we have always been modern: museums, collections, and modernity in the caribbean

we have always been modern:

Museums, Collections, and Modernityin the Caribbean

Wayne Modesttropenmuseum

abstract

In this article, I explore the ways in which notions of the

ancient and themodern have helped to shape early museo-

logical interest and practices in the Caribbean. I argue that

the Caribbean, and for my purposes Jamaica, occupies an

ambiguous place between the ancient and the modern

worlds—not ancient enough yet not modern enough—

which has resulted in the material culture of the modern

Caribbean being largely absent from anthropological (and

in fact history) collections both in the Caribbean as well as

in museums across Europe. The result is that the region

has come to be definedmaterially primarily through its nat-

ural and not its cultural history, and thus is represented as

a place of nature and not culture. [nature, modernity,

Jamaica, Caribbean, slavery, Tainos, colonial collecting]

Framed within the theme of this special issue of

Museum Anthropology, this article explores the ways

in which notions of the ancient and the modern have

helped to shape early museological interest and prac-

tices in the Caribbean. Drawing on the work of schol-

ars such as Sydney Mintz, Michael Dash, and David

Scott, I will argue that the Caribbean, and for my pur-

poses Jamaica in particular, occupies an ambiguous

place between the ancient and the modern worlds—not ancient enough yet not modern enough—which

has resulted in the material culture of the modern

Caribbean being largely absent from anthropological

(and in fact history) collections both in the Caribbean

as well as in museums across Europe.1 The result is

that the region has come to be defined materially pri-

marily through its natural and not its cultural history,

and thus is represented as a place of nature and not

culture.

Briefly put, the history of the modern Caribbean

may be described as one of aggressive European con-

quest and near extermination of the region’s indige-

nous peoples (the Tainos in Jamaica, for example).

This was followed by colonization and then repopula-

tion through abusive and oppressive force over Afri-

cans who were enslaved and brought to the

Caribbean for their labor. Enslaved Africans were

torn not only from their home, family, and cultural

groups, but they were also alienated from a past

to which they could no longer connect (Patterson

1985). Later, when African labor could no longer be

secured through force and hence was not easily

available because of Emancipation, other fungible

bodies—indentured Indians, Chinese, and more

Africans—were brought in as replacements. The sys-

tem of indentureship that developed, while not based

on forced labor, failed to result in significant changes

in the relationships of power or hierarchies of oppres-

sion structured around race that characterized the

earlier system under slavery. The new labor force was

to inherit a system in which they were deemed to be

merely laboring bodies for an imperialist enterprise

that mainly served the white ruling class’s needs.

The Caribbean that resulted was one produced in

large part by Western modernity—a region popu-

lated by new groups of immigrants involved in a

sociocultural and economic environment that could

be described as “modern in some way even before

Europe itself” (Mintz 1996:21). This “new” region

was to unsettle established notions about many of the

categories that we have come to understand within

social theory. Categories such as history, modernity,

past, and ethnicity became especially nuanced in the

Caribbean and the region has helped to introduce

new categories for exploration such as creolization.

Accordingly, Sidney Mintz in his 1993Walter Rodney

Memorial Lecture, “Goodbye Columbus: Second

Thoughts on the Caribbean Region at Mid-Millen-

nium,” (quoted in Scott 2004a:191) has described the

region and its peoples as:

the first modernised peoples in world history.

They were modernised by enslavement and

forced transportation; by “seasoning” and coer-

cion on time-conscious export-oriented enter-

prises; by the reshuffling, redefinition and

reduction of gender-based roles; by racial and

status-based oppression; and by the need to

reconstitute and maintain cultural forms of

their own under implacable pressure. These

were people wrenched from societies of a differ-

ent sort, then thrust into remarkably industrial

settings for their time and for their appearance,

and kept under circumstances of extreme

museum anthropology

Museum Anthropology, Vol. 35, Iss. 1, pp. 85–96© 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1379.2011.01124.x

repression. Caribbean cultures had to develop

under these unusual and, indeed, terrible condi-

tions. The argument here is that they have, as a

result, a remarkably modern cast for their time.

Scott (1999, 2004b), who concurs with Mintz,

describes the region and its peoples as being con-

scripted to modernity.

It is this history, this modern formation, that is

my focus in exploring the emergence of museums in

the region, and specifically in Jamaica. The questions

that arise from the region are how, within museologi-

cal (or anthropological) theory and practice, to

account for a people who, as Scott (2004a:192) puts it

are: “neither properly ‘primitive’ nor ‘civilized’, nei-

ther ‘non-Western’ on the conventional criteria nor

unambiguously ‘Western’ (in short, neither fish nor

fowl)?” How do we understand a region that “never

quite fit[s] securely within any anthropological

agenda. Whereas New Guinea, Africa, Amazonia

offered kinship systems, costumes, coiffures, cuisines,

languages, beliefs, and customs of dizzying variety

and allure,” how might we understand the Caribbean

within anthropological, and, more cogently for my

concerns, museological theory and practice (Scott

2004a)?

Within traditional museological conceptions of

time (often as chronology), space (as belonging), and

history/heritage (as past), how do we account for a

group of peoples whose originary formation is not so

much located in the land of their current negotiations

of identity and belonging but rather within a colonial

formation characterized by forced migration, dis-

juncture, and loss? How might we rethink the object-

based museum or heritage model, where objects act

as sites of memory that connect us to our past, to

account for the “new ethnicities” (Hall 1996) that

now characterize the Caribbean? How, in short, do

we account for a people who, through a specific colo-

nial formation have always been modern?

Nature, Curiosity, and Collecting the

Caribbean

Columbus’s initial encounter with the indige-

nous population—what Europe has described as

discovery—arguably signals the first instance where a

kind of Western museological collecting can be iden-

tified in the Caribbean region (see also Hooper et al.,

this volume, for a discussion of collecting practices in

the Pacific). On encountering a welcoming indige-

nous population on his first voyage, Columbus

returned to Spain with tangible evidence of his dis-

covery, in objects (including samples of the flora and

fauna) and actual Amerindians, as curiosities and as

proof of his discovery of the “West Indies” (Milanich

andMilbrath 1989).

This encounter and return signal two divergent yet

interrelated ideas that were to remain significant not

only to fashioning ideas about the Caribbean—“invent-

ing the region”(see, e.g., Hulme 1992; O’Gorman

1961)—but also to collecting practices within the

region for centuries to come. First, Europeans collected,

harnessed, and ordered (natural) things as they tried

to construct and control (knowledge about) the

natural world. Secondly, such practices included the

collecting of humans, that is (savage) bodies, as

fungible commodities to be classified and exploited.

These ideas were to frame the New World as a place

of the curious and the exotic, where nature abounded

and wild man roamed. Indeed, from the moment of

European contact, the Caribbean has been framed as

a natural space—sometimes as the Garden of Eden

and at other times a torrid zone—within imperial

imagination (Sheller 2003:13).

Numerous scholars have commented on the cen-

trality of these two tropes to imagining the region in

recent years. J. Michael Dash (1998), for example,

comes to a similar conclusion in his discussion of the

literary narratives that he suggests have been impor-

tant to the “invention” of what he calls the “Other

Americas.” Following Hayden White, Dash (1998)

identifies the tropes of “wilderness” and that of the

“noble savage” as discursive frames through which

the region has been created. By inventing faraway

lands of wild nature and savages, Europeans were not

only inventing themselves as dialectically opposite to

tropical man, that is, civilized and cultured, but also

laying claim to the power to domesticate the New

World (see Said 1978; Trouillot 1991). Dash describes

the ways these tropes have worked to structure narra-

tives about the Caribbean as a natural as opposed to a

cultural space:

Whether the prevalent trope is savage wildness

or pristine innocence, the New World is

overwhelmingly the realm of the natural. To

we have always been modern

86

even the most benign commentators, there is no

culture or civilisation worthy of mention.

Europe, on the other hand, is the domain of the

culture, even if that culture is seen as decadent

or repressive. [Dash 1998:28]

It is this image of cultural unworthiness and what

I believe to be its material consequences that is the

focus of this article. Dash’s project is primarily con-

cerned with literary attempts at self-fashioning in the

Caribbean through the works of several of the

region’s leading literary figures such as Glissant and

Cesaire. He makes his case in light of European liter-

ary discourses—from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to

Shakespeare’s Tempest, for example—that have

helped to frame the region as “Other” or “elsewhere.”

For the purposes of this paper, I am more concerned

with the ways that these imaginations of the Carib-

bean helped to structure collecting practices within

the region. What I would like to suggest is that it was

this notion of “tropicalness”—of a space of the natu-

ral and not the cultural—that framed later collecting

practices within the Caribbean. As I have discussed

elsewhere (Modest 2010), at the end of the 19th cen-

tury, when museums and other exhibitionary institu-

tions emerged in the Caribbean, the collections that

developed in local museums as well as those objects

collected and sent to World’s Fairs were overwhelm-

ingly natural objects and presented the island as a

controlled and productive space of nature.

The years following Columbus’s arrival in 1492

saw the inclusion of the West Indies into a broader

European Renaissance project of collecting natural

wonders for both economic gain and as part of map-

ping the entirety of God’s creation.2 Columbus was to

be followed by other voyagers, doctors, naturalists,

and colonists who traveled to the region in search of

wealth and wonders, and collections of nature from

all across the West Indies were taken back to imperial

centers such as France, the Netherlands, and England.

In the Caribbean, the European explorers were to

meet upon “curious” plants and animals, previously

unknown to them, as well as what were at the time

“curious” black bodies of early plantation slavery.

The plants that were collected formed part of both

private and public collections, as botanical and zoo-

logical specimens and as living specimens in botanical

gardens across Europe. Knowledge of these new and

curious plants and their uses was gained in part from

local populations in the region, including the

enslaved population.3 While we may never really

know what happened to Columbus’s “collections” of

humans—the Tainos that accompanied him back to

Spain—or where his collection of fruits and spices are

today, we are aware of other collections in and of the

region.

The collection of Sir Hans Sloane in the years 1687

to 1689 is one of the earliest and arguably the most

significant examples of a Caribbean collection.

Sloane’s collection is illustrative of the ways in which

the West Indies was materially imagined in the 17th

century as a place for the curious and the natural.

Sloane’s association with the Caribbean began in

1686 when he accepted the offer to become the physi-

cian of Christopher Monck, second Duke of Alber-

marle, who had recently been appointed governor of

Jamaica. On December 19, 1687, Sloane landed in

Jamaica. On his return to London, he published two

volumes on the natural history of the region, both of

which emphasized his Jamaican collections. The first,

Catalogus Plantarum, was published in 1696; the sec-

ond, published in 1707 (and expanded in 1725), was

entitled Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados,

Nieves, S. Christopher and Jamaica, with the Natural

History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-Footed Beasts,

Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles etc. of the Last of Those

Islands. With the second publication, Sloane hoped

that it served to “teach the Inhabitants of the Parts

where these Plants grow, their several Uses, which I

have endeavour’d to do, by the best Informations I

can get from Books, and the Inhabitants, either Euro-

peans, Indians or Blacks” (MacGregor 1994:16). By

the time of his departure from Jamaica, his “plant col-

lection” alone amounted to 800 specimens, “most of

which were new” (MacGregor 1994:13), along with

other objects of humanity, vertebrates, insects, and

botany.

Describing Sloane’s “Voyage to the West Indies,”

Gavin de Beer, former director of the British

Museum, writes:

The story of Sloane’s journey to Jamaica may

well be left for him to tell in his own words, by

means of extracts from his book. They have the

freshness that would be expected in a narrative

of one of the earlier Englishmen to undertake a


87

naturalist voyage to distant parts by sea, thereby

setting a tradition which, including as it does

the voyages of Sir Joseph Banks, Robert Brown,

Darwin, Huxley, Hooker, Mosely and many

others, has been one of the prides of British

Science. [1953:32, emphasis added]

Here, de Beer locates Sloane’s travels within the

context of a broader European tradition of collecting

and knowing nature as Europeans moved “farther

into the knowledge of her [Nature] ways and

workeings” (quoted in de Beer 1980:128).4 According

to Mimi Sheller, “by his scientific method of careful

observation, collection, and exhaustive recording,

Sloane furthered the incorporation of the NewWorld

into the material network of European knowledge-

production” (2003:17).

By the time Sloane reached the Caribbean, he

was preceded by other travelers concerned with the

region’s flora and fauna such as Gonzalo Fernandez

de Oviedo y Valde, who traveled to Santo Domin-

go in 1514 and wrote La Natural Hystoria de las

Indias, which was first published in 1526. Sloane’s

voyage, however, could be seen as different from

that of earlier travelers. His formal training as a

physician and scientist allowed him a more system-

atic approach to collecting in the region as com-

pared with earlier collectors. This, of course, also

coincided with developments in natural history

away from its “folkloric” past of the early Renais-

sance period to its initial systematization in the

early 17th century (see Jardine et al. 1996). Like

many of the other European travelers, physicians,

and naturalists, Sir Hans Sloane was, however, also

interested to extend his knowledge of the curative

powers that nature offered as a way of tapping into

the significant economic potential that they repre-

sented. We know, for example, that Sloane made

“a considerable amount of money from the pro-

motion of milk chocolate,” recommended as a

drink “For its lightness on the Stomach & its Great

use in all Consumption Cases” (MacGregor

1994:15). Other scholars, such as Londa Schiebin-

ger (2004:119–134), have also pointed out the

growing importance of the West Indies in the 16th

through the 18th centuries to what she has called

“colonial bioprospecting” and the ways in which

colonial powers vied for different lands, not only

to annex territories for their imperial booty but

also for the economic potential of the natural

products available in these new territories. To own

the territory where these new species of plants were

being found also meant the ownership of the cura-

tive agents that these plants produced.

I am, however, not so much concerned with

Sloane’s intent. What interests me here are the ways

in which his collections, in their proportional weight-

ing on nature, signal what was regarded as collectable

from the region and therefore presented a material

view of the Caribbean as a space of nature, especially

within the context of his museum in Europe. That is,

these objects, presented through Sloane’s publica-

tions, his museum—established on his return to

England—and later through his bequest to the British

Museum, delimited the ways in which the Caribbean

was to be understood as a realm of nature (and not

culture) in the metropolitan imagination. In fact, of

Sloane’s entire collection of objects from Latin Amer-

ica and the West Indies, those objects that may be

regarded as ethnographic numbered less than one

hundred, many of which he acquired from collections

from other dealers and collectors after his return to

England (King 1994). Of those, only about ten and

definitely fewer than twenty objects could be identi-

fied as being from Jamaica. Sloane’s collections of

Jamaican natural objects, then, comprised over 99

percent of his Jamaican collections.

Among the ten or so items of Jamaican ethnogra-

phy in Sloane’s collections were several items associ-

ated with slavery in Jamaica. These were “‘a barbary

Scourge with which the slaves are beaten made [from]

a palm tree’; a ‘noose made of cane splitt for catching

game or hanging runaway negros’; a ‘bullet used by

the runaway Negroes in Jamaica’; a ‘coat of the run-

away rebellious negroes who lived in the woods of the

island’; and [a] manatee strap ‘for whipping the

Negro Slaves in the Hott W. Indies plantations’”

(Delbourgo 2007:2). Also included in his collections

were human curios, such as “‘the foetus of a negro’”

and several specimens that related to skin color such

as “‘the skin of the arm of a black’ and ‘the skin of a

negro wt. the black corpus mucosum partly taken off

from the true skin and partly sticking to it’” (Del-

bourgo 2007:11). These objects, although significant,

must have been almost invisible in comparison to the

numerous flora and fauna specimens from the island


88

in the collection and most likely on show in his

museum. We also know that some of these items,

such as the slave whip, were not actually on show in

Sloane’s museum but in another museum in London

(Delbourgo 2007).

Located in Sloane’s museum in London in the

early 18th century, this collection from Jamaica pre-

sented a view that what was collectable from the

island was its nature. And, if Sloane’s museum did

not sufficiently suggest this idea that the Caribbean

was a place of nature, then his publication surely

would have confirmed this for his readers. As Kriz

(2000) writes, of the almost three hundred images

presented in Sloane’s Natural History of Jamaica

only 14 slides do not deal specifically with plant

and animals and even within these 14 some still

include aspects of natural history. She also points

out the importance of the visuality of the images

and the multiple audiences that Sloane addressed—in text, image, and different languages—in reinforc-

ing ideas about the region.5

What I am suggesting here is that both these

modes of representing the region to a British public

—through his museum and his publication—espe-

cially in light of the significant bias toward nature in

his Caribbean collections, served to convince his

viewers that the region was dominated by nature

with little else. In this regard, Sloane continued

within a trope established by Columbus’s earlier

encounter with the New World. At the same time,

his collections of natural specimens, both as artifacts

of knowing and for their economic value, foreshad-

owed later collecting practices within the Caribbean.

Sloane was to be followed by several others, includ-

ing important naturalists and physicians, such as

Patrick Browne who published The Civil and Natu-

ral History of Jamaica in 1756. It is from these tradi-

tions of accumulating curious plants, animals, and

bodies that the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ), like other

museums in places such as Barbados and Guyana,

was to inherit its collecting practices in the late 19th

century.

Collecting the Dead

But nature was not the only thing that was collectible

from the region. If we agree with Hayden White

(1985) that the noble savage trope helped to structure

imaginations of the tropics, by the time Hans Sloane

visited the region in the 17th century, the “original”

noble savages of the Caribbean had all but disap-

peared. For Jamaica, the original inhabitants, the Tainos,

had already been decimated through forced labor

under the Spanish and by new diseases brought by

both the Spanish and later Africans transported

across the trans-Atlantic to replace the dwindling

Taino laboring population. The fact of their decima-

tion, however, did not preclude a sustained interest in

the Tainos for centuries; nor did it prevent the

deployment of the idea of noble savage—childlike

and feminine—to describe native populations of the

Caribbean, including the later African populations of

the region (Edmondson 1999:21).

While the deployment of the noble savage trope to

frame the Caribbean may be explored with various

objectives in mind, I am again interested in the mate-

rial consequences of these tropes—in particular, the

ways in which Columbus’s early collections of Amer-

indians can be seen to prefigure later museological

interest in collecting objects related to the presumed

“disappearing” or already extinct Amerindians of the

Caribbean by and for Western museums and the IOJ

itself. That is, an interest in the ancient peoples of the

region and not the modern (see also Scott, Reflec-

tions, this volume).

By the time the English wrenched the island of

Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, the indigenous

Tainos had all but disappeared, having been deci-

mated, and the Spanish had started to enslave Afri-

cans to replace the depleted native labor force. The

Tainos soon developed into an antiquarian interest

and several important examples of Taino artifacts

became part of European collections, both private

and public, between the 15th and the 18th centuries.

In fact, tucked away within Hans Sloane’s folio of

images of Natural History of Jamaica, reflecting

objects from his collections, are the images of two

ceramic shards, described as “earthenware urns or

pots, discovered in a cave containing the bones of

an ‘Indian’ who previously dwelled in Jamaica”

(Kriz 2000:50).6 Three shards were part of Sloane’s

accessioned collections (King 1994:235). Another

notable example of Amerindian objects from

Jamaica that attracted earlier antiquarian interest

are the three Taino woodcarvings found in the Car-

penter’s Mountain in 1792 and removed to England

to be exhibited first at the meeting of the Society of


89

Antiquaries in 1799. These sculptures were later

transferred to the British Museum’s collection. In

the society’s publication of that year, these objects

were mentioned:

Isaac Alves Rebello, Esq. F.A.S. exhibited to the

Society Three Figures, supposed to be Indian

Deities, in wood . . . found in June 1792, in a

natural cave near the summit of a mountain,

called Spots, in Carphenter’s Mountain, in the

parish of Vere, in the island of Jamaica, by a sur-

veyor in meaning the land. They were discov-

ered placed with their faces (one of which is that

of a bird) towards the east. [Notice 1803:269]

These are arguably the most well-known Jamaican

artifacts collected during the colonial period and

within a major museum in Europe. Similar artifacts,

however, exist within other collections in Europe and

the United States. More commonly found within

British and other European and American collections

are Amerindian sculpted stone figures and relatively

large numbers of Amerindian stone and shell tools

and pottery shards.

In 2009, I conducted a brief survey of those United

Kingdom museums with major ethnography collec-

tions to see what constituted their Caribbean collec-

tions. This included web searches of museum

collections as well as interviews with curators about

their Caribbean collections. In some instances, cura-

tors sent me listings of the collections. In all cases,

Caribbean collections were very small. This was espe-

cially surprising in light of the large Caribbean popu-

lations in Britain and the heavy emphasis on

community-driven programs in British museums.

One museum curator I spoke with could name all the

objects in the collections without consulting any cata-

logue or database, as their holding was fewer than ten

artifacts.

Unsurprisingly, however, Caribbean collections

within British museums were overwhelmingly drawn

from the region’s indigenous past and little else.

When compared with large collections from other

regions, this suggests that the Caribbean had nothing

of anthropological interest outside of the Amerindi-

ans. One striking example of a comparably large col-

lection of what could be described as ethnographic

objects from the Caribbean in Britain is that of the

Kew Gardens. These objects, though “ethnographic”

in nature are also all “natural” objects, which coin-

cides with Kew’s interest in economic botany.

Although the three Taino sculptures mentioned

earlier arrived at the British Museum relatively early,

at that time there was only sporadic interest in the

material culture of the Tainos of Jamaica. Cultural

objects would have been collected as accidental finds

during land survey projects, for example. In Jamaica,

it was not until late in the 19th century that a

sustained interest in these collections, which were

initially primarily associated with the IOJ, developed.

According to Robert Howard,

Archaeological research, in the fullest sense of

the term, was not initiated in Jamaica until the

last decade of the 19th century. The two most

important pioneers in this field were J. E. Duerden

and Frank Cundall, both of the staff of the Insti-

tute of Jamaica in Kingston. Neither was a

professional archaeologist but both were schol-

ars of catholic interests and accomplishments.7

[1956:45]

This focus on the Taino within the institute is of

particular interest for me here on several levels. First,

this interest coincided with more systematic study of

anthropological material within museums and the

emergence of what has been described as “salvage

anthropology” associated with the noble savage.

Second, Taino artifacts comprised the major part of

the anthropological/archaeological collections of

the IOJ and were a major area of interest of the

institution’s curator in the late 19th and early 20th

centuries.8 The only collections that were larger than

the Taino collections were the flora and fauna

collections, which, as I have discussed before, were

significantly larger, and later the objects of the

portrait gallery. Third, this interest in the Taino over-

shadowed any interest in the material culture of black

Jamaicans, both within the local collection of the IOJ

and the collections of museums within imperial

centers such as the British Museum. What I am sug-

gesting here is that these three trends produced a way

of viewing the Caribbean—understood as a place of

nature and a noble savage that was already dead.

These trends evidence the ambiguity that Caribbean

blacks presented to early museum practice as they

neither fit within the natural history of mankind—that

is, anthropology—nor the history of Jamaica. Black


90

Jamaicans were neither primitive enough—like the

Tainos—to be part of anthropology nor civilized

enough to be a part of history.

Exploring the ways in which the IOJ museum con-

tributed to the “Writing West Indian Histories,”

Barry Higman writes,

the objects connected to the Arawaks [Tainos],

the original Indian inhabitants, are mostly con-

fined to stone implements and a limited amount

of pottery, etc., mostly from the numerous

kitchen middens which have been opened in the

Island. . . . On the other hand the artifacts of the

African majority were almost completely

ignored. [1999:71]

Although Higman makes a convincing compari-

son, this extract does not fully explain the extent of

the interest in collecting Taino (Arawak) material in

the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example,

issue four of the second volume of the Journal of the

Institute of Jamaica, published in 1892, was dedicated

to the “Aboriginal Indian Remains in Jamaica” and

more closely reflects the research interest in the Tai-

nos. This article was written by J. E. Duerden, a pale-

ontologist and curator for the institute at the time.9

Although some of the collections that were dis-

cussed and illustrated in this article were owned by

the museum of the institute, the majority of the

artifacts were part of the collection of Lady Edith

Blake, wife to the colonial governor of Jamaica.10

The IOJ later acquired more of its own Amerindian

collections. Lady Blake’s collection was on show in

an exhibition at the IOJ in 1895 but was later sold

to the Museum of American Indians in New York

(Howard 1956).

Howard (1956) argues that this early interest dem-

onstrated by the IOJ did not spawn ongoing interest

in more archaeology on the island. However, when

viewed together with other objects collected by the

institute, a different picture appears. In fact, this

emphasis on Taino archaeology overshadowed other

collecting interests. Howard (1956) himself shows

that between the 1890s and the first two decades of

the 20th century there were several excavations of

Amerindian sites across Jamaica: MacCormack, 1895

(the objects of this excavation are in the National

Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.);

Brennan, 1900; Miller, 1931; Reichard and Bastian,

1904 (this collection is in the Ethnology Museum in

Berlin); de Booy, 1913 (these objects were also given

to the Museum of American Indians in New York);

and Longley, 1914 (these collections are in the Ameri-

can Museum of Natural History in New York). The

institute resumed its own interest in the Tainos in the

1940s with the work of its curator, C. B. Lewis (Alls-

worth-Jones 2008; Howard 1956). These were not

extensive excavations or collections, but they demon-

strated an interest in the material culture of Jamaica’s

Amerindians that started with the IOJ at the end of

the 19th century. Several of these excavations were

published in important journals such as American

Anthropologist and Man. The IOJ also had institu-

tional contacts with several of the museums to which

these objects were sent. At this time in the IOJ, there

was no similar interest in collecting objects related

to the black population and material culture of the

black population was excluded from the institute’s

collections.

The Absence of Bounty

By the time the institute was established in 1879,

the natural history museums of Europe and North

America were still the home for anthropology col-

lections. As Conn has written, “Throughout most

of the nineteenth century, the study and presenta-

tion of other cultures occupied one branch of natu-

ral history” (1998:79). As the end of the 19th

century drew closer, however, anthropology took

on even greater significance and there were advo-

cates for the establishment of museums dedicated

to collections of what was described as a “natural

history of mankind”—anthropology—as distinct

from natural history museums. These anthropology

collections were being amassed and exhibited at

World’s Fairs and later retained by museums. In

some instances, World’s Fairs were seen as a vehicle

through which objects of anthropology could be

accumulated and later these collections were used

to establish museums. The Field Museum of Chi-

cago, for example, was developed from the objects

collected at the Columbian World’s Fair of 1893

(Conn 1998; Nash and Feinman 2003). Collections

were, however, also acquired through the field col-

lections done by early anthropologists and by,

among others, colonial agents and officials based in

the far regions across the world where purportedly


91

primitive peoples still existed. I have written else-

where that the IOJ collections, like other collections

in museums across the Caribbean, may be seen to

follow very loosely this model (Modest 2010). The

IOJ’s collections were indeed shared among archae-

ology, art, and natural history in the form of plant

and animal specimens and a small collection of mis-

cellaneous historical items. Moreover, collecting for

World’s Fairs was also seen as a way of building on

local collections (Cummins 1994).

As anthropology grew into its own field in the late

19th century, many of its chief proponents saw their

museums as fulfilling an urgent role to collect and

catalogue the cultures of many “races of peoples” that

they believed were fast disappearing. Equally, these

museums were important places to catalogue what

was regarded as primitive technologies or cultural

practices that were believed to be under threat of

rapid and irredeemable change as a result of Euro-

pean contact. These trends have been termed “salvage

anthropology” (Conn 1998; Penny 2002). The objects

and peoples from native North America, the Pacific,

and Asia were collected, placed on display, and stud-

ied in World’s Fairs and “saved” by and in museums

in Europe and the United States.

While black Africans were of some anthropologi-

cal interest, blacks from the Caribbean and the Uni-

ted States did not fit into either of the salvageable

categories of a dying race or having a culture that

was disappearing due to European contact.11 New

World blacks, it was thought, were already

tainted by European contact and its civilizing

forces and therefore seen to lack practices of cul-

tural significance—and related objects—worthy of

anthropological interest.

The history of black Africans on display at World’s

Fairs is well documented, from Saartje Baartman in

the early 19th century to African villages at the Paris

Universielle Exposition in 1878 to the Columbian

World’s Fair of 1893 and beyond (Corbey 1993;

Rydell 1987; Strothers 1999). However, not all

“Negroes” were Africans. Douglas Lorimer (1978)

has written of the many-sided nature of English atti-

tudes toward “Negroes,” which fluctuated through-

out the 17th to 19th centuries between ethnocentric

xenophobia and racism in response to different

events within the empire. According to Lorimer, “In

these Victorian perceptions, the significant attributes

of the Negro were not physical, but rather the social

and cultural traits derived from the associations of

Blacks with the status of American slaves, West

Indian plantation labourers, and African ‘savages’”

(1978:15).

For Lorimer (1978), while within Victorian society

a global category of “Negroes” existed, who were

believed to be inferior to whites, internal distinctions

could be identified between the African and the West

Indian Negro. Although I find Lorimer’s case

somewhat hopeful at times in trying to recover white

Britain from some of the racial prejudice that was part

of mid- to late-Victorian England, his claim is well

made. In mid-Victorian Britain, notions of the primi-

tive were much more easily applied to black Africans

than blacks from the West Indian colonies. Of course

this was not always the case. Indeed, distinctions

based on hierarchy also complicated the issue within

Africa. Yet, colonization, seen as a project to civilize

the colonized, had, to all intents and purposes, partly

achieved its purpose and placed blacks in the Carib-

bean colonies on a progressive ladder of improve-

ment. The progressive ladder could be viewed as a

move from savage Africa to slave, from slave to sub-

jects of the crown, and from there—only with further

improvement—to citizens. This improvement, it was

believed, resulted from the benevolence of colonial-

ism. The exhibitionary or material consequence of

this progression was that blacks from the Caribbean

and their objects possessed no salvageable qualities

for early anthropology. This would impact both the

representation of blacks from the Caribbean in

World’s Fairs and the objects collected that repre-

sented black culture.

Tony Bennett (1995) alludes to this hierarchy of

collectability when he speaks of the progressive taxo-

nomies of nations and peoples that the institutions of

the exhibitionary complex were to enshrine. Bennett

writes:

Subject peoples were thus represented as occu-

pying the lowest level of manufacturing civilisa-

tion and represented through the display of

primitive handicraft. . . . In brief a progressivist

taxonomy for the classification of goods and

manufacturing processes was laminated on to a

crudely racist teleological conception of the

relations between peoples and races which


92

culminated in the achievements of the metro-

politan powers, invariably most impressively

displayed in the pavilions of the host cultures.

[1995:82]

The general premise of Bennett’s claims also holds

true for the participation of Caribbean colonies at

“Great Exhibitions.” The Caribbean was represented

under the broad category of “Colony” or “West

Indian Colony” and hence subsumed under the

imperial frame and denied a category of its own.

Moreover, the collections of the Caribbean were

thought to occupy a lower rung of a progressive lad-

der of peoples and nations when compared with the

host cultures. Yet the Caribbean did not fit so easily

into Bennett’s taxonomy on two important levels.

First, while Caribbean blacks were seen as less civi-

lized when compared to peoples from the host cul-

tures, many of the products of their labor—sugar,

molasses, rum, et cetera—were the products of a

modern industrial enterprise that the plantation col-

ony provided. These goods, while they may have been

seen as less refined than metropolitan goods, could

not be viewed as primitive. Moreover, Caribbean

blacks, because of their colonization, could be seen to

be “more civilized” than some of their African

counterparts, for example. These factors made blacks

from the Caribbean an anomaly for exhibitionary

institutions and an especially ambiguous category for

museums.

It is this anomaly—ambiguity—namely, in the

position that Caribbean blacks held, that I suggest

made them not of anthropological interest. They were

not cultural enough. At the same time, natural objects

from the region were being collected and sent across

the empire. These were collected along with objects

from the already extinct Tainos.

Conclusion

In this article, I have discussed the historical and

perhaps ongoing framing of the Caribbean as a

place of nature and not culture and therefore a

space that falls outside of (material) anthropological

interest. New World blacks were neither ancient

enough nor modern enough as a people whose his-

tory and culture could be collected and celebrated

by museums. The only exception to this collecting

and display trend was the interest in the material

culture of the extinct or near extinct Amerindian

populations of the region, who could be easily

framed within a trope of the noble savage, the natu-

ral man, who was pure and ancient when they were

decimated and hence could yield some knowledge

for early anthropology.

Additional research is necessary to determine

whether the dynamics of collecting discussed in this

article might extend beyond Jamaica and the Carib-

bean. Could the historically shaped collecting biases

outlined here also have been at work in other regions

with displaced, “imported,” or immigrant popula-

tions considered neither modern nor ancient

enough? For instance, ethnographic collecting in

Indonesia has tended to neglect the material culture

of the large Chinese-descent population that has

resided there for centuries (see Adams 2001). A more

careful consideration of these gaps, occlusions, and

partialities in historical and contemporary collecting

could nuance museums’ presentations of “indige-

nous” histories.

Imaginative geographies that position the Carib-

bean as a space of nature rather than of culture con-

tinue to circulate globally, for instance in the tourism

imaginaries that continue to draw European and

North American visitors. Despite the limitations of

the collections they have inherited, museums can play

an important role—through exhibitions, research,

and contemporary collecting practices—in interro-

gating and challenging the dominant modes of fram-

ing regions such as the Caribbean.

notes

1. Whereas this article focuses primarily on collections in the

Caribbean and Europe, I suggest that North American col-

lections may be characterized similarly.

2. I refer here to the Renaissance collecting of natural his-

tory, characterized by the folkloric, mythical, and emblem-

atic ideals (see Ashworth 1996; Farago 1995).

3. For a discussion of the importance of local knowledge to

the collecting of nature in the Americas see Parrish

(2006).

4. Joseph Banks, for example, accompanied Captain Cook on

his first voyage between 1768 and 1771, and traveled to,

among other places, Brazil, Tahiti, and New Zealand;

Robert Brown was a botanist who accompanied Matthew

Flinders on his voyage to New Holland (Terra Australia) in

1801, while Darwin went to the Galapagos Islands.


93

5. By visuality I mean a system of visual meaning created not

just through the use of images but through the bringing

together of images with other elements such as text and

other graphic elements.

6. These are among the few ethnographic objects collected

by Sloane along with objects related to slave punishment.

Kriz (2000:50) mentions the fact that Sloane’s text goes

further to point out the “Negroes had remov’d most of

these Pots to cook their meat in,” a strategy which I believe

serves to invoke ideas of black savagery in readers.

7. Alissandra Cummins (1994) identifies the beginnings of

archaeological research in the region in 1900 with a

research trip by the Smithsonian to the Caribbean. How-

ever, this earlier date is more important for my concerns.

8. I use archaeology and anthropology interchangeably here

to mark an interest in the cultural as opposed to natural.

While these disciplines could be seen as different in the

late 19th century, the basis of distinction is not big enough

to negate my use. Additionally, one newspaper source

suggests that the institute’s exhibition of the Amerindian

material in the 1890s was in fact an attempt to redress a

lack of emphasis on the study of culture in the region,

especially in relation to the Jamaican exhibits at the

Columbian World’s Fair of 1893 (see Neely 2008: 84).

9. Interestingly, this issue of the journal also included “a

Note on the craniology of the Aborigines of Jamaica” by

eminent British anthropologist A. C. Haddon. J. E. Duer-

den’s (1869–1930) tenure at the IOJ was short lived due to

complaints that he did not spend sufficient time doing the

job of curator. Duerden also served as island zoologist.

After giving up the job, Duerden moved to the UK and later

worked at Rhodes University in South Africa.

10. This interest by the wife of the colonial governor is also

instructive of the kind of lay interest in Taino archaeology

at the time.

11. Rydell (1987) discusses blacks in the United States at

the World’s Fairs. While some similarity exists between

the ways they were viewed when compared to blacks in

the West Indian colonies, there were some differences.

This, however, resulted from the very different system of

emancipation that existed in the United States, where a

system of violent segregation was in place well into the

20th century. The work of scholars such as Melville Her-

skovits and his followers serves to support my point that

interest in the anthropology or materiality of black life

was very low if not nonexistent in the late 20th century.

Similarly, my earlier reference to early anthropological

interest in the Maroons that resulted from the ways in

which they were and are imagined as Africans also sup-

ports my point here.

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we have always been modern: museums, collections, and modernity in the caribbean

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