01 Fine 2005 Anthropological Suspicion Public Interest and NAGPRA

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Anthropological suspicion, public interestand NAGPRA

KATHLEEN S. FINE-DARE

Department of Anthropology, Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado, USA

ABSTRACTThis article asks why suspicion regarding the aims of anthropology hasbeen heightened in an era when anthropologists are perhaps engagedin more advocacy work than ever. While it may seem contradictory oreven ‘unfair’ that anthropology continues to get a ‘bad rap’, thisperception (of and about all parties involved) is itself an importantfocus for anthropological reflection. In this article, I examine an eventthat has contributed to this issue in important ways – the passage ofthe Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act(NAGPRA) in 1990 – to illustrate why suspicions about anthropolo-gists have taken on new dimensions, and to suggest what kind ofapproach anthropologists might take in responding to these issues.

KEY WORDSAmerican anthropology ● anthropological suspicion ● justice ●

museums ● NAGPRA ● Native American advocacy ● repatriation

Journal of Social Archaeology A R T I C L E

Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 5(2): 171–192 DOI: 10.1177/1469605305053366

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172 Journal of Social Archaeology 5(2)

■ ROUNDING UP THE USUAL SUSPECT

In 2001, an anthropology graduate wrote a letter to one of our school news-papers regarding what she as a Native American1 perceived as unethicaland disrespectful conduct of her alma mater towards Native Americanobjects in the campus museum collection and Native American studentsconcerned about the presence of human remains and sacred objects. Shefelt the students’ concerns were ignored and disrespected, despite therhetoric of the collection managers. ‘This is what anthropologists do’, shesaid, giving the target of her complaint a specific name; ‘this is evidence thatthey have never changed their ways’.

Those of us in the anthropology program felt confused and blind-sidedby this attack as we all knew the specific person who had, in her view,behaved inappropriately, and this person was not an anthropology facultymember (nor had he received any prior training in anthropology, as far asany of us knew). Why then did she write what she did, leading her readersto believe that the transgressor was in the anthropology department? Whydid she not identify herself as a former student of anthropology, one whowas actively looking for employment in the field of government archaeol-ogy? And why did we, her professors, react so defensively?

One of my colleagues said he was tired of all the ‘anthropology bashing’,and hinted that the only way to remedy this would be to dig our heels morefirmly into the sciences.2 ‘Look what Indian advocacy gets us’, anothercolleague moaned, ‘a kick in the pants from one of “our own”’. I myself dida little fuming, wondering paternalistically where we had ‘gone wrong’ ineducating this promising young woman. So I decided to write and ask herabout it, continuing a conversation we had begun years ago through classassignments and office talks.

After an interesting, if emotional, email exchange regarding matters thatcontinued to trouble her about anthropology and the ‘double bind’ whichshe, as an American Indian, felt had actually tightened since she had grad-uated and gone to live and work with Lakota people (Medicine and Jacobs,2001: 326, for insights into what she calls the ‘triple bind’ into which Nativeanthropologists have been put), I began to think more deeply about thedeployment of negative spin regarding ‘anthropology’, however defined. Iwondered why similar rhetorical vehemence was rarely launched against‘history’, ‘philosophy’, ‘psychology’ (and thus against historians, philoso-phers, psychologists), or other fields that are an intimate part of thecolonialist history from which anthropology arguably emerged.

One quick response could focus on semantics. It is far easier, it could beargued, to single out the domain of anthropology to make a rhetorical point,as the word has no corresponding meaning in regular parlance. In otherwords, while the lay public constantly uses the terms ‘history’, ‘psychology’,

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173Fine-Dare Anthropological suspicion

and even ‘philosophy’ to refer to matters everyday and not necessarilyacademic or institutional, ‘anthropology’ has no such ‘bleed’ into everydaydiscourse that might reduce the rhetorical impact when invoked as Creatorof Ills.

The answer, of course, is far more complex, yet not unrelated to thatproposed above. Anthropology may not occupy the same type of semanticdomain as history and philosophy, but it may well relate to the ‘amateur’,‘lay’ public in much closer ways. We need to look at anthropology moreclosely as a figure in the public realm, not only as a discipline that engageswith the public, but which is deployed and engaged by the public. Anthro-pology is dealt with in anthropomorphic, ad hominen terms, preciselybecause it has taken on that mien in the public sphere. It is a mistake toprotest anthropology’s innocence by engaging solely in a discussion regard-ing what anthropology ‘is’ – science or humanity – without looking equallyclosely at what anthropology ‘seems to be’ to the public. Although I havenot conducted extensive interviews with anthropologists to ascertain justhow much this continued criticism bothers them, my feeling is that few takeit personally, most of it running down their backs either unnoticed ordigging an irritating groove. What remains to be examined more closely arenot the personal feelings, but the specter itself. Whether fabricated of straw,herring, typeface, or flesh and blood, anthropology as suspect provides arhetorical device that cannot be ignored if we are to continue to maintainour credibility as a humanistic discipline.

To better understand this dynamic,3 I examine some aspects of thecontinued rhetorical invocation of a ‘tropic’, reified and arguably verypublic, anthropology in the USA by examining two meanings of the conceptof anthropological suspicion that exist in dialectical relation with oneanother. One meaning – the suspicion held by anthropology – emanatesfrom the skeptical approach that is a sine qua non of anthropologicalmethodology (one that arguably links the plurality of anthropologies). Thishas perhaps been heightened in recent years as anthropologists have takenmore deliberate stands on civil and human rights matters, and as feministand other forms of critical theory have focused the gaze on taken-for-granted assumptions about humanity. It could easily be said that this ratheracademic, methodological and often inward-looking approach, one thatrefuses to take for granted monistic assumptions about the universal humanbeing or, more to the point, refuses to accept the continued Eurocentric,androcentric and colonialist guy wires of its own history, is the norm ratherthan the exception. In the words of the late William Roseberry, anthropol-ogy ‘has never provided a congenial home for conservatives or those whoserve power’ (1996: 5).

A more familiar kind of suspicion is found, most famously, in the writingsof Native intellectuals such as Vine Deloria, Jr (1969, 1997a),4 Suzan ShownHarjo (2004a,b) and Haunani Kay Trask (1993). These critiques are not

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meant to be neutral. They take place in an antagonistic political field whereprinciples of democracy have been invoked along with religiously-fueledracist assumptions. The contradictions and hypocrisies in this unevenplaying field have long been rolled by oppositional public intellectuals intoan adversary variously labeled ‘Western culture’, ‘white people’, ‘scientists’,‘dominant society’, ‘anthropologists’, ‘archaeologists’, ‘dancing white folks’,or ‘Caucasians’ (the last two descriptors provided by Harjo, 2004b). Protestof this ‘vague, sweeping denunciation’ of anthropology has been made bya variety of anthropologists (Micaela di Leonardo, 1998, 1999), one of themost eloquent penned 20 years ago by the British social anthropologistRaymond Firth:

[A]nthropology is not the bastard of colonialism but the legitimate offspringof the Enlightenment . . . Some anthropologists have explicitly rejected theidea that they should be expected to serve administration policy orproselytizing campaign, or refused to accept a claim of the absolute validityof Western moral standards invoked to enlist anthropological assistance.Many have recorded the disruptive effects of a colonial situation upon thesocieties they studied, and some have specifically examined the significanceof colonialism as a social type. Indeed, I would argue that one role of socialanthropology has been to supply ammunition for the forces of contradictionwithin the system. Governments have supported anthropology, butanthropology is dedicated to exposure of the structures and values of thesocieties studied. This includes making clear the aims and interests of thepeople as stated by themselves and revealed in their own behavior, in termsof their own conflicts as well as integrative ties. In the history of the subjectthis has been recognized by some members of the societies concerned whohave come to anthropology for analytical tools to aid them in their searchand struggle, or who have appreciated the record anthropologists have madeof their institutions at a given point of time. (Firth, 1984: 44)

Although Firth was writing largely about critiques leveled at the colonial-ist basis of British social anthropology, many of his observations about thepositive aspects of anthropology have been acknowledged by NativeAmerican critics, including Deloria himself (1997b; Medicine and Jacobs,2001: 328). Many anthropologists have taken these critiques, howeverpolemical, seriously, recognijing them as a key starting point for initiatingreal change (Biolsi and Zimmerman, 1997; Dongoske et al., 2000; McGuire,1997; Swidler et al., 1997).5

Nonetheless, while it is undeniable that much negative rhetoric isproduced by Native American readings of anthropological/archaeologicalpast practices within the current context of a struggle over material objects,human remains, human rights, and territorial recuperation, the tendency inthe USA to read anthropological suspicion solely as a function of NativeAmerican ‘thought’, Native American political interests, Native Americanreligious principles, postmodern sloppiness, or misplaced liberal mea culpasis a mistake.

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For example, as di Leonardo6 cogently pointed out in a 1996 article inThe Nation, negative ideas about cultural relativism, arguably the keymethodological principle of anthropology, can be found in the rhetoric ofconservative US politicians fearful of the anti-foundational plague erodingAmerican values. This narrow and rather rigid understanding not only ofcultural relativism but the nature of culture itself is found in academic aswell as political fields. After battling a ‘bad rap’ from Native Americans inthe 1970s, and suffering internal post-Cold War squabbles in the 1980s,many US anthropologists were caught off guard in the early 1990s whenthey learned that the ‘multicultural movement’ (characterized rathercrudely by its critics as an unfortunate mixture of identity politics and NewAge religious beliefs) more often than not painfully ignored anthropology.How, anthropologists asked, could a movement centered on cultural plural-ism blithely wave away the years of research and theorizing on the subjectcarried out by ethnologists and archaeologists all over the globe? A hugenumber of publications were produced on the topic (Greenbaum, 1992;Perry, 1992; Turner, 1992; Weiner, 1992 – note the Columbian quincenten-nial nature of the date of all of these publications, a not insignificant conver-gence), but few conclusions were reached. While the controversy regardingmulticulturalism died down, the focus on anthropological texts intensifiedwithin the field of cultural studies, many authors drawing inspiration fromwriters such as Edward Said, Jean Baudrillard and Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Although I regularly read in the field of cultural studies, the jacket of ScottMichaelsen’s 1999 book, The Limits of Multiculturalism: Interrogating theOrigins of American Anthropology, caught my eye, as I was interested in whatit said the book was about, the role that American Indians had played in theconstruction of anthropology in its early years. While a few anthropologistshad studied this topic (Lurie, 1988), I was intrigued to see what new insightsa cultural studies scholar known for his border research could bring to anunderstudied realm.7 Michaelsen’s book, however, was disappointing to me.His focus on Indian anthropologists is not designed to illustrate the roles theyplayed in building the discipline of anthropology. Instead, Michaelsen down-plays their contributions by contending that the application of a multiculturalapproach to contemporary anthropology, i.e. opening the doors to voices of‘Other’-typed scholars, never has and will not now do much of anything tochange a field whose essence is so deeply defined by the colonial project thatit will forever suck the potential contestations of ‘Otherness’ into its vortex.Using a similar strategy to that employed by Walter Benn Michaels (1995)in his pessimistic study of cultural identity in America,8 Michaelsen suggeststhat whatever it is we think we anthropologists are doing to fix what ailsAmerica, we are just fooling ourselves.

Michaelsen’s version of the anti-anthropology theme (accompanied as itis by the suggestion that Indians did not have the intellectual power toshape or resist anthropological hegemony) is all the more confoundingbecause of its emergence at a time when accusations of the self-serving,

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unresponsive, dehumanizing, uselessly academic anthropological ‘gaze’ areperhaps less true than ever. Michaelsen thus produces one more arguablytired version of what di Leonardo (1998) calls the morality play of the ‘evilanthropologist’ versus the ‘good subaltern’, one that has been on stage inthe USA since the turn of the century (Brown, 2003, and Starn, 2004, showexamples of the dynamics that emerged from this tension and the resultson Native peoples’ objects and bodies).

Di Leonardo is blunt in her discussion of why this narrative emerges timeand again, saying that ‘anthropology as trope has long been an element ofAmerican cultural baggage’ (1998: 29). As a dense, multivocal symbolinstead of historical object, anthropology embodies the ‘Us versus Them-ness’ so central to everything from movie plots to US foreign policy. It hasbeen particularly useful in the USA, by providing an excuse for makingculture and biology determinants of difference so powerful that politicaleconomy only remains as a buzzword of tenured radicals. Anthropology, asunderstood in such ahistorical, popular-culture-constructed terms simplifiesthe world for many Americans, including and perhaps especially those mostfrustrated by the broken promises of participatory democracy and thefailures of social engineering. Di Leonardo reminds us of the ways JohannesFabian’s masterwork, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes ItsObject (1983), characterized anthropologists as time-space travelers whoregularly enter what Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991) called the ‘savage slot’;where prehistory, primitives, primates and the US primeval past all cometogether (the proverbial heart of darkness).

In other words, anthropology is to most Americans less of a ‘discipline’than a weird, exotic realm whose practitioners possess expertise inquiringpuritanical minds (perhaps the most important in the above string of ‘p’s)want to know on talk shows and college campuses like mine, where I amregularly asked what I think about Anasazi cannibalism, tongue-piercing, thepower of crystals, bear lore, Stephen Pinker and the Type O diet, as if I wereon the staff of ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’.9 Fortunately, questions regarding‘what I think’ about the US Native American Graves Protection andRepatriation Act (NAGPRA) have given me greater opportunity to seewhere the internal and external debates converge about the discipline, andwhere the discipline is in many ways created by the interaction betweenpublic and academic realms. The salience of the repatriation context cannotbe underestimated and arguably has a lot to do with anthropology beingplaced on the national stage in intensified ways. Speaking of anthropology’spresence in Indian Country, Lakota anthropologist Bea Medicine statedpresciently:

The disenchantment with anthropology as a discipline and the anthropologistas ‘officious meddler’ is still a part of the fabric of research in reservation andurban communities. This disdain may increase as issues of repatriation andintellectual property rights escalate. (Medicine and Jacobs, 2001: 325)

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As recently as the repatriation meetings held in September 2004 in Wash-ington, DC, participant testimonials mentioned the harm that anthropolo-gists and archaeologists (referred to by Suzan Shown Harjo, 2004b, as‘federally-subsidized scientists’) have done and continue to do in theirperceived role as an interest group that seeks to block the primary inten-tions of NAGPRA as a type of Indian law concerned with human rights.Likewise, the language surrounding the opening of the National Museumof the American Indian used anthropology as a key element in illustratingwhat the museum now ‘is not’, in comparison to what it was. For example,this quote from the Director of the National Museum of the AmericanIndian (NMAI), W. Richard West:

We are an international institution of living cultures, we’re not anethnographic museum –There’s a distinction. We are not retrospective. Welive in the present and we look toward the future. (Burnham, 2004)

■ HOW MUCH SHOULD WE CONTINUE TO SUFFER?PROBLEMS WITH NAGPRA

Because of the money it costs, the resources it drains and the frustrationsit constantly engenders, NAGPRA not only receives Native Americansuspicions, but attracts what Ramos (1998: 282) has termed an ‘anthropo-logical suspicion’, concerning the extent to which it can really achieve theends of justice to which it lays claim. In this regard, many anthropologistsand many Indians (and Native Hawaiians) are on the same ‘side’ of thefence. These suspicions are grounded on not only the history of federalIndian policy and US history, but on linked aspects regarding the contextsof anthropological practice that point to the reasons we should stay produc-tively suspicious. NAGPRA provides an excellent case study of the waysthat anthropological, public, legal and human rights concerns can be stirredinto a confusing, emotionally charged, mess with seemingly no resolution.One of the public sites where this confusion has emerged in the past fewyears is the college classroom.

In September of 2004 I gave a talk about changes in US museum prac-tices and Native American repatriation, to an undergraduate class at JohnsHopkins University. Students were assigned to read my book on the historyof the American Indian repatriation movement (Fine-Dare, 2002), particu-larly the chapter that discusses ‘eleven elemental problems’ withNAGPRA.10 I was anxious to address students’ questions, as I had justattended two days of meetings of the NAGPRA Review Committee inWashington (the body that by law addresses disputes and serves as inter-locutor between the public and the government). I was also still imbuedwith the ‘positive vibe’ I had experienced attending the opening ceremonies

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for the National Museum of the American Indian. On the Mall, I metseveral American Indian colleagues and former students from Colorado, allof whom expressed enthusiasm not only about the museum itself, but atbeing in a place where so many Native people from all over the hemispherewere amassed.

As I prepared myself for the Baltimore class I had to remind myself (asdid a Reason Online reporter who had called me for an interview last year)that just because I may think the repatriation movement and the NMAImay have significantly changed attitudes about and awareness of NativeAmerican religious and political concerns around the USA, this does notmean that most of the US public knows (or cares) about Indians, Indianrights, Indian claims, or Indian sovereignty, much less Indian concerns aboutrepatriation and reburial (Vincent, 2004).And what the public knows aboutAlaskan or Hawaiian Natives is arguably even less.

Before we began our class discussion I showed a brief film produced in1998 that recorded some Southwestern Natives’ views about NAGPRA.Spokesmen (there were no women in this film, something rightly noted byone student) from the Hopi tribe, the Navajo Nation, Acoma, Taos andother Pueblos, expressed some of their feelings about what had been goingwell and not so well as the law had been enacted in the Southwest. Animportant theme of the film, ‘NAGPRA and Southwestern Tribes’ (fundedby a National Park Service NAGPRA grant), was to suggest to museumworkers that NAGPRA, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ law, had to be applied in waysthat recognized the diversity within and between tribes.

As seeing this film a few years ago got me thinking about the content ofthe chapter these students read for class, I was particularly interested inhearing their comments. One student believed that far too much importantinformation would be forever lost by returning human remains to Indiantribes.Another student expressed a concern that Indians were worrying toomuch about what is in museums and not enough about the health andpoverty issues on their own reservations. And one additional student ques-tioned what she saw as Indian commentators criticizing the law withoutoffering any solutions. The fact that the law is ‘forever’, with no set timelimit to museum compliance, put an unfair burden on museums that have‘already suffered enough’.

The contrast between the concerns publicly expressed by thesestudents and those by the Native Hawaiians and American Indians at theNAGPRA Review Committee meetings of the preceding week were fasci-nating in their reflection of views of very different constituencies of theAmerican public.11 As a result of hearing their expressed concerns, I revis-ited the ‘eleven elemental problems’ I had written about earlier to see if,as a result of my listening to public voices regarding the law, I saw anyobsolete or new concerns. I was particularly interested to revisit theseconcerns in light of what they reflect about what the public knows, expects,

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or suspects about anthropologists’ motives and practices vis-à-vis NativeAmericans.

I have found that none of the original 11 issues have been resolved, withsome remaining particularly problematic and salient. Some of them are soobvious as to warrant brief mention only. There is still not nearly enoughfunding to deliver the demands of the law thoroughly and fairly; there is acontinual backlog of notices to repatriate; the number of grant requestshave diminished; the National Park Service may well be compromised inmanaging NAGPRA compliance, as the National Congress of AmericanIndians and others claim (Harjo, 2004b), because of an inherent conflict ofinterest (e.g. several institutions that have not yet submitted inventories areunder the aegis of the National Park Service); the legal power of the ReviewCommittee to resolve and enforce disputes is unclear; the concerns aboutthe logistics of reburial and preservation have only intensified; and the lawmakes no provision for the claims of American Indians not recognized asmembers of federally recognized tribes. Barbara Alice Mann’s recentpolemic against anthropological practice, Native Americans, Archaeologists,and the Mounds (2003),12 bitterly states the case:

For all the tooth-gnashing going on in archaeological circles over the seachanges heralded by NAGPRA, the price of NAGPRA – constant vigilance –is paid by the Native American Community. Especially in the east, where theFederal failure to recognize Natives allows many sly ways around NAGPRA,archaeologists, historical societies, and developers still operate pretty much atwill, successfully pushing aside Native concerns. (Mann, 2003: 301)

At the 27th NAGPRA Review Committee meetings held in Washington,DC (17–18 September 2004) the following problems were highlighted in thetestimonies, comments and dispute discussions held before the committee(for all Review Committee agendas and minutes, consult http://www.cr.nps.gov/nagpra/review/index.htm).

Interpreting legal language

In many ways this remains the key concern.13 For instance, public disputesover what the intent of Congress was in defining ‘Native Hawaiian Organiz-ations’ dominated the 27th meeting of the Review Committee because theBernice P. Bishop Museum of Honolulu had, in a draft statement issued inJuly 2004, declared itself to be a ‘Native Hawaiian Organization’. Theuproar over this revealed to an otherwise unaware public not only the manychinks in the law, but of the diversity of opinion among Native Hawaiiansregarding just who or what could be a legitimate ‘Native Hawaiian Organiz-ation’14 and thus who had the right to make claims to human remains andthe various other kinds of objects delineated under NAGPRA (Ayau, 2004;Bishop Museum, 2004;Viotti, 2004).While at this time, newspapers reported

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that the Bishop Museum’s board of directors had ‘bowed to politicalpressure’ on its stance (Apgar, 2004) and voted unanimously against beingdesignated a Native Hawaiian organization, a variety of other Hawaiiandisputes remained serious enough that a Hawaiian venue has beendiscussed for hearings by the Senate and the NAGPRA Review Committeein 2005.

A second very important legal language matter emerged shortly afterthe September meetings concluded. Responses to the setback on theKennewick dispute (a ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, whichcovers several Western US States, stating that the 9000+-year-old remainsof a person found on the Columbia River were affiliated to no living tribeand thus could be subjected to scientific curation and analysis – (Harjo,2004a,b; Reynolds, 2004, for editorial comments on the ruling) resulted inthe Committee on Indian Affairs submitting Senate Bill 2843 entitled ‘Tomake technical corrections to laws relating to Native Americans, and forother purposes’ (http://thomas.loc.gov). The final sentence of the bill(Section 14) amends Section 2(9) of Public Law 101–601 (NAGPRA.) Theproposed change inserts ‘or was’ after ‘is’ in the following sentence:‘ “Native American’’ means of, or relating to, a tribe, people, or culture thatis or was indigenous to the United States’.

This proposed amendment presumably intends to clarify the originalintent of Congress that living Native Americans should be able to tracetheir ancestry not only to remains and objects which the preponderance ofevidence links to an existing tribe, but to one that may no longer have anyliving legacy. The uproar, both from the public and the scientists, wasimmediate (Daly, 2004) and a statement was made from a group called‘Friends of America’s Past’ (2004). The negative impact of the bill wassummarized by an editorial in the Albany Democrat-Herald:

[This] seemingly minor amendment to NAGPRA . . . would mean that anyhuman remains, no matter how old, even older than Kennewick Man, wouldlikely be defined as part of a group that ‘was’ indigenous to the UnitedStates, no matter how long ago, and thus covered by the law.

This sort of thinking if applied generally around the world, would haveprevented us from learning anything about the ancient cultures of mankind.What little we know about the earliest inhabitants of the British Isles and theEuropean continent, for instance, all comes from studying their graves.

In North America, it would foreclose any attempt to learn – fromKennewick Man and other ancient bones – where these people came fromand who they were. That would leave a big gap in our knowledge. Let ushope [retired Senator Ben Nighthorse] Campbell’s bill dies withoutbecoming law. (‘Bill May Stall Bones’ Study’, 2004)

Here the suspicion travels from the public to the US Senate to AmericanIndians (Campbell is identified in dhe piece not as a Republican, but as ‘a

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member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe’) and back to other anthropolo-gists and the National Park Service who have supported the claims of theNorthwest tribes to the remains of Kennewick Man.

Unidentified or unidentifiable?

The matter of affiliation to a tribe that ‘is’ or ‘was’ in the USA at any timeis linked to a third ‘legal language’ concern regarding whether ‘unidenti-fied’ human remains (a term that admits possibility of identification) meansthe same thing as ‘unidentifiable’ (a term that does not). As the nuances ofthis discussion go beyond the scope of this article, I will only treat the matterby including a quote from Harjo (2004a):

Certain scientists who opposed national repatriation policy have worked tofrustrate the repatriation processes and delay repatriations until they canconduct further studies on human remains in their collections. Many aretrying to hide the identity of human remains which are the subjects of theirstudies and to classify them as unidentifiable, in order to avoid repatriatingthem. Some federal scientists are abetting this effort by attempting to createnew regulations to make the unidentified Native human remains theproperty of the repositories where they now reside.

If these wrong-headed notions are not overturned in Court, Congress muststep in and spell out its intent at a most rudimentary level. Most Nativepeople say it is putting the dead and the living at peace. Some scientists say,‘It’s still WAR’. (Harjo, 2004a)

This call for clarification apparently was asked for in the proposedSenate amendment discussed above and results from a suspicion that ratherthan ruling in favor of Indian interests within Indian law (i.e. NAGPRA)in the case of ambiguity, scientists would (with the backing of Justice Scaliaand other conservative members of the Supreme Court) hang their hats onabsolute proof rather than preponderance of evidence regarding the ‘is’such that fewer and fewer sets of human remains would ever see reburial.

Dispute resolution issues

Partly as a result of the confusion surrounding legal definitions and stan-dards of proof, disputes regarding cultural affiliation are presented withgreatest frequency to the NAGPRA Review Committee. These concernsarguably affect anthropologists most directly when their expertise is calledinto question when they find themselves unable to vouch for the truth-valueof oral histories, ethnographies, and other ‘documents of affiliation’ that ourcolleagues themselves collected over the years. For instance, are we reallybeing ‘objective’ by putting Diné accounts of the sacred nature of MesaVerde National Park into an affiliation report the vast majority of which

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deals with pre-Diné (by archaeological reckoning) sites? This issue has beenpresented repeatedly before the NAGPRA Review Committee by the Hopitribe, who does not agree with the decisions made by the Mesa Verde, Chacoand Aztec federally-managed cultural parks to affiliate such a large numberof tribes with its museum holdings. At the time of writing, the dispute hasnot been resolved and may end up in the courts.

Another dispute brought before the Review Committee has to do withthe alleged possession of Geronimo’s skull by the secret Yale Skull andBones Society (to which both George W. Bush and John F. Kerry belonged).It is claimed that one reason that George H.W. Bush signed the NAGPRAlaw into effect was that the public had information that his father hadobtained the skull for the Yale society in 1918 (Harjo, 2004b; Robbins, 2003).The Ft. Sill tribe would like to have the truth of the rumor investigatedmore thoroughly by the US government without having Geronimo’s gravein Oklahoma disturbed.

‘Out of heaviness, enlightenment’?

The ‘public face’ of NAGPRA compliance over the past decade reveals agreat deal about the changes in federal Indian policy; about the growingpower of Native activism not only in the USA, but around the globe; andabout the ongoing work of social scientist advocates of justice for NativeAmericans. Despite the ongoing disputes, accusations and deep suspicions,some rather significant changes have occurred, a few of which are listedbelow:

1 Certain sectors of anthropology have been more inclined to drawfrom critical cultural studies that stress interdisciplinarity, thebroadening of research topics, and a greater tendency to talk openlyabout the colonialist underpinnings of the discipline, both presentand past (Jenks, 1993: 157–8).

2 The practice of NAGPRA consultation has drawn the academic,federal, state and indigenous nation representatives together inunprecedented ways to articulate and work through repatriationconcerns. This ‘coming together’ has revealed in practical rather thanmerely theoretical fashion the impossibility of maintaining‘Us/Them’ polarities based around academic, tribal, and federal‘camps’, except for strategic purposes.

3 NAGPRA in the university setting has provided new ways ofteaching anthropology that have countered the ‘you’ll never change’charges brought before it, not only by undergraduates, but moreoften by academics who still have no idea what anthropology mightbe. It is still something to be tested, but my conversations withcolleagues who teach at institutions like mine where NAGPRA is

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front and center have revealed enormous, largely positive, changes inthe classroom. Science, rather than discarded, is deepenedhistorically, more self-conscious of ethics, and more dialogic inpractice (see publications located on the Public Anthropologywebsite for examples in Hawaii and elsewhere, e.g. Field, 2001;Tengan, 2001).

4 NAGPRA discussions seem to have opened up a deeperconsideration of what ‘justice’ might mean. Although perhaps notexpressed explicitly, repatriation claims blur the distinction between‘material’ or ‘distributive’ and ‘cultural’ or ‘recognition’ justice. Inother words, it is becoming clearer that returning cultural objects andhuman remains is not merely about returning ‘property’ or aboutcapitulating to a ‘wronged race’.

5 In a related vein, Native Americans have had a way to open doorsformerly closed to them as NAGPRA consultations have been usedto discuss issues and make demands that have gone far beyond thepurview of the law. Some of these issues include culturalrepresentation in museum exhibits and university courses, andexpanded opportunities to attend scholarly conferences as Nativeintellectuals.

6 Participating in NAGPRA discussions all over the USA hasenhanced opportunities for participation in indigenous rights issuesat an international level. This internationalism, in turn, hasstrengthened activism at the local level, for instance amongAmerican Indian students at my college, and has provided goodexamples for classroom discussions of global/local links.

7 Most importantly, many Native American objects and humanremains have been returned to their owners without either museumsor scientific research establishments going under (see Preucel et al.,2003, regarding ways that NAGPRA compliance at the University ofPennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology hasopened opportunities for ‘represent[ing] the character and vitality ofIndian cultures to the public in new ways’).

■ AGONISTIC PLURALISM AND ANTHROPOLOGICALSUSPICION

I began this piece with a story about a young anthropologist who not onlycriticized anthropology, but took as her example of the excesses and trans-gressions of the field the acts of a person who is not an anthropologist. Asshe was unclear regarding this person’s academic background, and as she

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wanted to make a point, she rhetorically labeled the wrongs committed bythis administrator as evidence that ‘anthropology never changes’. This isfascinating as it does, in many ways, reflect the historical lag experiencedwithin the field as nineteenth-century aspects are indeed alive and well,even if they have been absorbed by non-anthropologists who work inmuseums.

Both senses of the term comprise a dialectic wherein various terms andpractices of the field at once create and respond to the public’s evolvingideas about human existence, human problems, and human justice, whichin turn create new problems that attract a professional anthropological eye.While it may make anthropologists crazy that some historians, culturalstudies scholars, philosophers and other intellectuals selectively choose themore negative effects of the field to construct their own strategies ofsurvival and influence vis-à-vis their own students and peers, we need tolook at the continued moral and conceptual messiness within anthropologythat contributes to the confusions and misrepresentations of ‘outsiders’.

William Roseberry addressed some of this confusion in his 1996 ‘unbear-able lightness’ piece when he suggested that anthropologists need to realizethat their discipline has for some time been deeply affected by a post-ColdWar move to not only expunge structural analysis from the academy, but torewrite history in such a manner as to create the sense that such analysishas never been linked to anything that has ‘made a difference’ in people’slives. The ways that matters ranging from social justice to education arebeing thrust into the private sector are paralleled by an inability to acknowl-edge the linkages between redistributive and cultural justice (see Fraser’s1997 discussion). Many anthropologists – especially those most aggrievedby the misunderstandings that follow them – need to conduct research onthe role of the academy in ‘post-Fordist’ times, to understand how ourvoices are squelched and distorted by our own lack of awareness of howwhat is going on outside affects our perceptions of how the politics offunding and our own work environments (academic and not) in turn affectsour research problems and theoretical conclusions.15

This leads to a second concern, one that shamelessly borrows againanother key insight from di Leonardo. As she puts it, anthropologists areoften hoisted by their own cultural petard, whereby the discipline’s insist-ence on championing the culture concept, particularly within culturalstudies frameworks, pushes aside the awareness that political and structuralanalysis should and does take place on many fronts. Our concentration on‘culture’ often means that we forget that public actions and perceptionshave structural qualities. Any perceived or real positive actions carried outby anthropological advocates of indigenous rights will be understood vis-à-vis other phenomena ranging from the theft of Ishi’s brain (Starn,2004), to ‘vampire’-like human genome projects, to a growing obsessionwith Peruvian mummies and Southwestern cannibalism. The continued

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practice of the popular media and textbooks to refer to Indians in a purelycultural sense as ‘ethnic minorities’ and the related refusal of Americansociety as a whole to learn about and recognize the limited nature of Indiansovereignty provides other pieces of the context in which anthropologicalactivism is (mis)understood (Vicenti, 2004).

Finally, if anthropologists are to heed the message of the 1971 Declara-tion of Barbados, ‘that social scientists have a moral duty to inform nativepeoples of their rights and of the institutional means to regain their rights’(Wright, 1988: 374), they must find ways to keep from falling into the Scyllaof identity politics or the Charybdis of what Sahlins (1999) calls, echoingSartre’s Search for a Method, a reduction of all cultural phenomena to mereknee-jerk resistance to power. They would also do well to heed NancyFraser’s warning regarding giving ‘abstract nods’ to coalition building as asole solution to the problem of justice. Just as, in Fraser’s words, forming‘additive combinations among already formed constituencies . . . surrendersthe possibility of an integrative perspective that seeks to grasp, and trans-form, the social whole’, an anthropology that merely seeks alliances withtribal organizations or an infusion of Indian majors cannot necessarily fixwhat ails any of us. This means taking a more ‘structural’ than perhaps‘cultural’ position, and being wary of the dangers of what Ramos (1998: 282)calls ‘professional indigenism’. Anthropologists working with NativeAmerican groups on repatriation consultation matters need to be able toformulate strategies that are at once based on notions of human rights, intel-lectual property, redistribution and the contexts in which theselegal/cultural intersections occur.

In the end, it may matter very little whether a mood is pro- or anti-anthropology. In an interview conducted for Public Anthropology, PhilippeBourgois had this to say in the context of discussing public intellectuals:

what I notice in the debates that happen, is there is sort of a bemoaning thatanthropology isn’t recognized by the general public and I’m not reallyworried about that. I don’t really care that much about anthropology – I loveanthropology and I think that specifically its participant observationmethods force people to be political and have a preferential option for thesocially vulnerable and also a strategic access to the nitty gritty of how powerrelations translate into everyday social suffering. (Haanstad, 2001)

Ironically, our best hope as a discipline may be to concentrate less on ourdisciplinary boundaries and more on our position as interlocutors betweensystems and individuals. As Grimshaw and Hart note:

It is entirely conceivable that the next century will have no place for a class ofspecialist intellectuals, called anthropologists, with a mission to tell peoplewhat is going on in their world. But, if the line between expertise andcommon sense is increasingly being called into question, anthropologists, whohave never been comfortable on either side of that divide, might be able to

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devise creative ways of acquiring and disseminating knowledge out of theircombination. For academic anthropology has never succeeded completely ineliminating the early ethos of the amateur from its professional practices.Moreover, it might be said that, compared with the other sciences andhumanities, anthropology has remained in important ways an anti-discipline,taking its ideas from anywhere, striving for the whole, constantly reinventingprocedures on the move. (Grimshaw and Hart, 1994: 259)

As a final comment, I would suggest that remaining suspicious not only canbe enormously productive to anthropological research, but can also contrib-ute to ‘grasping the antagonism inherent in all objectivity’ (Mouffe, 2000:12). Following suggestions made by Derrida and others, Chantal Mouffesuggests that the more we view one another across perceived divides asadversaries rather than enemies, the more chance we have to realize ourrespective projects. Enemies, in Mouffe’s definition, are ‘persons who haveno common symbolic space’. Adversaries, however, engage in the kind of‘agonistic pluralism’ that can keep us free from the delusion that one sideof a political field can be eliminated. The dialectics of anthropologicalsuspicion are one of the reasons that anthropology as a discursive field mayindeed offer no false hope for resolution of human disagreements, butcreates stronger common ground for building realistic praxis.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Byron Dare, Greg Johnson, Linda Seligmann, Jane Guyer,Lynn Meskell, Frederick F. York, David Nugent, John Isaacson and four anonymousreviewers for helping me think through some issues that are addressed in this article(whether they were aware of their assistance or not). All errors, of course, are myown.

Notes

1 I admit to being less than consistent in my usage of the term ‘Native American’in this article, although I try to make it include all peoples of Native Alaskan,Hawaiian and Indian self-appellation. When I use ‘American Indian’ or ‘NativeHawaiian’, I am, I hope, being clear in my reference to a subset of the broadercategory.

2 See Lett (1997) for a rather – tongue-in-cheek – ‘hysterical’ account of thedangers towards which we hurtle if we do not climb up the slippery slope ofpostmodern anthropology, and soon.

3 An earlier version of this article was presented at the invited session, ‘FourthWorld Rising: A New Native Studies for a New Public Politics’, AmericanAnthropological Association annual meeting, 15–19 November 2001, SanFrancisco, CA. I wish to thank Gerry Sider and Kirk Dombrowski for invitingme to participate in this panel and for providing cogent discussant commentson the original article.

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4 Deloria’s critiques are not limited to anthropologists; see Deloria (1998) for adiscussion of ‘fictions’ in the writings of historians and religious studiesscholars.

5 Also see documents posted on the Museum of London website(www.museumoflondon.org.uk) related to an international symposium held atthe Museum in Docklands on ‘The Politics of Human Remains and MuseumPractice: Ethics, Research, Policy and Display’.

6 I owe a great deal in this article to insights drawn from di Leonardo’s work,particularly 1998.

7 Michaelsen is a prolific scholar who teaches at Michigan State University. Hiswebsite states that he ‘writes about the problem of formulating concepts ofculture and identity politics across a number of eras and a wide range ofdisciplines such as cultural studies, ethnic studies (including border andborderlands studies), anthropology, sociology, postcolonial studies, and thelike’. Two works in progress mentioned on this site, accessed in October of2004, are ‘Ending Culture: Reading American Anthropological Literature“Across” the Color Line’ and ‘Anthropology’s Wake: Corpses, Obituaries,Tears’. http://ww.msu.edu/~smichael/.

8 In an interesting review of Adam Kuper’s book, Culture: The Anthropologists’Account (Harvard University Press, 1999), Camille O’Reilly states thefollowing: ‘In his inimitable style, Kuper makes a rather sarcastic jab at culturalstudies and its links to multiculturalist politics in the university. Perhaps moreseriously, he criticizes multiculturalism in the United States for its potentiallyconservative, anti-ideals of the Enlightenment stance on ethnicity and identity.In fact, he argues, the term culture in the hands of multiculturalism has becomelittle more than a politically correct euphemism for race, especially in the US.He cites Walter Benn Michaels to back up his argument that the concept ofculture is in fact a form of racism, replacing biology as the assumed basis ofdistinct human groups, but no less essentialist for it’ (O’Reilly, 2000).

9 Anthropologist Roger Lancaster’s appearance on HBO’s ‘Da Ali G Show’ tospeak about incest satirized within the brief span of seconds the role ofanthropologist as ‘expert’.

10 These ‘eleven elemental problems’ are: (1) administrative and procedurematters; (2) compliance and good-faith issues; (3) legal language problems; (4)scientific challenges; (5) dispute resolution issues; (6) cultural affiliationproblems; (7) cultural interpretation issues; (8) reburial and preservationistconcerns; (9) ‘balancing’ human rights; (10) international law and sovereigntyissues and (11) the National Park Service, conflict of interest, and structuralcontradiction (Fine-Dare, 2002: 143–65).

11 I did talk with one American Indian student who was auditing rather thantaking the class for credit. Although she said she disagreed with the otheryoung woman who spoke about the rights of scientists and museums, shenevertheless disagreed more with the attempts of some other students in theclass to silence her.

12 While most of the facts in Mann’s 2003 study of the history of the desecrationand study of the mounds is accurate, the work suffers from a polemicalframework that distorts some of the picture in unnecessary ways. Herargument rests squarely on the evils of the past in order to provide a

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foundational or ‘root’ context without which the primary focus of the bookcannot proceed The past evils are not only labeled ‘anthropology’, particularlyof the archaeological variety, but are averred to continue into the present. Herdemonstration of this is not only unfortunately very selective, but occludesthe facts that much of the historical and anthropological criticism from whichshe draws is itself penned by anthropologists. And these are not the fringe,‘shouted down’ variety (as she calls them) like Larry Zimmerman (himselfhardly either, for that matter), but luminaries like Bruce Trigger, David HurstThomas, and Alan Goodman. Further, although the physician Samuel GeorgeMorton is labeled an ‘anthropologist’ in Mann’s work because of his work onhuman crania, the critique of his work is drawn from paleontologist StephenJay Gould, no less an ‘anthropologist’ according to the criteria of havingsomething to say about the human species. In the end, Mann’s use of a faultystructure, one based squarely not in Native American discursive styles as sheclaims, but in Western polemical rhetoric, unnecessarily frames and ultimatelyovershadows the meat of this study, the native histories of the Easternmounds.

13 A fascinating set of reviews that deals with disagreements among federalcultural resource managers about, among other things, the deployment and useof legal, cultural, and academic definitions pertaining to cultural resources(itself quite a loaded term) is found in the Fall 2004 issue of High PlainsApplied Anthropologist. These joint reviews concern ‘Four Books Written byThomas F. King’. Many thanks go to Fred York, one of the reviewers, forsending me a copy of the publication (York, 2004).

14 I am indebted to Greg Johnson for any insights I might have into the workingsof Native Hawaiian Organizations and the variety of discourses and grievancesemanating from Hawaiian peoples regarding repatriation matters (Johnson,2002, 2003).

15 Thanks to David Nugent for this insight.

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KATHLEEN S. FINE-DARE is Professor of Anthropology and Women’sStudies at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. She has conductedfield research since 1980 in the Ecuadorian Andes, and is working on abook called Social Insecurity: An Ethnographic History of Poverty andInequality in Quito, Ecuador, 1980–2005. She has also written articles in theareas of critical museum studies, critical archaeology and NAGPRA. Herrecent book, published in 2002 by the University of Nebraska Press aspart of its ‘Fourth World Rising’ series, is entitled Grave Injustice: TheAmerican Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA. She is currentlyediting a volume of essays centered on the rethinking of AmericanistStudies written by anthropologists who have worked on both sides ofthe Rio Grande.[email: [email protected]]

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