes things get put on the wrong shelf, or they get loaned to a museum and then maybe don't come back. Things, unfortunately, do get misplaced. But the task of looking through the archives and trying to figure out where things left and what the history behind these objects were. And sometimes the CD, history of how they arrived at museums, I was just endlessly fascinated by that. It kept me up at night. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I wanted to go to work every day. And one thing really led to another in terms of writing about that as a topic, thinking about it, and eventually applying to graduate school to become a historian and really focusing on that as my study. I think that it puzzled me, you know, was looking around for texts like this. There is, there's a literature you might say on the history of anthropology. And the stories and characters, and of course, the context in which all of this happens is so incredibly fascinating. And what will get to eventually is this topic of salvage anthropology. But it occurred to me when I was reading about the history of anthropology that people were talking about. This is a phenomenon, but there was no book written on this phenomenon of salvage anthropology. So sometimes it's just learning about things and topics that you're interested in and asking more questions. And of course, that can go to any number of different places within this huge field of anthropology. Yeah. Well, let's get to that eventually now. So the eventual is now. So for the benefit of our listeners, could you please and Anna, could you please define salvage anthropology? What is it? And what what led you to be the person to write a book about it? Because you said like they had a lot of them. Sure. Sure. So in the 19th century and before, the really prevalent idea existed in Europe and the United States, the idea that we now call the vanishing Indian myth. And it was this concept that native people, indigenous people across North America, what we now call Native Americans or First Nations peoples, but also elsewhere around the world, indigenous people all around the world, were were thought to be doomed to vanish. And much like if often when I use the word salvage anthropology to people who have not heard of this concept or thought about this as an idea, that the word salvage often connotates a shipwreck, you know, trying to salvage a shipwreck. Well, in this case, if you go with that analogy, I guess the perceived ship going down was thought to be cultures and the uniqueness of different cultures. So anthropologists thought by whom. Thought by white people in particular, thought by Europeans and Americans were can largely convinced of this. So individuals that people have heard of like Thomas Jefferson, Detokville, many major thinkers would write about how this was a reality that was about to occur. And certainly if you look at other sorts of data and information, census data when it starts to emerge and the realities of genocide and colonialism, destruction and disease, there was some reason to think that these cultures were indeed threatened in material sorts of ways. So the salvage component of it becomes anthropologists who become obsessed with rapid collecting and documenting for preservation purposes. So yes, they are interpreting these materials and publishing them and trying to get them out. But by and large, the focus becomes rapid collection of materials. And this includes everything. It includes the most sacred materials that one can think of from tribes and communities across the world and also the most profane things, the most everyday mundane things like our utensils. And maybe in some cultures, utensils could become a sacred object, but by and large for most people, they don't feel quite the same attachment to those as they might religious or [BLANK_AUDIO]
But for salvage anthropologists, they wanted to collect songs and stories, language information, material objects, as well as human bodies. So this book is really about that phenomenon and how it played out in North America in the 19th and 20th century, especially in what legacy we're left with today as a result of that. And so the people who are doing the collecting in this early sort of stage of salvage anthropology, in profits and ghosts, you describe the first work done and by default it was by amateurs because the profession didn't exist. And so what did research look like for them and did their approaches inform kind of the formalized training that came later or was that replaced by new methods? So basically where did any existing formal or codified practices for salvage anthropology come from? I love this question because it really speaks to what I was trying to figure out. As your question suggests, there was a transition, of course, at some point from sort of an amateur anthropology to a more formalized version of it that was centered especially in universities and places of higher education for these more formal, higher education in this field. So you know, the sounds kind of silly when you think about it, but at where do books begin? I mean, I was sitting at some point in the library thinking about, oh, isn't it interesting that there isn't a, like when I look up salvage anthropology in the database, that some book just doesn't pop up in relation to this. Well, what really is salvage anthropology? Like let's look up all of the various definitions of this thing and see if we can sort of work it out. And one of the things that I was, became interested in is it was almost exclusively associated with a famous figure in anthropology named Franz Boas, who comes, it was really active a bit later in the 19th century and into the 20th century. But I became curious, well, what about earlier than that? Like what if we go back and look at figures in anthropology earlier than that? Sometimes in American intellectual history, we look at some books that are written by a figure named Lewis Henry Morgan, who is an attorney who like to dress up and in the words of one scholar play Indian. Oh, no. Yeah, yeah. I mean, talk about extreme 19th century cultural appropriation. He's sort of this interest that he has becomes more and more serious and he starts to not only read what he can about native cultures. He starts to actually try to meet native people and he befriends a teenager named Eli S Parker, who's a fascinating figure in American history. He's a very interesting figure. And it's this sort of armchair anthropology that we think of in many a lot of Morgan's work is that he writes surveys and sends them out to people who write back, you know, I think this is what's going on in this culture and there's a lot of second and third hand information that he's incorporating into a lot of his work. He's also really relying on Eli Parker and what we sometimes call informants, but native people who are offering to him sometimes freely sometimes in exchange for other things. Morgan is an attorney, right? So he often advocates for native people in terms of land claims as an attorney against major railroad companies that are intruding. He's a complicated guy, but the last thing that stood out to me that no one really talks about is that he writes letters appealing to the Wisconsin Historical Society and other new museums using exactly the language that we attribute with Franz Boas later on saying, please collect this unique material, preserve it for future generations because it is threatened for these reasons. And thinking about that definition of salvage anthropology, it doesn't actually begin 30, 40 years later, it begins with figures like Lewis Henry Morgan and Eli as Parker, who are working and collaborating together on some level, even though Morgan receives a great deal more of the credit for attempting to preserve these materials. And as indeed collect materials for the New York Historical Society, much of which is later destroyed in a fire, which is also probably why we don't fully interpret history in quite that way. And so we're going to talk about later anthropologists as they began to call themselves that were they reading Morgan's work and being like, this is how you do it. Like what like, because you know you think about like, oh, is there a text book of like, this is how you do it. And so when you are creating. And so, you know, I think it's a very interesting way to look at is like to say that you know anthropology was sort of invented because it was it was inherited from lots of different disciplines. And so what were they looking to that work is that why we see Morgan's sort of sentiments coming through and what Boas was saying, even though he wasn't from the US like who, who wrote the text book here. So a lot of the first programs are coming up and emerging in Germany, like if you want to get a PhD, you have to go abroad in this field. But you're right, there's a limited number of texts that are available and much like how Morgan was in that library, poking or in the bookstore where he bumps into Eli Parker, he's looking for those sort of limited number of texts that can speak to the things that he's obsessed with, including native languages and native cultures and things like that. And so, he figures like Franz Boas, even though he does emerge later, he, he studies physics and geography and like you say these other fields, but figures in the Bureau of American ethnology, this government group that starts to collect materials base much of their work on these early anthropologists. And so, they read Morgan, some of them are friends with Morgan, so John Wesley Powell, who is the first director, corresponds with Morgan and then the visits him in his home and they spend time together. And he's fascinated by that, I mean, on an individual level where intellectual history meets the relationships that these people have, how they're talking about that in public text, but also in their private letters, personal disagreements that they have personality complex arguments, some of them, of course, become lovers and fall out. But the story of anthropology in that way is really compelling from a personal, you know, interest side, but more importantly, these figures are writing these really important texts that are hugely consequential for native people and how we think about cultures more, more generally. I'm really interested in all aspects of that, but yes, to answer your question, Morgan's major texts and his lingering personal influence through letter writing really influences what the Smithsonian would become and what later anthropologists would become and debate. So yeah, it's really central in terms of standing that up for all of the many problems that Lewis and Morgan presents. Well, we are going to take a very quick ad break and then we'll be right back with more questions. Let's Chris Webster again. If you haven't checked out our new parent website, culturalmedia.com, then please do. We've got one coming up in November. Check it out over a cultural when it gets posted. If it's already happened and you're hearing this, then as a member, you can go to your member pages and see the event recording. Our live events are always free, but you have to show up during the event to see it. So that's culturalmedia.com for all our live events and more, culturalmedia.com. Chris Webster here, founder of the APN and host of several shows. I just wanted to let you know about our membership program and what it offers. Members of the APN get for just $7.99 a month or cheaper if you pay for the year, add free episodes so you don't have to listen to me on the breaks. Membership in our Slack team so you can continue the conversation with hosts and other members and exclusive access to any of our live event recordings. Live events are always free, but you only get to watch the recording if you're a member. So head over to arcpodnet.com/members for more info and to become a member. Our podcasts are always free, but this is just a little something extra and it really helps us out. That's arcpodnet.com/members. So we're back and I have more questions. So you mentioned the Bureau of American Ethnology in the Smithsonian before on the other side of the break. And so something that I kept thinking about while reading your book, but also I think about more generally, sort of the nature of like funding for research. So a lot of the work, especially the early work in in salvage anthropology and you know anthropology more broadly. It was supported by the Bureau of American Ethnology as you said. and dismissing.
the Smithsonian's institution, and both of those are US government entities. Like they are part of the federal government. So in your research, to what extent did you notice that the anthropologists who were funded by them or some of them worked on contracts, some of them just sort of worked on spec and sort of like that they were working alongside with and trying to appeal to the BA and Smithsonian. Were they aware of the tension between on the one hand you've got this need, this perceived need to capture information about people that they thought were on the way out that you know you catch it and like you got to like gather this information now because you'll never have another chance. But then on the other hand, you've got this sort of these material forces, this, this and like they are either underwritten or explicitly instructed by these, these government organizations, which are in fact like an arm of the very apparatus that created the existential threat that indigenous groups faced. Yeah, did they step back and take a look at themselves and go, oh, yeah, were they like this is horrible, but I've got to eat was where was there any kind of drive like that or was it all very like idealistic? Yeah, I want to help. What a super important question or sort of set of questions and absolutely it is something that I too could not stop thinking about the whole way through because I kept trying to sort of think or balance the degree to which yes, you are absolutely right for it, you know, and a great example of that is is the one that you mentioned and one of the most direct examples is an anthropologist named Alice Cunningham Fletcher who writes these remarkable detailed letters from quote unquote the field from across the American West, but especially a lot of work with the Omaha and in what are, you know, the great planes. And she, you know, it's clear when you're reading her letters that she in some sense has a quote unquote benevolent paternalistic view towards native people and people that become her friends. I mean, there's the story where she becomes bedridden with arthritis and friends in the native surrounding native community come and sing to her every day. So it seems that you know, on some level, they're developing relationships on the other day. They come and sing to her because she is an ethnomusicologist, right? Like she's the one who that was her work and that's how she established those relationships. 100%. So you become seriously interested in ethnomusicology. You're totally right and collecting these and one honestly, one of the first people that's really interested in this, like if you think about what comes before this, the vast majority of people would have dismissed native music as being unimportant, unintelligible quote unquote savage, lots of dismissive views towards that which, which Fletcher responds to and in many ways elevates the study of that. But like scholars like Phil DeLoria have pointed out, they also buy a lot like they help enter these materials into the national grist, the sort of heritage grist. So it's sort of about claiming these materials as much as anything else. And Fletcher also becomes a point person for the implementation of the DAWS Act, which is one of the most unhorably consequential pieces of legislation for native people resulting in the vast loss of lands and break up of community lands into individual plots of lands, often on terrible farming conditions. It's a huge disaster. So it's one of these things where the path, the road sometimes, the horrible consequences can be laid with good intentions. On the other hand, there are also figures like James Mooney, who is another fascinating complicated figure who I think is under drawn in terms of the history of anthropology, in part because he's at the Smithsonian as a curator and works with the BAE for many years. He doesn't have a huge number of students, but he learns about things like Piodi and the ghost dance. And he writes about these and the hysteria surrounding these things and pushes back before Congress. And honestly, a lot of his writings and points of you get him into hot water with politicians who see things very differently and want him banned from Indian country, including Henry Pratt, the head of the Carlisle Indian School, that this Native American boarding school gets into a public battle with Mooney over the future of Native Americans and the freedoms associated with native spirituality. So it's a complicated question because in ways this is connected to the same mechanisms that are harming Native people and yet we're left with this legacy of materials that in some respects are really meaningful and important for in many respects, I should say, for Native people today. So how did these materials get there? Sometimes through abuses, through this sort of macro systems that are allowing for this to happen. And on the other hand, you're left sometimes with the only material culture, maybe that your grandparents or great grandparents have on this earth. So it's intensely complicated and complicated and fascinating in that way. If any examples come to mind in letters or diaries of, you mentioned Mooney getting and sort of protracted tips with folks, interlocutors, but are there any examples of the time that they said, I wish there were someone else who were funding this. I wish there were someone else supporting this. Maybe it just was impossible given the circumstances to sort of move the, like the DAW's act and similar things to move towards privatization and away from sort of communal ownership or sort of efforts to dissolve community. Like where they're, they're, could you think of anyone who were like not only am I looking to my informants who are indigenous people, but I want, but I want to work as a peer, as a sort of an equal or I would prefer that this day and their ownership or their custody or was, is that just a foregone conclusion given the, like the fact that this was an, a world in which salvage anthropology believed it needed to exist, precluded a world in which there could be indigenous custody over their own objects. I think largely the latter, largely that very end is the unfortunate reality. There's an amazing book about this too by native scholar Margaret Roussak who writes a book called Savage Kin, who's thinking about the role of quote unquote informants and native influence in these ultimately texts that are largely the, the focus of her study in the history of anthropology. But of course, Margaret also writes about the history of collecting and how this has been influenced in that way. Sometimes you can see, you know, in the record figures like Boaz who developed deeper relationships with certain native individuals and he invites them to come to New York and look at exhibitions that are in progress and comment, but it's never on the level of full parity, right? Like it's, there's always that hierarchical sort of voice that's happening. So I became really interested in the moments where there is some level of collaboration, but by and large, the story of salvage anthropology is largely this like paternalistic movement that museums are the proper place to hold these materials for future generations and sort of this Western idea of how this should be done is enacted. It's interesting that you mentioned Boaz there as somebody who would invite people to you know, native colleagues to come and as yet because it sounds like they're there are internal contradictions because I think that some of our listeners who may be less familiar with sort of Boaz in general may know him as one of the guys that was intimately involved in the tragedy of Minic and in his family and including his father's death, what being brought under duress and and subsequent like medical neglect that comes along with with that and and though the way in which his he was not given the customary funeral that Minic believed that he would have that he he both should have and did receive to instead keep his ring installing him as an exhibit. And so to have that's something that I I can think of few more violent acts that an individual can take. I can't think a few things worse and so it's very fascinating to me that you do mention Boaz as somebody who had who did approach parody sort of never reaching it but approach. Yeah. So I should and I should clarify that's a great comment and point that's also highlighted in in the book because Boaz is of course this really complicated
figure. One of the reasons why I wanted to write this book was to show that salvage anthropology is about more than this guy, Franz Boas, this German-American immigrant who in many respects changes the field and changes many of the social sciences by advocating for cultural relativism, this idea that would have been really controversial in the 19th century when it was to propose that maybe people are developing their own unique solutions to problems as opposed to being better or worse or like more advanced or less advanced. So yes, this is a radical idea and we need to give credit to this hugely consequential moment and influence that it has and his advocacy for immigrants in some ways and being an anti-Nazi voice, an impromptu and anti-nancy voice, he deserves credit for a lot of those things. On the other hand, and this is a big important point, right, is that he trafficked and human remains by selling them as I write about in bone rooms. He had these horrible abuses with the Inuit who were brought by Commander Perry as you said, kidnap, abducted really. So how do you reckon those things? How do you sit with those contradictions? To me, I find that really compelling and interesting. I find it like humanizing about these figures and it makes me want to learn more and understand more of the context. But I think if we see it as just one or the other we're sort of missing some aspects of this. But he's endlessly compelling and I found his fingerprints to be all over everything. Even writing a chapter about California, here's Boaz in New York. And he's trying to raise money. He's trying to determine who gets money. He's trying to send people to collect things for New York. I mean, his fingerprints are all over the story in a lot of meaningful ways. Reckoning someone's legacy in the discipline with the darker aspects of themselves and even how they conducted themselves in the classroom with advisees. There's a little bit of that that comes through in your book is, I found to be rather economist with some aspects of individuals that I have very scavenging views of including Alfred Crover who was taught how to exploit people by his advisor. And it comes through with that kind of Boaz as kingmaker and sort of like pop it master. And so I think that that's something that if we're folks that I mean, certainly folks who follow me on Twitter. But like folks that are on Twitter are involved in sort of academic Twitter. Like you see these things. You see these aspects of the realities of a scholar and the realities of scholarship extend far beyond their publications. And I think that a conversation like this and sort of a topic like this, a topic of scholarship that is that was controversial and remained controversial and used to people look for the silver linings or they look for the like the the upshot of the things that we can learn from both in positive and negative ways. I think that that's a really good and powerful entry point into discussing other aspects of abuses. Yeah. Well, a brief foray into maybe something a little more positive. So along with this sort of chronicle of the history of anthropology as sort of a white European centric discipline, you do throughout the book highlight the ways in which indigenous individuals at this time in individuals and communities were not passive or not simply the objects of collection or the objects of study and found ways in which they exercised agency within salvage anthropology. So are there examples of this that particularly stand out to you? Yes. One, you know, I really again trying to think about what is salvage anthropology and how do we see it out in the world? One of the things that I really became compelled by and was searching for were episodes or moments in time or individuals. Of course, we've talked about how some of these individuals are really compelling, but also objects and some ways that we or myself I'll just say that I generally thought of objects as objects, but that was my sort of Western, you know, the way in which I have been acculturated and sort of learning to question that through this project, right? That for example, the Omaha have in their spiritual tradition a sacred pole, a cedar pole that has some markings on it. It's protected by an elder in a special tent that they move as they would move around seasonally. And at some point it was considered threatened because the eldest individual who knew how to care for the pole had had passed away and the tribe is just trying to decide collectively what to do with it. And I found a series of signed data, notarized depositions from 1900 where tribal elders were giving statements and their own personal rationale for why these materials should go to Harvard University, to the Peabody Museum to be with other materials that had been deposited there. Now, these were some materials that were repatriated later in the 80s and 90s, even some of them, even before official nag brought Native American graves protection and Repatriation Act laws are enacted. But that to me was really surprising as someone who was thinking about the dark corners of this and in terms of thinking about the exploitative, often cultural theft that we're talking and thinking about to see these depositions where people are saying they want materials to go into a specific museum stood out to me as unusual and as a deliberate choice. Now, we can think about the cultural pressures and the stresses and the motivations for that rationale in that moment. But to me, I thought about, well, what if we take this seriously as a phenomenon and think about that? How can we, you know, think about the ways in which, as Joe Horskapture, the curator put it, he says, he feels like grateful to be in the amidst the legacy that the ancestors have left for us. And so that, to me, it seemed like in connection with that statement, here's a very deliberate act that the ancestors have taken in order to ensure the preservation of these materials. So we need to think, I think, more compil, you know, in a more sophisticated way about how some of these played out. Now, we can't overdraw that, right? Like, this isn't, it's not as though all of these materials ended up there collaboratively, but it's not as though they represent just a simple one-to-one threat theft either. There's lots of influences that could potentially sort of play into this. So throughout the book, I couldn't help but find that for many of the anthropologists that you that you profite or whose work you outline, lots of them have very positive attitudes, like very positive attitudes towards indigenous people that aren't necessarily paternalistic, but they are very fetishizing. And so I said that something that hit me really early on with the guy who wanted to know about indigenous populations. And so he married one. And so he had his, he had his wife and his in-laws. And so that's something that I remember learning as something that you shouldn't do when you're an anthropologist. It's like, marry one of your anthropologists. Like when you're doing an ethnographic study. But shouldn't be married to your job. So this is beginning with that. And then moving on from there, I found that these fetishizing relationships continued. Now they weren't all necessarily something like romantic or like physical relationships or anything that has like other sorts of implications, but they were like, I don't know, like a lot of them didn't sit well with me. But and there certainly was. And you've spoken to this already in this conversation. This persistent theme of white audiences listening to white narrators, everything from like getting a lot of reports from the agents who my understanding is that they are sort of federal employees. I don't know if they're military or just sort of bureaucratic employees who are assigned to various sort of like circumscribed like indigenous population. So I don't know if these are reservations necessarily or they're just sort of like out there. But they were the ones who were being interviewed and they're like, I don't know. I got I think I got assigned here. And and I just I just could not get past the fact that this was information like filtered through a white lens for a white audience because it wasn't like somebody was like, I want to learn about my own culture or like I want to learn about, you know, I'm in this community, but I want to learn about the Omaha. I'm going to pick this up. Like it was just sort of a white audience for white research goals. Like the very Nate, the very idea of salvage anthropology was a staff
I wish to buy white people because the people who were vanishing were like, no, or enough. So did indigenous, all of that. It's not several minutes of me talking. Did indigenous people-- - Welcome to podcasting. - Did indigenous people fit themselves into this framework? Were they fit in it? Like, were they an afterthought in the entire enterprise? - Henry Rose Schoolcraft is that anthropologists that you mentioned, or sort of early anthropologists that you mentioned, who's also an Indian agent who marries Jane Schoolcraft and relies really heavily on her family and her sisters to learn about Ojibwe culture. And Schoolcraft is important because he advises some of the formation of the Bureau of American Ethnology and the whole formation of the Smithsonian's anthropology program. So he's not just like some guy, right? But yes, there are just endless examples of this that then need to be parsed out and thought about. So paternalistically, Frank Hamilton-Cushing at one point says, I like trading materials with native people and I try to explain to them what a museum is and they don't really seem to get it. So I'm just gonna carry on doing what I'm doing. And then there are other people who try to take advantage of this and play, it really in some ways exploitative, but sort of psychology in this like, a wanting anthropologist who says, I'm collecting songs and some of the other elders have from other tribes have given me songs and that would sort of be a little bit of a potential affront to one's pride. So people would say, well, I know more than that jerk over there. So I'm gonna give you many more songs. So as we've been talking about, there's a whole array of these relationships that develop in the history of salvage anthropology, that yes, as you suggest, like really fetishize in some way this idealized version of the people that they're encountering. And as Nancy Paraiso, a scholar has written about that there's irony in the salvage method in going and trying to trade Western materials to preserve these Indian cultures and then ultimately changing the material realities of these places that people are then using cast iron skillets and incorporating different types of feathers and materials or shells that they could get through trading. And of course that's-- - But their old ways are saved for posterity. - Right, and so it's based on this faulty idea, right, that cultures are sort of in the static bubble. They're never changing or influenced by-- And yet, like I've said, we have to look on this, I think, on a couple of different levels, is that they're contributing to this awful global process of colonialism and the stripping of land and materials. They're also writing figures like Helen Hunt Jackson, our influential in these stories who are writing some of the first sympathetic treatments of native history that are opening quote unquote liberal sympathetic white audiences eyes to these problems for the first time, like before the 1880s, there weren't very many texts saying like, "Hey, what happened in California was genocide "that was a disaster on a human scale, "like people in Boston should know about that." So I think it's important to recognize that element of these individuals as well, along with the many problems that they're presenting. Some of these figures were the first Europeans or Americans to say, "Hey, we need to take this seriously "and think about these as sort of complete worlds, "even though they weren't thinking about them "and sort of truly sophisticated or accurate ways." - All right, well, we're gonna take one more break and give Sam a chance to like, catch his breath after I grow them for a while. And then we'll come back with some more questions. (upbeat music) This is Chris Webster with the APN. I'm also a project manager for several industries. I wouldn't be able to keep on track with really anything if it wasn't for motion. With motion, I just say what I need to do, how long I think it'll take, what sort of priority I think it has, and motion builds my day for me. I believe in building breaks because, let's be honest, it's hard to remember to stop to eat lunch sometimes. So head over to arcpodnet.com/motion for a free trial and a discount if you sign up. You'll kick back a small amount to the APN if you do. That's arcpodnet.com/motion. (upbeat music) Hey fans of APN Podcasts. We've got lots of designs over at our T public store. Every purchase helps out the APN with a few cents back to us. Check out the high quality t-shirts, stickers, phone cases, coffee mugs, and a lot more. There are lots of colors to choose from and most of those items and T public often runs 30% discounts. So check out the store at arcpodnet.com/shop. That's arcpodnet.com/shop and click on the link. (upbeat music) - We are back and we've got a few more questions for Samuel Ribbon. The final chapter of "Profits and Ghost" brings in the voices of indigenous artists and scholars and leaders, which essentially asks the question now what? So what do you see or what you want to see as the future for all of this data, for all of these objects, for all of these remains, for everything that was collected, stolen and gifted by as a result of salvage anthropology. What comes next for all of that? - So a monumentally important question because I think it speaks to what is the future of museums? What is the future of collecting and trying to preserve heritage and material culture? As I suggested earlier, I think I've stated this pretty routinely over the course of my work that I'm an advocate for thoughtful repatriation that there should be collaboration with museums and tribal communities to ensure the thoughtful return of material, rebarial in many cases or return of sacred materials to tribal museums. And I see this not as a threat to museums, as many people did in the early 1990s. I see this as a huge opportunity for people to create new connections to repair some really heavily-fraid relationships that will never be fully repaired, but we can make some strides towards reconciliation and improving these relationships. I became also interested in though, what about these materials that will be there even after those conversations take hold, sort of some of these mundane materials or other materials that maybe can't be repatriated for one reason or another because of circumstances. So for example, there is a practice in the 19th century of quote unquote poisoning materials for preservation purposes. So anything organic, which is like, oh my gosh, anything, right? Wood, feather, bone, any of that material that would be doused in arsenic or mercury for permanent preservation. So even though some communities would like to re-incorporate these materials into their ceremonies, like you can't give like a toxic carcinogen, it's to be like, perform the in. - Not great. - Right, so. - So that's the powerful metaphor. - Right. I became interested in the story that the Smithsonian and tribal communities were coming together to use 3D printing technology to create replicas of these materials that were removed from their communities a century ago in many cases. And in one story with a clink at hat, the century old hat was asked to sit overnight in a room with this 3D printed replica and share its knowledge. And there again, through many of these stories, I began to think differently about material culture and what these things even mean, what they are, but then how they could potentially be incorporated into art and art practice in a contemporary world. Let me just mention briefly, these amazing artists Wendy Redstar and Marie Watt who talked to me about how they think about museums today. So it became really fascinating. And again, something that I think we should introduce new voices into the conversation and ask native people what they think should happen with these materials. - Yeah. So I know you've got another book coming out. And so, I mean, I don't know when you wrote it compared to this one, but thinking about, so you've mentioned now a couple times of sort of the lives of objects and so sort of material culture as being embodied, not necessarily that they're, not necessarily in an animistic way, but in a way that this
has a life, it has a purpose, it has a role, so it has a form of like personhood. Did wrestling with that idea and sort of seeing that and experiencing that, did that change in any way, your view of what a museum is, what a museum can be, and the consequences of taking material culture from communities who either have explicitly explained like how they view it and or and personify a room body, these objects and putting them in these sterile, lonely places where they are and not being given an opportunity to live as they should have, whether they be a living, breathing person, or they be a non-breathing object of material culture. Did that change for you? Is it shifting for you? How is this project making you think about what museums have been and thinking about the photos that you have in the book and the photos that people may think and when they think about the old Smithsonian, just like these rooms and like these drawers overflowing, which is stuff. And it's like, why do you keep taking, why do you keep receiving it, why do you keep collecting it if you're not, if you can't store it. And we talk about, we limit this all the time. Lots of folks who listen, have worked in museums and know that like there are places where like the worst possible place something could be, you know, thinking about the Hearst Museum back in Berkeley and thinking about how many of those objects, including like the largest collection of baskets, is under a pool over a fault line. And like thinking about, it seems like a safe place to keep your stuff. - Yeah, just like, I remember spending time in there being like, this is imperiled. So you have things that are quite literally imperiled and then you have other things that are sort of more, perhaps like symbolically or spiritually imperiled. And so what's going on in your head with your guide to museums and what they do and how they work? - Yeah, well, on some level, I'm still a big believer in museums when I go to the American Museum of Natural History or the Met or when I go back to the Field Museum and I see people learning about the world and thinking of that. Like one of my colleagues says, the ranking of all of the many things that I think we need to dismantle in society. I think museums aren't exactly at the top. I think there are other more problematic institutions that we should think about. But I think that they need to be reformed in a bunch of major and foundational and important ways. And we need to fully rethink what it is they do and what their purpose is and what the purpose of preservation is and what that looks like. And as your question suggests, I don't think preservation should be just taking these materials and us determining or the powers that be people that largely look like me throughout a lot of the story to they shouldn't be able to just unilaterally determine what is best. So we need to fundamentally reform and rethink from a more collaborative and meaningfully collaborative way where these major institutions see a lot of the power, frankly. But they also have a huge amount of resources and this prestige in this academic universe and this prestige-driven economy in many respects they still have a voice. So I think there's a huge amount of power there and potential for education, but they do need to be fundamentally reformed and rethought. I think there are a lot of people doing this work. I just want to credit a lot of that six chapter is about people pushing for these changes that have been pushing for these changes since the '80s and '90s that I wasn't the first person thinking about a lot of these problems. But what I tried to do was think about this historical problem of these shelves, like you say in the 19th and early 20th century that are just becoming filled with this material. What do we do with it now? I think that challenge should force us to reconsider fundamentally what a museum even is today. And frankly, too, what anthropology is, what archaeology is, and what the benefits of these fields are, but also what the ethical limitations might be. I mentioned earlier how I was trying to think about-- I was thinking about Gertrude Bell, as I often am. And so thinking about her in a different context a different part of the world from a different imperial apparatus. But are there transferable lessons from the salvage anthropology movement and in legacy in the United States to other corners of the discipline? You mentioned in the book that you're like, this is not the point of this book, but this is something that there are shades of it elsewhere and other parts of the world and other times. And does it speak to settler colonial states? And so thinking about Australia, in particular, came to mind for me, to colonial enterprises more generally, thinking about the European powers that are sort of at work in the African continent and sort of pushing research there. Are there transferable lessons to our present relationship with material cultures or bodies of-- from cultures where we can't identify to senate communities? So I'm thinking about not just the ones where you have people who are on record at the time saying, this is what this is what this is like. This is what this does. This is why we don't want you to have it. Because if it's sitting in the pee body, it isn't living its life for Anna's work. Because sort of-- Thanks. In Western Asia or in Denisovac Cave, where you've got sort of bodies of neatoz and Denisovans and people who are not homo sapiens. Are there transferable lessons here? Like in thinking about how we engage with material culture and remains of people who have vanished, actually. Yeah, I think this is, again, a really important conversation that's been evolving in a bunch of related aspects of our profession. So for example, the society for American archivists debated protocols for indigenous archival material. And they came out with a statement in response for how archives should strive to work with these materials. And another aspect of it that it didn't really occur to me until taking this on was the idea of copyright. So a lot of things are just standard copyright for a century. And then they become freely available through, say, the Library of Congress or books. And we kind of-- I don't know. I sort of had this assumption that that material, or that knowledge, is neutral. And I come from this Western background that privileges free speech and open access and free exchange of knowledge and scientific information. By and large, I think that's a good thing, right? But what about sacred knowledge that I'm not supposed to know? What about things of that nature? So I think it should introduce more nuance into this conversation. But again, I don't think-- I'm certainly in thinking about the implications of this. I don't think I'm the only person meditating on this. But I do think that thinking about the heavy influence of salvage anthropology, when it happened, and how it happened, should make us think that collaboration is so much a better process to outcome than this unilateral determination of what's best for materials. And that includes all different types of materials. I think that's a lesson that we're left with today. Yeah. And so think about collaborating when there's no one to collaborate with. There are, as a result of the genocide that happened in this continent, there are people who are lost. And there are people that don't have-- that don't have descended communities, that there are not-- because as you make very clear both in this conversation and in your work, like this is not-- Indigenous North America is not a monolith. And so there are people-- there is such degree of diversity. They'd be like, I have no idea. I-- we have no linguistic ties to tell you what any of this was. There are no cultural or religious ties. And so what happens then? Does it just sort of like-- is there the very cynical? We get to keep it kind of thing? Or is it sort of like, well, what can we-- how do we do right by this? Like, as sort of having-- like, how do you have collaboration in the absence of a collaborator? This is another line in one of these interviews that I did where artist Wendy Redstar said, through learning about this history and how complicated it is, I've become even more skeptical of broad sweeping answers or simplistic answers. So I don't have broad sweeping answers to this necessarily. But I think two things in response to that. And one of them really relates to the issue story, right? So if the issue-- the sort of the way issue, of course, is framed. And I think this has been problematized by some scholars. It's like this idea of the last of his tribe. So what do you do when there's no sort of kin in that way? Well, I think the strategy that was taken
in that case that can often be successful is thinking about who the closest living communities are, who are sort of the cousins or the next of kin you might say in a reasonable way. And then this is problematic in certain sorts of ways, but I think on a fundamental human level, when I worked with human remains back before, really getting into this more as a historian than working in repatriation, thinking about fundamentally, how would you want to be treated? How would you want your relatives to be treated? Can there be, and I hesitate to propose some sort of universal ethics behind any of this, but certainly that meant a sort of quiet solitude around the things that deserve that respect and learning from people how they could be ethically, respectfully treated in a way that I would want the most sacred things in my life to be treated or that I would want my ancestors to be treated. And the way that I would want that to happen is by asking, or asking someone that knew them or cared about them in some meaningful way. So I think that could be a path forward in many ways, but there again, that's one of the reasons why I'm sort of skeptical in some of these broad sweeping solutions that everything should be repatriated or returned. Maybe there are examples where things have been gifted or given in a positive way that we can build on. Maybe there are other examples that might require years of dedicated research and collaboration and consultation to figure out what the right way home and path forward is. On the other hand, those complexities have often been made into excuses for throwing up reasons for slowing down repatriation or processes. So I think there needs to be a balance of investing in that and doing the work, but also understanding that sometimes that does meaningfully take time. - Yeah, and avoiding a sort of positivistic approach. It's like, well, we can't do everything. What's the way to do anything? - Right. - Yeah. - Yeah. - All right. Are you ready for our hardest questions? - Hit me. - Okay. So these are the two final questions that we ask all of our guests and we really love seeing sort of the breadth of answers across all of the guests. So what is the best thing about anthropology? - To me, the best thing about anthropology and having any opportunity to study it or be around it are the incredible people that I meet. Of course, you get a chance to debate ideas and sometimes go to different places. But back when I worked in museum anthropology and would help visiting delegations, I learned a huge amount in my anthropology classes, no doubt. And from reading anthropology books, I did a lot. I don't mean to say that those were secondary to my education. There's nothing like meeting someone and saying, you know, hearing them say something like, oh, my mom made spoons like these. Here's how they did it. And you know, I, to me, that's just one of the most remarkable eye-opening experiences that any human can have is to meet people who aren't necessarily like them for one reason or another and to engage in serious listening. So, you know, I love anthropology because it makes me work on that listening. It makes me work on, you know, being present and mindful with people and thinking about the context and trying to be attuned to those things. But yeah, I just, I find it endlessly fascinating. There are so many possible answers to that. But I think the people that you meet, that's my favorite part of it. - If you could be a fly on the wall for one moment in human history or prehistory or for a moment in the development of anthropology as a discipline, what would you choose? And why? - This is such a tough question, but you know, in thinking about like, gosh, all of human history. - Yeah, yep. - Problem. - That's why we send the questions in advance. - Okay, just this one. - No, no. - Thinking about honestly, the first time that someone was brave enough to eat something like an oyster and was like, yeah, I'm just gonna go for it. - Here's a shellful of snot. - Yep. - It's right out. - And this ends up being delicious. And half of people hate it, but man, it's great. So yeah, I think there are just moments like that where it's a little bit of a mystery how people sort of went off that ledge and figured that out. And I'm always curious about that. Of course, in terms of the history and anthropology, there are so many moments in the history of anthropology that I would like to go back and see. I mean, touring the 1893 world's Colombian exposition or the insulate problematic archeology and anthropology displays at the 1904 Saint Louis Fair. - Yep. - You're so interesting just to be a fly in the wall or to be able to go back and see those things. But yeah, I wonder who ate that first oyster. (laughing) - I wonder the same thing about the first person to milk something in animal. (laughing) It seems like a good plan. - Yeah, we're gonna have, we're gonna-- - I mean, there are, there is, they can, I mean, if you look at a baby animal, you can be like, okay, this is-- - Yeah, but you could also watch-- - I'm gonna be a watch. - Watch the watch. - Right, but you could also watch another animal eat it at oyster. - This, that's gonna away from the milking. - There's still plenty of mysteries to make you think of your lengthy history. - Well, you know what doesn't have to be a mystery. You on the internet, where can people find you Samuel J. Redmond and your work? - Sure, I think I'm a very easy person to find. I am at Samuel J. Redmond on Twitter and I teach at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and folks can find my first two books, Bone Rooms and Prophets and Ghosts through Harvard University Press. And thanks for mentioning that I have a forthcoming book called The Musee, a short history of crisis and resilience. And that's coming out on April 5th, this year with NYU Press. So folks can check those out. And I'm really grateful for having this fascinating conversation today. - Yeah, this is fun. - Yeah, that's fun. - We're so glad you can join us. - Yeah, and so everyone, now you hurry it, go get yourselves onto Twitter. - Get these little bookstore. - Well, no, or first, hold out a little hope. Get the to our Twitter and Instagram feeds because you have an opportunity to. - Oh yeah, you can win your very own. - Yeah, so Harvard University Press is graciously. - Thank you. - Given us the opportunity to give away three copies. And so you've got a week, you're listening to us when it drops. - Yep, I would do that. - And Jacob, yeah, definitely check out the book. In the show notes, we will include other books that have been mentioned in other work so that you can find that stuff if this is a topic that you want to learn more about. And while you're on the internet, go ahead and rate us and give us a positive review. - Yeah, you're there already. - You're already there. On Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, anywhere else that you can find a place to rate us highly. Please, five stars. If you have fewer than that, it's okay to have an unexpressed thought. Like, that's fine. But that's what we've got for you this week. - Yeah, and we will be back in your ears next week with new content, which you can find in all the usual places. You can also find us on our social media, on Twitter, we're @dirtpodcast, on Instagram, we are @thedirtpod, and on Facebook, you can just find us at regular old The Dirt Podcast. And don't forget, go to @dirtpodcast on Twitter, @thedirtpod on Instagram, and get in, win that book. - Yeah, yeah. And all of that, and more, and links to our merch, and everything else that we do, and all of our other guests. - Oh my goodness. - On our website, thedirtpod.com. Thanks, everybody. Do it. We love you. Goodbye. - Bye. (upbeat music) - This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV, Traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network. - This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. 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