Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1991), pp. 386-443. Please consult published version for notes and citations. ================================================================= Objects of Ethnography Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Moon rocks, a few small strips of meat dried Hidatsa style before 1918, dust from Jerusalem, "a knot tied by the wind in a storm at sea," bottle caps filled with melted crayon made for skelley, a New York City street game, "a drop of the Virgin's milk," pieces of the dismantled Berlin Wall. Each object is shown to the public eye, protected and enshrined. Were the criteria of "visual interest" to determine what should be exhibited, such rocks, bits of meat, knots, dust, wire, and toys, if saved at all, would await attention of another kind--perhaps by microscope, telescope, laboratory test, nutritional analysis, written description, diagram, or report of miracles. Why save, let alone display, things that are of little visual interest? Why ask the museum visitor to look closely at something whose value lies somewhere other than in its appearance? To suggest that objects lacking visual interest might be of historical or cultural or religious or scientific interest, while it seems to offer an answer, actually compounds the problem because it leaves unexplored several fundamental assumptions, first among them the notion of artifactual autonomy. It is precisely this autonomy that makes it possible to display objects in and of themselves, even when there is little to inspect with the eye. Ethnographic artifacts are objects of ethnography. They are artifacts created by ethnographers. Such objects become ethnographic by virtue of being defined, segmented, detached, and carried away by ethnographers. Such objects are ethnographic, not because they were found in a Hungarian peasant household, Kwakiutl village, or Rajistani market rather than in Buckingham Palace or Michelangelo's studio, but by virtue of the manner in which they have been detached, for disciplines make their objects and in the process make themselves. It is one thing however when ethnography is inscribed in books or displayed behind glass, at a remove in space, time, and language from the site described. It is quite another when people are themselves the medium of ethnographic representation, when they perform themselves, whether at home to tourists or at world's fairs, homelands entertainments, or folklife festivals--when they become living signs of themselves. Exhibiting the Fragment The artfulness of the ethnographic object is an art of excision, of detachment, an art of the excerpt. Where does the object begin and where does it end? This I see as an essentially surgical issue. Shall we exhibit the cup with the saucer, the tea, the cream and sugar, the spoon, napkin and placemat, the table and chair, the rug? Where do we stop? Where do we make the cut? Perhaps we should speak not of the ethnographic object but of the ethnographic fragment. Like the ruin, the ethnographic fragment is informed by a poetics of detachment. Detachment refers not only to the physical act of producing fragments, but also to the detached attitude that makes that fragmentation and its appreciation possible. Lovers of ruins in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England understood the distinctive pleasure afforded by architectural fragments, once enough time had passed for a detached attitude to form. Antiquarian John Aubrey valued the ruin as much as he did the earlier intact structure. Ruins inspired the feelings of melancholy and wonder associated with the sublime. They stimulated the viewer to imagine the building in its former pristine state. They offered the pleasure of longing for the irretrievable object of one's fantasy. Nor were ruins left to accidental formation. Aesthetic principles guided the selective demolition of ruins, and where a ruin was lacking, the building of artificial ones. Restoration may be resisted in cases where the power of the ruin is its capacity to signify the destructive circumstances of its creation--the skeleton of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima does just this. In the case of Ellis Island Restoration, a fragment of the ruin is exhibited as such, in a vitrine, as part of the story of the site. A history of the poetics of the fragment is yet to be written, for fragments are not simply a necessity of which we make a virtue, a vicissitude of history or a response to limitations on our ability to bring the world indoors. We make fragments. In Situ In considering the problem of the ethnographic object, it is useful to distinguish in situ from in context, a pair of terms that calls into question the nature of the whole, the burden of interpretation, and the location of meaning. The notion of in situ entails metonymy and mimesis: the object is a part that stands in a contiguous relation to an absent whole that may or may not be recreated. The art of the metonym is an art that accepts the inherently fragmentary nature of the object. Showing it in all its partiality enhances the aura of its 'realness.' The danger, of course, is that museums amass collections and are, in a sense, condemned ever after to exhibit them. Collection-driven exhibitions often suffer from ethnographic atrophy because they tend to focus on what could be, and was, physically detached and carried away. As a result, what you've got is what you show. Very often what is shown is the collection, whether highlights, masterpieces, or a collection in its entirety. The tendency increases for such objects to be presented as art. The art of mimesis, whether in the form of period rooms, ethnographic villages, recreated environments, reenacted rituals, or photomurals, places objects (or replicas of them) in situ. In situ approaches to installation enlarge the ethnographic object by expanding its boundaries to include more of what was left behind, even if only in replica, after the object was excised from its physical, social, and cultural settings. Because the metonymic nature of ethnographic objects invites mimetic evocations of what was left behind, in situ approaches to installation tend towards environmental and recreative displays. Such displays, which tend towards the monographic, appeal to those who argue that cultures are coherent wholes in their own right, that environment plays a significant role in cultural formation, and that displays should present process and not just products. At their most mimetic, in situ installations include live persons, preferably actual representatives of the cultures on display. In-situ installations, no matter how mimetic, are not neutral. They are not a slice of life lifted from the everyday world and inserted into the museum gallery, though this is the rhetoric of the mimetic mode. On the contrary, those who construct the display also constitute the subject, even when they seem to do nothing more than relocate an entire house and its contents, brick by brick, board by board, chair by chair. Just as the ethnographic object is the creation of the ethnographer, so too are the putative cultural wholes of which they are part. The exhibition may reconstruct Kwakiutl life as the ethnographer envisions it before contact with Europeans, or Polish peasant interiors, region by region, as they are thought to have existed before industrialization. Or, the display may project a utopian national whole that harmoniously integrates regional diversity, a favorite theme of national ethnographic museums and American pageants of democracy during the first decades of this century. "Wholes" are not given, but constituted, and often they are hotly contested. Representational conventions guide mimetic displays, despite the illusion of close fit, if not identity, between the representation and that which is represented. Indeed, mimetic displays may be so dazzling in their realistic effects as to subvert curatorial efforts to focus the viewer's attention on particular ideas or objects. There is the danger that theatrical spectacle will displace scientific seriousness, that the artifice of the installation will overwhelm ethnographic artifact and curatorial intention. In Context The notion of in context, which poses the interpretive problem of theoretical frame of reference, uses particular techniques of arrangement and explanation to convey ideas. The notion expressed in a 1911 history of the British Museum that "the multifarious objects in the Ethnographical Gallery represent so many starting-points in the world's civilization" places those objects in context, not in situ. That context is signalled by the title of the chapter devoted to the Ethnographical Gallery-- "Civilization in the Making." Objects are set in context by means of long labels, charts, and diagrams, commentary delivered via earphones, explanatory audio-visual programs, docents conducting tours, booklets and catalogues, educational programs, lectures and performances. Objects are also set in context by means of other objects, often in relation to a classification or schematic arrangement of some kind, based on typologies of form or proposed historical relationships. In context appoaches to installation establish a theoretical frame of reference for the viewer, offer explanations, provide historical background, make comparisons, pose questions, and sometimes even extend to the circumstances of excavation, collection, and conservation of the objects on display. There are as many contexts for an object as there are interpretive strategies. In-context approaches exert strong cognitive control over the objects, asserting the power of classification and arrangement to order large numbers of artifacts from diverse cultural and historical settings and to position them in relation to one another. Plants and animals arranged according to the Linnean classification affirmed the goodness of the Divine plan in Charles Willson Peale's museum in Philadelphia during the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. A.H.L.F. Pitt Rivers, preferred to arrange his series of weapons according to formal criteria, from the simplest to the most complex, to tell the story of man's inexorable evolution through stages of racial and cultural development. Even when the objects themselves are not arranged according to such conceptual schemes, but according to geographic area, the viewer may be encouraged to "frame for himself a few general principles for which he can seek out specimens." Whether they guide the physical arrangement of objects or structure the way viewers look at otherwise amorphous accumulations, exhibition classifications create serious interest where it might be lacking. "Than the Ethnographical Gallery in the British Museum there is no department the educational significance of which is so likely to be unappreciated," writes Henry C. Shelley in 1911, adding that visitors are inclined to indulge in laughter and jokes when confronted with "objects illustrating the manners and customs of what are known as the savage races." For instruction to redeem amusement, viewers needed principles for looking. They required a context, or framework, for transforming otherwise grotesque, rude, strange, and vulgar artifacts into object lessons. Having been saved from oblivion, the ethnographic fragment now needed to be rescued from triviality. One way of doing this was to treat the specimen as a document. Rescuing the Fragment from Triviality The problematic relationship of in situ and in context, which are by no means mutually exclusive approaches, is signalled by Oleg Grabar in his comment about Islamic objects: "they are in fact to be seen as ethnographic documents, closely tied to life, even a reconstructed life, and more meaningful in large numbers and series than as single creations." Such objects, in Grabar's view, are inherently multiple, documentary, and contingent. They were never intended to hold up to scrutiny as singular creations. Moreover, they are at their most documentary when presented in their multiplicity, that is, as a collection. Grabar diffuses their status as artifacts by according them higher value as "documents," as signs that point away from themselves to something else, to "life." At the same time, he hyperbolizes their status as artifacts by advocating that they be examined in "large numbers and series," a task anticipated and facilitated by the collecting process itself and well suited to typological exhibition arrangements. Though once multiple, many ethnographic objects become singular, and the more singular they become, the more readily are they reclassified and exhibited as art. The many become one by virtue of the collection process itself. First, collecting induces rarity by creating scarcity: escalating demand reduces the availability of objects. Second, collectors create categories that from the outset, even before there is demand, are marked by the challenges they pose to acquisition: "By creating their own categories, all collectors create their own rarities." Third, the very ubiquity of the kinds of objects that interest ethnographers contributes to their emphemerality. Commonplace things are worn to oblivion and replaced with new objects, or are viewed as too trivial in their own time to be removed from circulation, to be alienated from their practical and social purposes, and saved for posterity. But no matter how singular the ethnographic object becomes, it retains its contingency, even when, by a process of radical detachment, it is reclassified and exhibited as art. Indeed, the litmus test of art seems to be whether or not an object can be stripped of contingency and still hold up. The universalizing rhetoric of "art," the insistence that great works are universal, that they transcend space and time, is predicated on the irrelevance of contingency. But the ability to stand alone says less about the nature of the object and more about our categories and attitudes, which may account for the minimalist installation style of exhibitions of "primitive art." By suppressing contingency and presenting the objects on their own, such installations lay claims to the universality of the exhibited objects as works of art. Ethnographic objects move from curio to specimen to art, though not necessarily in that order. As curiosities, objects are anomalous. By definition, they defy classification. Nineteenth- century advocates of scientific approaches to museum exhibition complained repeatedly about collections of curiosities that were displayed without systematic arrangement. But how could exhibitors be expected to systematically arrange what in their terms was the unclassifiable? In what category might one exhibit the knot tied by the wind during a storm at sea that was donated to Peale's Museum at the end of the eighteenth century? Probably indistinguishable in appearance from a knot tied by human hands on land during calm weather, this object was an episode in an amazing story waiting to be retold rather than a member of a class of objects relevant to scientific taxonomies of the period. What we see here are objects that had outlasted the curatorial classifications that once accomodated them in Renaissance cabinets and galleries. Singularities, chance formations that resulted from the "shuffle of things," did fall into a broad category, namely mirabilia. Defined in terms of that which is not normal or commonplace, this category included the very large and the very small, the misshapen and the miraculous, and the historically unique--for example, a hat with bullet holes associated with a specific historic event. By the nineteenth century, such objects were anomalous to natural historians interested in taxonomies of the normal, not the singularities of chance formation, though figures such as Joseph Dorfeuille continued to make teratology a major attraction in their museums. Exhibition classifications, whether Linnean or evolutionary, shift the grounds of singularity from the object to a category within a particular taxonomy. For a curiosity to become classifiable it had to qualify as a representative member of a distinguishable class of objects. Peale, for example, was reluctant to show items that fell outside of the Linnean classification according to which he arranged objects in his museum in Philadelphia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His exhibits of plants and animals were normative: they featured typical members of each class. The comprehensiveness of the classification and orderly arrangement of Peale's collection testified to the purposiveness and goodness of God's creation, a message that was reinforced by quotations from the Bible mounted on the walls. With his fine American specimens, Peale intended to refute Buffon's view that New World species were inferior to those of Europe. A mark of the seriousness and scientific nature of such exhibitions was the absence of freakish aberrations. In contrast, the exhibit for the International Eugenics Conference at the American Museum of Natural History in 1932 subjected to orderly arrangement the very anomalies (trembling guinea pigs, triplets, picture drawn by a color blind man, deformed eye-balls) that a century earlier would have appeared as curiosities defying classification. The structure of genetic inheritance now provided the matrix for the orderly display of nature's mistakes, long an attraction in cabinets and freak shows, as well as the basis for eliminating such errors in the future--sterilization, anti-miscegenation laws, selective mating. A logical outgrowth of the exhibition of racial types and the evolution of mankind, such eugenics exhibitions offered total classifications that included the visitors themselves. These were interactive displays, for attendants handed out pedigree charts and and blank schedules issued by the Eugenics Record Office and encouraged visitors to take tests for taste theshhold and artistic capacity. An exhibit on "Eugenic Sterilization" was nearby. Displays in the dime museum tested credulity--Ripley's Believe It or Not. Scientific exhibits struggled to achieve intelligibility--George Brown Goode's object lessons. Exhibitions of art faced a different challenge. Refusing to define the objects in his collection either as curios (singular anomalies) or as ethnographic artifacts (representative examples of a class of objects), Hadji Ephraim Benguiat, a prime lender of Jewish ceremonial art to the Smithsonian Institution at the turn of the century, thought of his possessions as objects of art, a status derived from their perfection and his connoisseurship. Benguiat identified the classificatory skills of the art collector with his powers of discrimination. At the climactic instant of acquisition--each time he accepts or rejects an object--the collector "classifies." Benguiat was interested in only one category--the perfect. This category was coterminous with his entire collection, seen as a supreme singularity made up of many singular artifacts. Jewels and gems dazzle. They invite appreciation, not analysis. There is no place in this empire of things, ruled by the collector of collectors, for copies, photographs, models, homologs, dioramas, or tableaux. There is no place here for displaying continuous series of objects--without regard for the artistic excellence of each and every one--to make some historical point, no place for a system of classification that would subsume objects within theoretical hierarchies. Unmitigated excellence in everything shown, ubiquitous singularity, and the unifying principle of the collector's power--this is the message of the jewel box. No matter how perfect this collection and each object within it, however, Benguiat's treasures could be reclassified for scientific purposes, and in the various exhibitions where they were featured, they moved from category to category. The Limits of Detachment But not all that the ethnographic surgeon subjects to cognitive excision can be physically detached, carried away, and installed for viewing. What happens to the intangible, the ephemeral, the immoveable, and the animate. The intangible, which includes such classic ethnographic subjects as kinship, world view, cosmology, values and attitudes, cannot be carried away. The ephemeral encompasses all forms of behavior--everyday activities, storytelling, ritual, dance, speech, performance of all kinds. Now you see it, now you don't. The immoveable, whether a mesa, pyramid, cliff dwelling, or landform, can be recorded in photographs but presents formidable logistical obstacles to those who would detach and carry them away. The animate has been collected, both dead and alive. Dried, pickled, or stuffed, botanical and zoological specimens become artifacts for the museum. Alive, flora and fauna present storage problems that are solved by gardens and zoos in which living collections are on view. But what about people? Bones and mummies, body parts in alcohol, and plaster death masks may be found in museums. Living human specimens have been displayed in zoos, formal exhibitions, festivals, and other popular amusements. If we cannot carry away the intangible, ephemeral, immoveable, and animate, what have we done instead? Typically, we have inscribed what we cannot carry away, whether in field notes, recordings, photographs, films, and drawings. We have created ethnographic documents. Like ethnographic objects, these documents are also artifacts of ethnography, but true to what I would call the fetish of the true cross approach, ethnographic objects, those material fragments that we can carry away, are accorded a higher quotient of realness. Only the artifacts, the tangible metonyms, are really real. All the rest is mimetic, second order, a representation, an account undeniably of our own making. We have here the legacy of Renaissance antiquarians, for whom "visible remains" were used to corroborate written accounts. Objects, according to Giambattista Vico, were "manifest testimony" and carried greater authority than texts, even contemporaneous ones. Textualizing Objects/Objectifying Texts The priority of objects over texts in museum settings was reversed during the second half of the nineteenth century. Dr. George Brown Goode, Director of the U.S. National Museum, operated according to the dictum that "the most important thing about an exhibition was the label," a point restated by many who worked with him: The people's museum should be much more than a house of specimens in glass cases. It should be a house full of ideas, arranged with the strictest attention to system. I once tried to express this thought by saying "An efficient educational museum may be described as a collection of instructive labels, each illustrated by a well-selected specimen. (emphasis in the original) Museums were to teach "by means of object lessons," but objects could not be relied upon to speak for themselves. The curatorial charge was to create exhibitions that would "furnish an intelligent train of thought" by using objects to illustrate ideas. Reacting to the apparent lack of logical arrangement in displays of art collections in many European museums and the low status to which so many private museums in America had descended, Goode had long insisted that the museum of the past was to be transformed from "a cemetery of bric-a-brac into a nursery of living thoughts." His model for the public museum was the public library, though he believed that exhibitions had even greater potential as a medium of popular education than libraries. Objects were to be read like books: "Professor Huxley has described the museum as a `consultative library of objects.'" Curators were to objectify texts and textualize objects, hence the importance of an organizational scheme for arranging objects and labels to explain them, and the willing acceptance of copies, casts, impressions, photographs, diagrams, and other surrogates for primary artifacts. Since the main purpose of a public museum was to educate, "for the purposes of study a cast was as good as an original," and in some cases better. Copies came to play a special role. Though proclaimed as a new approach to the exhibiting of objects, the textualized object was not new, but had been featured in demonstrations and illustrated lectures for centuries. Anatomy lessons were conducted at public dissections as early as the fourteenth century in Bologna, where, as the scholar read the anatomy text, the demonstrator dissected the body and the ostensor pointed a wand at the part of the body under consideration. The French anatomy lesson during the seventeenth century was "a great social event that the whole town attended, with masks, refreshments, and diversions." The increasing emphasis on ostension during the nineteenth century suggests a shift in the foundation of authoritative knowledge, with information playing a leading role, particularly in the form of visual facts, rather than relying primarily on rhtetoric. By the end of eighteenth century, Peale could boast that in the lecture room of his museum, presentations were illustrated with real specimens from his collection, consistent with Rousseau's admonition that "teachers never substitute representation for reality, show for substance--to teach, in short, for actual objects." In this respect, Peale was in tune with a more general tendency of the period towards the "decidedly empirical or evidential nature of lecturing," though even under the guise of science, objects were used for their dramatic effect: "William Hazlitt was appalled at one of Carlisle's lectures on the human emotion to find a dissected heart and brain being circulated among the audience." In many ways, the approach to museum exhibitions advocated by Goode during the latter part of the nineteenth century should be seen in relation to the illustrated lecture, its history and requirements. Complaining in 1891 about the decline of "entertainments worthy of civilized communities--concerts, readings, lectures" and the rise of illustration, including the diagram, blackboard, and stereopticon, Goode wanted the museum to fill the gap left by the decline of lectures and of scientific, literary, and artistic societies. The written label in an exhibition was a surrogate for the words of an absent lecturer, with the added advantage that the exhibited objects, rather than appearing briefly to illustrate a lecture, could be seen by a large public for a longer period of time. It is precisely in these terms that Washington Matthews introduced his lecture "Some Sacred Objects of the Navajo Rites" at the Third International Folklore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893: Someone has said that a first-class museum would consist of a series of satisfactory labels with specimens attached. This saying might be rendered: "The label is more important than the specimen." When I have finished reading this paper, you may admit that this is true in the case of the little museum which I have here to show: A basket, a fascicle of plant fibres; a few rudely painted sticks, some beads and feathers put together as if by children in their meaningless play, for the total of the collection. You would scarcely pick these trifles up if you saw them lying in the gutter, yet when I have told all I have to tell about them, I trust they may seem of greater importance, and that some among you would be as glad to possess them as I am. I might have added largely to this collection had I time to discourse about them, for I possess many more of their kind. It is not a question of things, but of time. I shall do scant justice to this little pile within an hour. An hour it will be to you, and a tiresome hour, no doubt; but you may pass it with greater patience when you learn that this hour's monologue represents to me twelve years of hard and oft-baffled investigation. Such dry facts as I have to relate are not to be obtained by rushing up to the first Indian you meet, notebook in hand. But I have no time for further preliminary remarks, and must proceed at once to my descriptions. In this demonstration of connoisseurship, the ethnographer is a detective who toils long and hard to decipher material clues. This master of induction competes both with the native informant and with other ethnographers, not for the objects, but for the facts that comprise his descriptions. His lecture is a long label, a performed description, that elevates what would otherwise be viewed as "trifles." Neither the modest specimens, nor the dry facts, are expected to interest the listener. Rather it is the ethnographer's own expenditure of time and effort--his expertise--that creates value. This effect is achieved rhetorically, for the more unprepossessing the evidence, the more impressive his ethnographic description. Characterizing his own recounting of the facts as "minute to a tedious degree" and "not one half the particulars that I might appropriately have told you," Matthews admits to having reached the limits of his ability to describe when challenged by the drum-stick on the table. Not even the Navaho can describe in words how the drumstick is made, "so intricate are the rules pertaining to its construction." Apologizing for not having fresh yucca on hand with which to demonstrate the process, he offers to take anyone who is interested to the "yucca-covered deserts of Arizona" where Matthews can "show him how to make a drum stick." In this way, Matthews confronts two basic problems in ethnographic display. First, he makes the apparently trivial interesting by performing ethnography (the illustrated lecture). Then, he addresses the limitations of verbal description by offering to play Indian (the demonstration). The profusion of facts that Matthews presents to his listeners, his apologies for their dry and tedious character notwithstanding, are a classic case of what Neil Harris has identified as the operational aesthetic--"a delight in observing process and examining for literal truth." Exhibiting Humans Not only inanimate artifacts, but also humans are detachable, fragmentable, and replicable in a variety of materials. The inherently performative nature of live specimens veers exhibits of them strongly in the direction of spectacle, blurring the line still further between morbid curiosity and scientific interest, chamber of horrors and medical exhibition, circus and zoological garden, theatre and living ethnographic display, scholarly lecture and dramatic monologue, cultural performance and staged recreation. The blurring of this line was particularly useful in England and the United States during the early nineteenth century because performances that would be objectionable to conservative Protestants if staged in a theatre were acceptable when presented in a museum, even if there was virtually nothing else to distinguish them. This reframing of performance in terms of nature, science, and education rendered it respectable, particularly during the first half of the nineteenth century. If in the scientific lecture the exhibitor was the performer, ethnographic displays shifted the locus of performance to the exhibit proper, and in so doing, made ample use of patently theatrical genres and techniques to display people and their things. In what might be characterized as a reciprocity of means and complementary of function, museums used theatrical crafts of scene painting for exhibits and staged performances in their lecture rooms, while theatres used the subjects presented in museums, including live exotic animals and humans, and the technologies demonstrated there in their stage productions. Museums served as surrogate theatres during periods when theatres came under attack for religious reasons, while theatres brought a note of seriousness to their offerings by presenting edifying entertainment. In the drama of the specimen, the curator was a ventriloquist, whose task it was to make the object speak. Through processual scenarios of production and function, curators narrativized objects: they showed the process by which ceramics and textiles were manufactured, step by step, or how they were used in daily life and ceremony. Smithsonian anthropologist Otis T. Mason was explicit on this point in 1891 when he defined "the important elements of the specimen" as "the dramatis personae and incidents." Living or Dead Human displays teetertotter on a kind of semiotic seesaw, equipoised between the animate and inanimate, the living and the dead. The semiotic complexity of exhibits of people, particular those of an ethnographic character, may be seen in reciprocities between exhibiting the dead as if they are alive and the living as if they are dead, reciprocities that hold as well for the art of the undertaker and the art of the museum preparator. Ethnographic displays are part of a larger history of human display, in which the themes of death, dissection,torture, and martyrdom are intermingled. This history includes the exhibition of dead bodies in cemeteries, catacombs, homes, and theatres, the public dissection of cadavers in anatomy lessons, the vivisection of torture victims using such anatomical techniques as flaying, public executions by guillotine or gibbet, heads of criminals impaled on stakes, public extractions of teeth, and displays of body parts and foetuses in anatomical and other museums, whether in the flesh, wax, or plaster cast. The body parts arrived not only as byproducts of dissections but also as a result of amputations, for example, the trigger finger of a villain. Effigies of men tortured and executed in the cages in which they were displayed were an attraction at the Mu"nster Zoo. Ethnographic subjects were easily incorporated into such modes of display. The remains of the dead had long been excavated and shown as ethnographic specimens--tatooed Maori heads, Aztec skulls, and bones removed from Indian graves. Live subjects provided expanded opportunities for ethnographic display. While live, human rarities figured in museological dramas of cognitive vivisection. When dead, their corpses were anatomized and their bones and fleshy body parts incorporated into anatomical exhibits. The vanitas mundi was a way of exhibiting dissected materials: one such anatomical allegory was created out of the skeleton of a foetus, tiny kidney stones, a dried artery, and a hardened vas deferens. Articulated skeletons, taxidermy, wax models, and live specimens also offered conceptual links between anatomy and death in what might be considered museums of mortality. Wax models as a form of three-dimensional anatomical illustration were commonly used to teach medicine and were featured in anatomical displays open to the public. Rackstrow's Museum of Anatomy and Curiosities, which was popular in London during the mid-eighteenth century, offered visitors wax replicas of the human body in various states of health and disease, inside and out, including reproductive organs and foetuses, some of them preserved in alcohol rather than represented in wax. With the rising interest in racial typologies and evolution, Sarti's Museum of Pathological Anatomy in London during the mid- nineteenth century, and others like it, became the place to exhibit culturally constructed anatomical pathologies (parts of a Moorish woman's anatomy), missing links in the evolutionary sequence (wax figures of African "savages" with tails), and wax tableaux of ethnographic scenes. As early as 1797, Peale had completed wax figures for "a group of contrasting races of mankind" that included natives from North and South America, the Sandwich Islands, Otaheite, and China. The faces are thought to have been made from life casts. The figures were outfitted with appropriate clothing and artifacts. Half a century later, the Gallery of All Nations in Reimer's Anatomical and Ethnological Museum in London featured "the varied types of the Great Human Family," including the Aztec Lilliputians that shortly before had appeared live in the Liverpool Zoo. The "gallery of nations" idea, which since the late sixteenth century had served as the organizing principle for books devoted to customs, manners, religions, costumes, and other ethnographic topics, was easily adapted to the exhibition of ethnographic specimens. A logical spinoff was the monographic display. Nathan Dunn's celebrated Chinese collection, which was installed in Peale's museum in 1838 and moved to London in 1841, offered, according to a diarist of the period "a perfect picture of Chinese life": Figures of natural size, admirably executed in clay, all of them portraits of individuals, are there to be seen, dressed in the appropriate costume, engaged in their various avocations and surrounded by the furniture, implements and material objects of daily existence. The faces are expressive, the attitudes natural, the situation & grouping well conceived, and the aspect of the whole very striking and lifelike. Mandarins, priests, soldiers, ladies of quality, gentlemen of rank, play-actors and slaves; a barber, a shoemaker and a blacksmith employed in their trades; the shop of a merchant with purchasers buying goods, the drawing room of a man of fortune with his visitors smoking and drinking tea & servants in attendance; all sitting, standing, almost talking, with the dress, furniture and accompaniments of actual life. Some of the costumes are of the richest and most gorgeous description. Models of country houses and boats, weapons, lamps, pictures, vases, images of Gods, and porcelain vessels, many of them most curious and beautiful, and in number, infinite. Mr. Dunn was in the room himself and explained to us the nature and uses of things. The attention in this description to the individuation of faces reflects the more general preoccupation with "types" and the notion of physiognomy as a key to moral character. Physiognomic types and their racial implications were presented not only in galleries of nations and in the later "types of mankind" exhibitions, but also in crowd scenes and group portraits of life in contemporary European and American cities, as well as in the literature of the period. So great was the fascination with physiognomy, that at Peale's Museum, where portraits of great men "etched the outlines of genius" and those of "savages" revealed their physiognomy, museum visitors could take home as a souvenir their own silhouette, made with great exactitude thanks to a mechanical device, the "physiognotrace," invented in 1803 and demonstrated in the museum gallery. Dunn's Chinese exhibition inspired other such displays, notably, scenes of daily life at the Oriental and Turkish Museum during the 1850s in London. Viewers were astonished by the wax figures, which a journalist of the time praised for their realism: "the arms and legs of males are rough with real hair, most delicately applied--actual drops of perspiration are on the brows of the porters." Clearly, the mannikins were more than clothes hangers, for not only ethnographic artifacts, but also physiognomy was on display. It is precisely the mimetic perfection of such installations, and perhaps also their preoccupation with physiognomy, that so disturbed Franz Boas, who resisted the use of realistic wax mannikins in ethnographic recreations. They were so lifelike they were deathlike. Boas objected to "the ghastly impression such as we notice in wax-figures," an effect that he thought was heightened when absolutely lifelike figures lacked motion. Furthermore, wax as a medium more nearly captured the color and quality of dead than living flesh, and in their frozen pose and silence, wax figures were reminiscent of the undertaker's art, a connection that wax museums capitalized on in deathbed and open casket scenes featuring famous persons. As a result, Boas not only rejected hyperrealistic mannikins, but also advocated that the human body be displayed at rest rather than in a state of arrested motion. Fear of verisimilitude did not inhibit Artur Hazelius, who in his effort to present Sweden "in summary," began installing wax tableaux--"folklife pictures"--in the 1870s. Inspired by genre paintings, these sentimental scenes in wax integrated costumes, furniture, and utensils that Hazelius had collected in Sweden and other parts of Scandinavia. Featured not only in his Museum of Scandinavian Ethnography, which opened in 1873, but also at World's Fairs in 1876 (Philadelphia) and 1878 (Paris), these displays utilized techniques Hazelius had seen at the many international expositions and museums he visited. He used the habitat group, a fixture of natural history museums. He turned to the wax tableau, which, like the tableau vivant, was often modelled on a painting or sculpture and captured a dramatic moment in a narrative. He also drew on the period room and travel panorama. By the 1891, he had realized his dream of exhibiting Swedish folklife in "living style" at Skansen, his open-air museum. In addition to buildings, plants, animals, the museum featured peasants in native dress, traditional musicians and artisans, costumed receptionists and guides, restaurants, craft demonstrations, and festivals. Hazelius's Skansen museum became the prototype for hundreds of other open-air museums throughout Europe, many of them still functioning today. Animal or Actor People have been displayed as living rarities from as early as 1501, when live Eskimos were exhibited in Bristol. A Brazilian village built by Indians in Rouen in the 1580s was burned down by French soldiers, an event that pleased the king so much that it was restaged the following day. "Virginians" were featured on the Thames in 1603. Over a period of five centuries, audiences flocked to see Tahitians, Laplanders, "Aztecs," Iroquois, Cherokees, Ojibways, Iowas, Mohawks, Botocudos, Guianese, Hottentots, Kaffirs, Nubians, Somalis, Singhalese, Patagonians, Terra del Fuegans, Ilongots, Kalmucks, Amapondans, Zulus, Bushmen, Australian aborigines, Japanese, and East Indians in various cities in England and on the continent, in taverns and at fairs, on the stage in theatrical productions, at Whitehall, Picadilly, and Vauxhall Gardens, along the Thames, at William Bullock's London Museum (better known as Egyptian Hall), in zoos and circuses, and by the latter half of the nineteenth century, at world's fairs. Basically, there were two options for exhibiting living ethnographic specimens: the zoological and the theatrical. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the distinction between zoological and theatrical approaches was often unclear and both were implicated in the production of wildness. The zoological option depended on traditions of displaying exotic animals, including the circus, which featured trained animals, and the zoo, where live exotic specimens were shown in cages, fantastic buildings, or eventually, in settings recreating their habitat in realistic detail, though here too animal acts could be found. It was not uncommon in the nineteenth century for a living human rarity to be booked into a variety of venues-- theatres, exhibition halls, concert rooms, museums, and zoos--in the course of several weeks or months as part of a tour. William Bullock's London Museum, better known as Egyptian Hall because of its architectural style, was dubbed the "ark of zoological wonders" by at least one observer of the period, because of the wide range of live exhibits, human and animal, presented there. While the term "ark" evokes the discourse of natural theology, as opposed to natural history, and suggests that the sheer variety of divine creation rather than scientific classification was the focus, Bullock found in environmental displays a fine way to combine theatrical effect, the experience of travel, and geographic principles. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, geography was also an omnibus discipline devoted to all that is on the earth's surface, including people in their environment-- geography subsumed anthropology and ethnography as subfields. Location on the earth's globe and relationships of specimens to landforms, climate, and local flora and fauna offered an alternative principle for arranging exhibitions of animals and people and encouraged environmental displays that showed the interrelation of elements in a habitat. Those who collected their own specimens, had first-hand knowledge of their habitat, and controlled how their materials were exhibited were more likely to present animals and people in their home environments. Like Bullock, who collected material for his displays while travelling and then tried to recreate the places he had been, Charles Willson Peale hunted for many of his specimens himself, mounted them, and created settings for them based on his observations while hunting. The passion for close visual observation on the spot had transformed how landscapes were experienced and described during the eighteenth century and shaped how specimens brought into galleries were exhibited, to the point that the experience of travel became the model for exhibitions about other places. Visitors were offered the display as a surrogate for travel, and displays in turn participated in the discourse of travel. Billed as travel experiences, panoramas were narrated by travellers who served as guides-at-a-distance through landscapes they had personally traversed. Individuals who had assisted hunters and collectors abroad were brought into exhibitions both to complete the scene and to comment on it, thus transferring to the recreated travel setting the roles of native guide and animal handler. Returning from Mexico in 1823 with casts of ancient remains, ethnographic objects, specimens of plants and animals, and a Mexican Indian youth, William Bullock designed an exhibition that would make visitors feel like they were in Mexico, enjoying a panoramic view of Mexico City painted on the wall and intimate contact with its inhabitants. An observer of the period reported that "In order to heighten the deception, and to bring the spectator actually amidst the scenes represented, [he presented] a fac simile [sic] of a Mexican cottage and garden, with a tree, flowers, and fruit; they are exactly the size of their natural models, and bear an identity not to be mistaken." To complete the effect, Bullock installed the Mexican Indian youth in the cottage and had him describe objects to the visitors "as far as his knowledge of our language permits," thus making him do double duty as ethnographic specimen and museum docent. Living Style The moment live people are included in such displays the issue arises--what will they do? In considering the options for presenting people in "living style," it is useful to distinguish staged recreations of cultural performances (wedding, funeral, hunt, martial arts display, shamanic ritual) and the drama of the quotidian (nursing a baby, cooking, smoking, spitting, tending a fire, washing, carving, weaving). In a highly popular African display mounted in 1853 at St. George's Gallery, Hyde Park, thirteen Kaffirs "portrayed 'the whole drama of Caffre life' against a series of scenes painted by Charles Marshall. They ate meals with enormous spoons, held a conference with a 'witchfinder...,' and enacted a wedding, a hunt, and a military expedition, 'all with characteristic dances,' the whole ending with a programmed general mˆl‚e between the rival tribes." Two decades earlier, in 1822, Bullock had a Laplander family and live reindeer perform at Egyptian Hall, where they drove their sledge around a frosty panorama fitted out with their tents, utensils, and weapons--the Laplanders had been brought to care for the reindeer, who, it was hoped, could be introduced into England, but when this proved impractical, the Laplanders were recycled as ethnographic exhibits. Ethnologists in London kept track of new ethnographic arrivals and took advantage of their presence for their research. Whereas the notion that native life was inherently dramatic allowed it to be staged and billed as theatre, the ability of natives to perform, and particularly to mime, was taken by some viewers as evidence of their humanity. Charles Dickens, who was otherwise disdainful of the people in live ethnographic displays, commented on seeing the Bushmen in Egyptian Hall in 1847 that: "Who that saw the four grim, stunted, abject Bush-people at the Egyptian Hall--with two natural actors among them out of that number, one a male and the other a female--can forget how something human and imaginative gradually broke out in the ugly little man, when he was roused from crouching over the charcoal fire, into giving a dramatic representation of the tracking of a beast, the shooting of it with poisoned arrows, and the creature's death." The Bushmen were installed against a scenic African background, and in addition to offering the "cultural performances" that so captivated Dickens, they slept and smoked, nursed an infant, and otherwise went about the business of daily life. What is so extraordinary about Dicken's statement is the implication that what makes the Bushmen human is not their ability to hunt, but their ability to mime the hunt--that is, their ability to represent. As the everyday life of others came into focus as a subject for exhibition, ethnography, at least for some, offered a critique of civilization. In his 1911 account of the British Museum, Henry C. Shelley commented: "Perhaps the hilarity with which the ordinary visitor regards the object lessons of ethnography arises from his overweening conceit of the value and importance of his own particular form of civilization. No doubt he has much in common with that traveller who lost his way on his journey and described the climax of his experience in these words: 'After having walked eleven hours without having traced the print of a human foot, to my great comfort and delight, I saw a man hanging upon a gibbet; my pleasure at the cheering prospect was inexpressible, for it convinced me that I was in a civilized country.'" This is the ethnological effect in reverse: our own barbarity is experienced as civilized. Exhibiting the Quotidian Genre Errors The drama of the quotidian feeds on what John MacAloon calls a genre error--one man's life is another man's spectacle. Exhibitions institutionalize this error by producing the quotidian as spectacle and they do this by building the role of the observer into the structure of events that, left to their own devices, are not subject to formal viewing. Following Dean MacCannell's analysis of "staged authenticity," such exhibitions "stage the back region," thereby creating a new front region. In what is a logical corollary of the autonomous object, people, their realia and activities, are mounted in a hermetic aesthetic space--fenced off in a zoological garden, raised up on a platform in a gallery, placed on a stage, or ensconced in a reconstructed village on the lawn of the exhibition grounds--and visitors are invited to look. There is something about the seamlessness of the commonsense world, its elusiveness, that makes such genre errors so appealing. For the quotidian, by virtue of its taken-for- grantedness, presents itself as given, natural, just there, unnoticed because assumed. It becomes available for contemplation under special conditions, most commonly through the repetition that produces boredom, or through the comparisons (induced by contrast, incongruity, violation, and impropriety) that call the taken-for-granted into question. The task of creating fissures that offer evidence that the ordinary is really there propells the fascination with penetrating the life space of others, getting inside, burrowing deep into the most intimate places, whether the interior of lives or the innermost recesses of bodies. In making a spectacle of oneself, or others, "what is private or hidden becomes publicly exhibited; what is small or confined becomes exaggerated, grand or grandiose." The everyday lives of others are perceptible precisely because what they take for granted is not what we take for granted, and the more different we are from each other, the more intense the effect, for the exotic is the place where nothing is utterly ordinary. Such encounters force us to make comparisons that pierce the membrane of our own quotidian world, allowing us for a brief moment to be spectators of ourselves, an effect that is also experienced by those on display. Imagine being installed in a room at an exhibition in, say, Nigeria, where one's only instruction was to go about one's daily chores just like at home--making coffee, reading the New York Times, working at the computer, talking on the phone, walking the dog, sleeping, flossing, opening the mail, eating granola, withdrawing cash from a money machine--while curious visitors looked on. The challenge in such displays is to avoid "performance," that is, to maintain an asymmetrical reciprocity, whereby those who are being watched go about their business as if no one were paying attention to them, though we have long known that what we observe is changed by virtue of being observed. The reciprocity of the museum effect can be triggered by a simple "turn of the head," which bifurcates the viewer's gaze between the exotic display and his own everyday world. A visitor to the Bushman exhibition at Egyptian Hall in 1847 commented: "It was strange, too, in looking through one of the windows of the [exhibition] room into the busy street, to reflect that by a single turn of the head might be witnessed the two extremes of humanity...." The pane of glass that separated the illusion of being somewhere else from the immediacy of life on London Streets was eliminated in presentations that depended in part for their effect on intensifying just such incongruities. In George Catlin's display in London in 1844, "The spectacle of Red Indians encamped [in four wigwams] and demonstrating their horsemanship on the greensward at Vauxhall, where eighteenth-century beaux had strolled with the belles of Fanny Burney's set, must have been one of the more striking sights of the day." To those who complained that "to place the savage man in direct contrast with the most elaborate of man's performances is too abrupt a proceeding, besides being useless," Dr. John Conolly, President of the Ethnological Society of London, answered in 1855 that the inclusion of ethnological exhibits at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham offered valuable contrasts. In his view, these displays "set off the splendour of...[man's] performances when his social advantages are enlarged" and showed that everyone can "emerge from barbarism and want to refinement and enjoyment"--a message both of British superiority and of optimism in the perfectibility of humankind. The incongruity of intercalating two different quotidians reaches an apotheosis of sorts in displays that presented exotic people, not in their native habitat but in ours. Ironically, at least one observer of pygmies playing the piano in a well- appointed drawing room on Regent Street in 1853 thought this arrangement preferable to having them "set up on a platform to be stared at, and made to perform distasteful feats," for among other things, "the visitor literally gives them a call, and becomes one of their society," which is to say one's own society. These pygmies had learned English and acquired the "rudiments of European civilization." The Museum Effect Once the seal of the quotidian is pierced, life is experienced as if represented: the metaphors of life as a book, stage, and museum capture this effect with nuances particular to each metaphor. Like the picturesque, in which paintings set the standard for experience, museum exhibitions transform how people look at their own immediate environs. The 'museum effect' works both ways. Not only do ordinary things become special when placed in museum settings, but also the museum experience itself becomes a model for experiencing life outside its walls. As the gaze that penetrated exhibitions of people from distant lands was turned to the streets of European and American cities, urban dwellers such as James Boswell reported that walking in the streets of London in 1775 was "a high entertainment of itself. I see a vast museum of all objects, and I think with a kind of wonder that I see it for nothing." Bleeding into the ubiquity of the commonsense world, the 'museum effect' brings distinctions between the exotic and the familiar closer to home. Calibrations of difference become finer. The objects differentiated draw nearer. One becomes increasingly exotic to oneself, as one imagines how others might view that which we consider normal: writing about the Danse du ventre in the Little Cairo area of the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Chicago world's fair, Frederic Ward Putnam commented that visitors might misunderstand this dance as "low and repulsive" because they did not understand it, but that "the waltz would seem equally strange to these dusky women of Egypt." In America and England during the 1890s, recently arrived immigrants became the ethnographic other, in part as a way of creating social distance under the threatening conditions of physical proximity: a paper entitled "Mission-Work among the Unenlightened Jews," which was delivered at the Jewish Women's Congress in 1893 at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, characterized immigrants in London and New York as "half-dressed, pale-skinned natives in our own towns," and noted that "Borrioboola Gha has been supplanted by 'Whitechapel,' 'Mulberry Bend,' and the nearest district tenements." The trope of the city as dark continent and the journalist and social reformer as adventurer/ethnographer was common in such mid-nineteenth-century accounts as Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861-62). One of the attractions of poor neighborhoods was their accessibility to the eye, their "intimacy at sight." Any stranger could see openly on the streets what in better neighborhoods was hidden in an inaccessible domestic interior, a closed carriage, or under layers of clothing. At the turn of the twentieth century in New York City, one writer remarked: Mankind is not only the noblest study of man, but the most entertaining. People are more interesting than things or books, even newspapers. The East Side is especially convenient for observation of people because there are such shoals of them always in sight, and because their habits of life and manners are frank, and favorable to a certain degree of intimacy at sight. Where each family has a whole house to itself and lives inside of it, and the members never sally out except in full dress--hats, gloves, and manners--it is hopeless to become intimately acquainted with them as you pass on the sidewalk. You may walk up and down Fifth Avenue for ten years and never see a Fifth Avenue mother nursing her latest born on the doorstep, but in Mott or Mulberry or Cherry Street that is a common sight, and always interesting to the respectful observer. When the little Fifth Avenue children are let out, if they don't drive off in a carriage, at least they go with a nurse, and are clothed like field daisies, and under such restraint as good clothes and even the kindest nurses involve. But the East Side children tumble about on the sidewalk and pavement hour after hour, under slight restraint and without any severe amount of oversight, hatless usually, barehanded and barefooted when the weather suffers it. The blend here of repulsion and attraction, condemnation and celebration, so typical of the reception of ethnographic displays in exhibition halls, reveals that the source of the critique is also the basis of the appeal. "Intimacy at sight," which suggests a kind of social nakedness, combines with the "view from the sidewalk" to verge on what might be termed social pornography-- the private made public. Or rather, the disparities in cultural definitions of private and public are exploited here: the discrepancy between what others make public that we consider private also generates voyeuristic excitement in zoos, particulary in primate displays. Similarly, in madhouses, which from the early seventeenth century in Europe also combined confinement with display, the public was free to enter and observe the ravings of lunatics. While respectability has the power to conceal, to control access to sight, poverty, madness, children, animals, and the "lower" orders of humankind reveal by exposing themselves fully to view. Historically, ethnography has constituted its subjects at the margins of geography, history, and society. Not surprisingly, then, in a convergence of moral adventure, social exploration, and sensation seeking, the inner city is constructed as a socially distant but physically proximate exotic--and erotic--territory. Visits to this territory tempt the adventurer to cross the dangerous line between voyeurism and acting out. Slumming, like tourism more generally, takes the spectator to the site, and as areas are canonized in a geography of attractions, whole territories become extended ethnographic theme parks. An ethnographic bell jar drops over the terrain. The vitrine, as a way of looking, is brought to the site. A neighborhood, village, or region becomes for all intents and purposes a living museum in situ. The museum effect, rendering the quotidian spectacular, becomes ubiquitous. The Panoptic Mode In contrast with the panoramic perspective of all- encompassing classifications, in situ approaches to the display of the quotidian work in a panoptic mode. The panoramic approach lays out the whole world conceptually in a Linnean classification or evolutionary scheme or experientially in a scenic effect, the appeal of such technologies of seeing as the eidophusikon, theatrical panorama, and diorama. Offered a supreme vantage point, the viewer is master of all that he surveys. The view is comprehensive, extensive, commanding, aggrandizing. As a prospect, it holds in it scenarios for future action. In contrast, the panoptic approach offers the chance to see without being seen, to penetrate interior recesses, to violate intimacy. In its more problematic manifestations, the panoptic mode has the quality of peep show and surveillance--the viewer is in control. In its more benign mode, the panoptic takes the form of hospitality, a host welcoming a guest to enter a private sphere. A recent guide to ethnographic recreations of "homes" at the Field Museum in Chicago exemplified the panoptic mode: "Each of the houses has had part of the walls and roof removed so you may peek inside." The issue is the power to open up to sight differentially, to show with respect to others what one would not reveal about oneself--one's body, person, and life. Live exhibits as a representational mode make their own kinds of claims. Even when efforts are taken to the contrary, live exhibits tend to make people into artifacts because the ethnographic gaze objectifies. Where people are concerned, there is a fine line between attentive looking and staring. To make people going about their ordinary business objects of visual interest and available to total scrutiny is dehumanizing, a quality of exhibitions that was not lost on some viewers in London during the nineteenth century who complained about live displays on humanitarian grounds. Live displays, whether recreations of daily activities or staged as formal performances, also create the illusion that the activities you watch are being done rather than represented, a practice that creates the illusion of authenticity, or realness. The impression is one of unmediated encounter. Semiotially, live displays make the status of the performer problematic, for people become signs of themselves. We experience a representation, even when the representers are, if you will, the people themselves. Self-representation is representation nonetheless. Whether the representation essentializes (you are seeing the quintessence of Balineseness) or totalizes (you are seeing the whole through the part), the ethnographic fragment returns with all the problems of capturing, inferring, constituting, and presenting the whole through parts. Performing Culture We might distinguish the museum as a form of interrment--a tomb with a view--and the live display. These metaphors have historical roots in the history of interrment and incarceration as display traditions in their own right. Differences between them are expressed in the sensory organization of display. The Senses Compartmentalized The partiality so essential to the ethnographic object as a fragment is also expressed in the fragmentation of sensory apprehension in conventional museum exhibitions. With the important exceptions of popular entertainment, opera, masques and banquets, and avant-garde performance, among others, the European tendency has been to split up the senses and parcel them out, one at a time, to the appropriate art form. One sense, one art form. We listen to music. We look at paintings. Dancers don't talk. Musicians don't dance. Sensory atrophy is coupled with close focus and sustained attention. All distractions must be eliminated--no talking, rustling of paper, eating, flashing of cameras. Absolute silence governs the etiquette of symphony halls and museums. Aural and ocular epiphanies in this mode require pristine environments in which the object of contemplation is set off for riveting attention. Rules posted at the entrance and guards within ensure that decorum prevails. When reclassified as "primitive art" and exhibited as painting and sculpture, as singular objects for visual apprehension, ethnographic artifacts are elevated, for in the hierarchy of material manifestations, the fine arts rein supreme. To the degree that objects are identified with their makers, the cultures/civilizations represented by works of art also rise in the hierarchy. In contrast with conventional exhibitions in museums, which tend to reduce the sensory complexity of the events they represent and to offer them up for visual delectation alone, indigenous modes of display, particularly the festival, present an important alternative. As multi-sensory, multi-focus events, festivals may extend over days, weeks, or months. They require selective disattention, or highly disciplined attention, in an environment of sensory riot. The closeness of focus we expect to sustain in silence for a one-hour concert is inappropriate for events so large in scale and long in duration. Participants in the Ramlila, a festival and ritual drama that extend over many days in northern India, bring food, sleep through parts of the event, talk to their neighbors, get up, walk around, leave, return. All the senses--olfactory, gustatory, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, visual--are engaged. The experience tends to be environmental, as episodes of the drama are enacted in various locations, rather than hermetically sealed into an aesthetic space created by a proscenium, frame, or vitrine. Sensory saturation rather than sensory atrophy or single sense epiphany is the order of the day. Sensory apprehension and attention must be structured differently in such events. Every Day a Holiday The festival, both as it occurs locally and as an anthology of ethnographic performances, can be seen as a form of environmental performance governed by an aesthetic of pure theatricality. Though museum exhibitions can also be considered a form of environmental theatre--visitors moving through the space experience the mise-en-scene visually and kinesthetically--museum exhibitions tend to proceed discursively. Festivals are generally less didactic and less textual. They depend more on the performative, reserving extended textual analysis, to the degree that it is offered, for the program booklet, in this way avoiding the awkwardness of discoursing about living people in their very presence. There is a convergence of sensibility here between ethnographers interested in the festival as a display genre and the discovery by the historical avant garde of the theatricality of everyday life and vernacular genres. Rejecting the conventions of classical European theatre, with its dependence on the dramatic text, formal theatre architecture, and mimetic conventions, Antonin Artaud, Bertold Brecht, and East European directors working during the interwar years looked to Balinese, Chinese, and European folk and popular forms for new artistic possibilities. Their artistic sensibility valorized performative forms that were otherwise of strictly local or ethnographic interest, and offered the possibility of experiencing them with a distinctly modernist sensibility as models of pure theatricality. They created new audiences for ethnographic performances and a hospitable climate for festivals that excerpted and re/presented them. Tourists who have difficulty deciphering and penetrating the quotidian of their destination, find in festivals the perfect entr‚e. Public and spectacular, festivals have the practical advantage of offering in a concentrated form, at a designated time and place, what the tourist would otherwise search out in the diffuseness of everyday life, with no guarantee of ever finding it. Typically, local festivals are simply put on the tourist itinerary. A 1981 brochure issued by India's Department of Tourism does just this: Why festivals? Because they celebrate the joy of life. The Indian calendar is a long procession of festivals. The traveller may come when he pleases, a spectacle always awaits him. If you find yourself in the right place at the right time, it is possible to go through the calendar with a festival daily! It may be the harvest in the south, the golden yellow of short-lived spring in the north, the seafront spectacle of Ganesh's immersion in Bombay, the fanastic car festival of Puri, the snake-boat races in Kerala or the Republic Day pageant in New Delhi. Each is different. Every region, every religion has something to celebrate....Take in a festival when you come to India. No land demands so much of its legends--or, in celebrating the past, bedecks the present so marvellously. While large festivals can usually absorb tourists with ease, producers may take steps to keep casual observers away from smaller events they might overwhelm. Still other local ceremonies that are extremely costly to produce thrive as a result of tourist interest and dollars: cremations in Bali, which require vast sums of money, can now occur on a larger scale and more often thanks to the revenues generated by tourists who pay to attend them. Festivals are cultural performances par excellence. Their boundaries discernable in time and space, they are particularly amenable to encapsulation. Because whole festivals generally offer more than the casual traveller can consume, and because such complex events do not travel well, entrepreneurs often excerpt local festivals and incorporate their parts into other kinds of events. In an effort to make such attractions more profitable, as well as to restrict the access of tourists to areas of local life declared off limits, events are adapted to the special needs of recreational travellers. Events staged specifically for visitors are well-suited for export because they have already been designed for foreign audiences on tight schedules, or, exported events developed for international expositions may be brought back home in the hope of attracting tourists into the local economy. Balinese performances developed for the Paris World's Fair in the 1930s were brought back to Bali, where versions of them continue to be presented to tourists. Import the tourist? Or export the village and festival? These processes are reciprocal. Ethnographic displays are not only a way to recreate the travel experience at a remove. Increasingly, these displays are introduced at the travel destinations themselves, where they may displace the travel experience altogether. All of Polynesia is represented on 42 acres of the Hawaiian island Oahu, at the "Polynesian Cultural Center": according to a 1985 promotional brochure, "More people come to know and appreciate Polynesia while touring these beautifully landscaped grounds than will ever visit those fabled islands." As mass tourism has grown in the postwar period, festivals of all kinds have proliferated with the explicit intention of encouraging tourism. A 1954 guide to festivals in Europe makes this very point: That [the abundance of festivals] means fun for everyone who wants to frolic with our friends abroad when they are in their most festive moods, or they can frolic with us if they are so inclined....[Americans want to satisfy their] curiosity about how other people live...As everyone knows, just about the best time to see the most people in any region is at a festival. That is also a fine time to learn what interests or amuses them, because a festival invariably reflects the character of the region in which it takes place and dramatizes the economic and recreational attractions, as well as the spiritual and aesthetic aims of the people. We have here the major tropes of ethnographic display, from the perspective of the tourism industry--the promise of visual penetration, access to the back region of other people's lives, the life world of others as our playground, the view that people are most themselves when at play, and festivals as the quintessence of a region and its people. To "frolic with our friends abroad" becomes the paradigm for intercultural encounter. The foreign vacationer at a local festival achieves perfect synchrony--everyone is on holiday, or so it seems. To know a society only in its festival mode, filtered through the touristic lens of spectacle, is to raise another set of problems--the illusion of cultural transparency in the face of undeciphered complexity and the image of a society always on holiday. To festivalize culture is to make every day a holiday. Folkloric Performance The living quality of such performances does not obviate the issue of artifactual autonomy, for songs, tales, dances, and ritual practices are also amenable to ethnographic excision and to presentation as autonomous units, though not in the same way as artifacts. You can detach artifacts from their makers, but not performances from performers. True, artifacts can be photographed and performances can be recorded. But artifacts are not photographs and performances are not recordings. While the pot can survive the potter, though it too will eventually crumble to dust, music cannot be heard except at the moment of its making. Like dance and other forms of performance, musical performance is evanescent and in need of constant renewal. To achieve for drumming the sense of "realness" conveyed by the physical presence of the drum, we need the drummer. But a drummer drumming is no less an ethnographic fragment. The proscenium stage, master of ceremonies, and program booklet are to the drummer what the vitrine, label, and catalogue are to the drum. The centrality of human actors in performance and the inseparability of process and product are what distinguish performances from things. While an artifact may be viewed as a record of the process of its manufacture, as an indexical sign--process is there in material traces--performance is all process. Through the kind of repetition required by stage appearances, long runs, and extensive tours, performances can become like artifacts. They freeze. They become canonical. They take forms that are alien, if not antithetical, to how they are produced and experienced in their local settings, for with repeated exposure, cultural performances are routinized and trivialized. The result is events that have no clear analogue within the community from which they purportedly derive and that come to resemble one another more than that which they are intended to re-present. Embedded in the flow of life, artifacts and performances that have historically interested ethnographers are contingent: they are not generally made to stand alone, set off for exclusively aesthetic attention. Forms that are perfectly satisfying in their indigenous setting--chant, drumming, a cappella ballads, repetitive dance steps--challenge audiences who are exposed to them on stages where they are used to seeing opera and ballet. Professional folkloric companies adapt such forms to European production values. To hold the interest of new audiences, folkloric troupes design a varied and eclectic program of short selections. They also depend upon musical accompaniment (such as piano or orchestra), European harmony, concertized arrangements and vocal styles on the model of European opera, and movement styles on the order of ballet to reduce the strangeness and potential boredom of a cappella song, unison music, and repetitive (and not apparently virtuosic) dance for unfamiliar audiences. To meet strict time requirements and deliver exactly what has been advertised and announced in a printed program, improvisation is curtailed, if not eliminated. A tightly coordinated ensemble of trained professionals, often more or less the same age and physical type, wear stylized, often uniform, costumes, while executing highly choreographed routines with great precision. A frontal orientation accomodates the proscenium stage, to which is added theatrical effects (sound, lighting, sets). There is a tendency towards the virtuosic, athletic, and spectacular. The repertoires of folkloric troupes typically include excerpts from festivals and rituals--weddings, healing ceremonies, and hunting rituals are favorites. While such excerpts allude to the contingent nature of music and dance, they partake of theatre, for they have been severed from their local social and ceremonial settings and reclassified as art. At the same time, the proprietary rights to the material have been transferred from local areas to the "nation," where regional forms are declared national heritage. National troupes typically perform traditions from across the land, no matter what the personal histories of the performers. Since everyone can perform everything and everything belongs to everyone, differences do not differentiate. Polyglot programs, besides offering variety, generally represent an "imagined community" in which diversity is harmoniously integrated, where difference is reduced to style and decoration, to spice of life. Cultural difference is then praised for the variety and color it adds to an otherwise bland and dull scene. Such choices in repertoire and style are ideologically charged. They attempt to find a middle ground between exotic and familiar pleasures and to bring these forms (and their performers) into the European hierarchy of artistic expression, while establishing their performances as national heritage. The more modern the theatre where the troupe performs the better, for often there is a dual message: powerful, modern statehood, expressed in the accoutrements of civilization and technology, is wedded to a distinctive national identity. The performance offers cultural content for that identity. Such assertations are not confined to the concert stage. They are implicated in claims to territorial sovereignty, the drawing of political boundaries, the choice of official language, and many other matters of vital concern in the tension among nation, state, and culture. Claims to the past lay the ground for present and future claims. Having a past, a history, a "folklore" of your own, and institutions to bolster these claims is fundamental to the politics of culture: those who are concerned with demonstrating the possesssion of a national folklore, particularly as legitimated by a national museum and troupe, cite this attribute as a mark of being civilized. Folk Festival As a venue for the representation of culture, the festival derives its celebratory tone and environmental approach to staging from the joyful events associated with the traditional feasts and fˆtes that honor a religious anniversary, event, or personage. But unlike feasts (the etymological root of festival), which do what they are about, festivals of the kind that interest us here re-enact, re-present, and re-create activities and settings in a discrete performance setting designed for specular (and aural) commerce. Such events acquire a distinctive (if plural) semiotic status. Quivering with issues of authenticity and iconicity, these events tend to make a clear separation between doers and watchers--or among kinds of doers--even with efforts to encourage 'participation'. These issues are dramatized by the highly successful Festival of American Folklife, produced annually since 1967 on the Mall in Washington, D.C., by the Office of Folklife Programs at the Smithsonian Institution. This pioneering program is sensitive to the issues raised here and addresses them by experimenting with new ways to present American folklife to the public. Two cases are particularly instructive here: the Festival of India and the Old Ways in the New World programs. Seen in historical perspective, these programs blend the national and state pavilions, long a staple feature of world's fairs in America, and the homelands exhibitions and festivals that celebrated immigrant "gifts" during the first half of this century. Festival of India Recognizing the festival as a readymade genre of presentation, the 1975 Guidelines for the Festival of American Folklife advised the following: Because many genres survive in the context of esoteric community celebrations and rituals, large scale traditional celebration events should be used as organizing structures for "Old Ways in the New World" programs. Such events can be parades, processions, picnics, festivals, religious ceremonies, wedding festivities, or any similar event in which performing arts are closely associated with other traditional expressive forms....Celebration events should allow direct participation by Festival visitors. However connected they may be to what communities do at home, the festival within a festival is a recreation. At its most mimetic, it offers a sumptuous alternative to the sensory atrophy of the bare stage. The festival within a festival format also presents formidable ethnographic and logistical challenges, particularly at the points where the two festivals are incompatible. This insight guided the decision to embed a festival within a festival, the Festival of India within the Festival of American Folklife, in 1985: The Mela program on the Mall is really a fair within a fair. It is a composite mela, compressing both space and time to present selectively only a few of India's many traditions. Just as a mela would in India, the program encourages visitors to learn about and participate in Indian culture. The structures on the Mall have been built largely with natural and handcrafted materials from India, while the site itself has been designed to reflect indigenous Indian concepts. The mela, the fair that accompanies religious festivals in India, did indeed offer an ingenious format for displaying many kinds of artifacts, activities, and people (dance, music, acrobatics, street performers, religious observance, food, architecture, crafts) as they are integrated in their native setting. But of course this mela was to occur during a festival of our own making and our festival and those of India are not necessarily compatible. Smithsonian festivals are events produced for the public with the taxpayers' dollars: they are not-for-profit ventures and studiously avoid the slightest hint of commercialism. Things are not for sale, except at one small gift shop inconspicuously positioned at the edge of the main events. Goods are carefully selected for their appropriateness and salespersons are expected to be well-informed about the objects, their makers, and communities. They offer items relating to all the exhibits. Indian fairs, by way of contrast, are full of things to buy. Each craftsperson and stallkeeper competes to sell goods. The Smithsonian mela on the Mall was a representation of a commercial environment, which, while mimetically very complete, stopped short of commercial exchange, one of its defining features. Indeed, the representation was so complete that it was necessary to post signs in the stalls to indicate that the goods were not for sale. Perhaps as a concession to "authenticity," visitors could make purchases at a few designated stalls, as well as in the sales tent. What happens when a commercial Indian fair is embedded inside a non-commercial Smithsonian festival? Stalls of goods for sale that cannot be sold. Food presented a similar problem. Clearly, the Department of Health would not countenance vendors from India without licences to feed visitors to the Mall. An Indian hotel chain catered the festival from a central post in the mela. Even had Department of Health requirements been met, those planning festivals encounter the resistance of local vendors to any intrusion on their economic turf by traditional cooks brought in for the day. This effectively inhibits efforts to recreate the culinary environment of traditional festivals. Though intended as an evocative recreation, ethnographically accurate and authentic in most details, the festival within the festival is a distinct type of performance event, and whatever else happens, the visitor experiences it as such. Though the intension may be the illusion of being in India, it is the recreation itself that is experienced, with all of its tensions and ambiguities. When carried to extremes, as in the case of first-person interpretation at Plimoth Plantation, visitors experience the thrill of the hyperreal and at the same time the fragility of the membrane that has been constructed to separate the present place and time from that which has been reconstructed. Old Ways in the New World Raising yet another set of problems, The Old Ways in the New World program integrated the national pavilion and the homeland exhibition in an attempt to juxtapose folk artists in immigrant communities with their counterparts in their home countries. This was also a way to involve foreign countries in a festival of American folklife. But in the case of Jews, the assumption of an "old world" presented insurmountable problems. There was no old world. The European Jewish communities were largely destroyed during the Holocaust. Eliding differences between old world and homeland, Israel was selected as the Jewish old world for the purposes of the festival. But the "old ways" of American Jews were not to be found in the newly formed Jewish state, which was itself a case of new ways in the new world. Nor was Israel willing to be cast as the old ways of American Jews. Quite the contrary. When working with the Ministry of Education and Culture in Israel to identify appropriate performers for the Jewish section of the Bicentennial Festival of American Folklife in 1976, I was instructed to bring the finest exponents of "authentic" traditional art forms. Some of the performers that met this standard were born in Yemen, Morocco, or Iraq and were advanced in years. Officials responsible for Israeli participation wanted to send Israeli folk dance troupes, arguing that they were young, athletic, lively, versatile, and specially adapted for the stage. Not only were the professional folk dance troupes costumed and choreographed, but, I was told, they had been trained to perform the music and dance of the many different Jewish communities living in Israel. Their performances conformed to professional standards and were stylized to reduce their strangeness. These were precisely the groups the Office of Folklife Programs had instructed me not to bring. The Israeli officials complained further that my choices would present entirely the wrong image of contemporary Israel and would offer a poor performance to boot: Israel and its culture were not to be represented by old immigrants performing exotic music of the diaspora. Even to the extent that we succeeded in bringing traditional performers of our choice, we still faced the problem of relating these traditions to Jewish immigrants in America. Staging Culture A key to the appeal of many festivals, with their promise of sensory saturation and thrilling strangeness, is an insatiable and promiscuous appetite for wonder. The irreducibility of strangeness, a feature of tourist discourse more generally, inscribes on the geography of the exotic a history of receding wonder threshholds: as exposure exhausts novelty, new ways to raise the wonder threshhold must be found. The passion for wonder also accounts for the primacy of spectacle as a presentational mode, and the tension between the very unspectacular nature of much material that we might want to present and the expectation of audiences that they will get a good show. Given the special way that spectacle works (clear separation of observer and actor, primacy of the visual mode, and an aggrandizing ethos), the spectacle of festival evokes what MacAloon has characterized as diffuse wonder or awe and precipitates intellectual and moral ambiguity, even with the various efforts to mitigate the effects. We complain of ritual degenerating into spectacle, into sheer show. Historically, however, we have long valued the inscrutable strangeness of the exotic as an end in itself. The appeal of the villages on the Midway of the Chicago Fair depended largely on such mystification, and many multi-cultural festivals today still feed this appetite, while encouraging understanding and reflection by offering "interpretation." That we objectify culture has long been recognized; festivals, however, also objectify the human performers and implicate them directly in this process. This is an inherently problematic way to confront cultural questions, for spectacle, by its very nature, displaces analysis, and tends to suppress profound issues of conflict and marginalization. The more that ethnographic festivals and museum exhibitions succeed in their visual appeal and spectacular effect, the more they reclassify what they present as art, aestheticize that which is marginal, and risk appealing to prurient interest. Fighting the spectacular and the illusion of recreation, the Office of Folklife Programs at the Smithsonian Institution, has long advocated what might be called an ascetic approach to staging: Costumes used only for stage performances, or for other exoteric purposes, are not appropriate for the Festival. This matter should be thoroughly reviewed in the field and reiterated in formal invitations and correspondence with participating groups and individuals. In 1974, all the Greek-American participants, and most of the foreign Greek participants wore ordinary clothes throughout the five-day presentation. Costume was not a part of the two Greek-American glendis held on the Mall, because it is not customarily worn at glendis in this country. A few elderly participants from Greece wore traditional clothes every day, as they always do at home. The concern that costumes that are only worn for stage performances not be donned for the Smithsonian presentation presents a paradox--from the perspective of many participants, the folklife festival is a stage performance, so why not wear costumes? There is a conflict here between two aesthetics. As the Smithsonian Guidelines suggest, festivals organized by dominant cultural institutions such as museums and state folklife programs or funded by state and federal agencies share a performance discourse that often stands in contrast (if not in opposition) to the ways communities stage themselves. These differences are more than matters of taste and style; they offer different approaches to the marking of authenticity. Hallmarks of the festivals mounted by professional folklorists in the past include a focus both on performers who claim the forms they perform as their birthright and on the traditional components of their repertoire. Performance practices that entail an adaptation to the concert stage are discouraged, despite the fact that communities have often developed their own troupes, costumes, repertoires, choreography, musical arrangements, interpretations, dramatizations, and other conventions for presenting their performing arts on the concert stage for themselves and for outsiders. Such adaptations, which may be viewed as touristic kitsch, are studiously avoided by folklorists in favor of a very different set of conventions, many of which have evolved specifically for this type of festival. Typically, solo performers and ensembles are selected from among those who normally play at a community's festivities. Wearing ordinary clothing, they play on a bare stage within a large tent, the audience seated on bleechers or benches, or on a concert stage in an indoor auditorium. High tech sound equipment and professional stage technicians ensure the best possible acoustics and documentary recording of the event. Explanatory text panels may be mounted near the entrance to the tent, and a large photomural of the performer's home environment may serve as a backdrop. An informed "presenter" introduces the performers, with sensitive expanations about the history, context, and meaning of what the audience is about to hear. The program booklet supplements the presentation with illustrated essays about the communities and traditions featured at the festival. Formal concerts are complemented by interactive and didactic workshops, demonstrations, lectures, and films. Performers are discouraged from the use of electronic instruments, though there are exceptions, "ethnic costumes", non- traditional repertoire, concertized performance styles, and choreography adapted for the stage, and other overtly theatrical concessions. There is thus a suppression of representation markers and a foregrounding of presentation markers, an avoidance of the suggestions of "theatre" and an attempt to achieve the quality of pure presence, of a slice of life. Given the history of national troupes and pavilions and homeland exhibitions, it is easy to see why groups would expect to appear in costume and in organized groups. This is after all the public face, as they have constructed it, of their private lives. And given the way that spectacle brings authenticity into question, it is easy to see why an ascetic aesthetic to staging should appeal to festival producers aiming to present rather than represent that life. Performing Difference The interest in displaying performance or in using performance as a way of displaying culture is, like the series of objects arranged to show a continuous historical process, linked to particular theoretical orientations. First, performance- oriented approaches to culture place a premium on the particularities of human action, on language as spoken and ritual as performed. Such approaches resist stripping the observed behavior of contingency in order to formulate norms, ideals, and structures of competency. Second, cultural performances as units of analysis have offered a distinct methodological advantage to those grappling with large and complex societies, where approaches that worked well in small settings are inadequate. The Manchester school of social anthropology found in "social dramas"--events that involved a breach of some kind and efforts to deal with it--a useful way to focus cultural analysis. Sociologist Erving Goffman brought a dramaturgical approach to the analysis of ordinary social life in his own milieu. Third, performance, whether a focus for research or basis of ethnographic display, is compatible with efforts among folklorists and anthropologists to deal with issues of diversity, pluralism, cultural equity, and empowerment, particularly when participants can control how they are represented. The issue of who is qualified to perform culture is thorny because it reveals the implicit privileging of descent over consent in matters of cultural participation. Though the guidelines for producing folklife festival programs stress visitor "participation," they are also usually clear in specifying that the "performers" at the festival are to be those to whom the arts 'belong' by virtue of their having been acquired in a traditional manner and setting, that is, by insiders from insiders--by descent, though this distinction is not rigidly applied. "Outsiders", those who have chosen to learn the art even though they were not born into the communities that transmit it, are generally considered revivalists and may be excluded on this count, though here too the matter is more complicated. There thus operates a distinction between those who are licensed to do and those who are mandated to watch. The event is to be structured, however, in ways that will allow the watchers to "participate," a notion that generally stops short of performing the tradition themselves, except as they are invited to join a procession or the dancing and group singing. The curatorial problem in folk festivals is the delicate one of determining not only what meets certain standards of excellence, but first and foremost, what qualifies as authentic folk performance. As a result, performances at folk festivals are often artifacts of the discipline of folklore, whatever else they may be. We speak of the "Child ballads," the Grimm m„rchen, and other traditional forms that have been canonized in printed collections, museum exhibitions, commercial recordings, and folk festivals. We also create the criteria by which the multiplicity of forms we find can be sorted into their "preferred" and "residual" categories. The danger here is what Stuart Hall calls self-enclosed approaches, which "valuing 'tradition' for its own sake, and treating it in an ahistorical manner, analyze cultural forms as if they contained within themselves from their moment of origin, some fixed and unchanging meaning or value." The pressure is there to do just this. Further, those who organize folk festivals must accept the responsibility for representing those they include in "their most traditionalist form". While folklife festivals attempt to represent traditions that would otherwise not be exposed, it is also the case that those who perform tend to be represented exclusively in traditional terms. Following Stuart Hall, we might consider the opposition of folklore/not folklore, not as a descriptive problem or a matter of coming up with the right inventory of cultural forms, but rather in terms of the "forces and relations which sustain the distinction, the difference" between what counts as a genuine tradition, a revival, fakelore, or elite culture. Hall suggests that the categories tend to remain, though the inventories change, and that institutions such as universities, museums, and arts councils play a crucial role in maintaining the distinctions: "The important fact, then, is not a mere descriptive inventory--which may have the negative effect of freezing popular culture into some timeless dscriptive mould--but the relations of power which are constantly punctuating and dividing the domain of culture into its preferred and its residual categories." Similarly, by aestheticizing folklore-- no matter what is gained by the all-inclusive definition of folklore as the arts of everyday life--we are in danger of depoliticizing what we present by valorizing an aesthetics of marginalization. Though there are still many festivals devoted to the traditions of a single ethnic group, large scale events sponsored by city, state, and federal agencies are generally multi-cultural in nature. They participate in the discourse of pluralism, of unity in diversity. They risk what might be termed the banality of difference, whereby the proliferation of variation has the neutralizing effect of rendering difference (and conflict) inconsequential. This is the effect by design of the pageants of democracy so popular during the first decades of this century. Though offered as an alternative to the brutal efforts of nativists to suppress difference and preserve the preminence of Anglo stock and culture, the unity in diversity discourse can also have a neutralizing effect. In festivals of cultural performances, respectability and decorum, values of the dominant cultural institutions that stage the event, tend to coopt the oppositional potential that is so essential to a festival. For this and other reasons, these festivals have a tendency to reinforce the status quo, even as enlightened organizers and performers struggle to use them to voice oppositional values. Carnival represented is carnival tamed. In the case of the homeland exhibitions and festivals, immigrant organizations were already doing a good job of supporting a wide variety of cultural activities. "National festivals" organized by immigrant groups in American cities during the last decades of the nineteenth century attracted tens of thousands of participants. In the homelands exhibitions and festivals organized during the first half of this century, "cooperation" between Americanization agencies and immigrant groups, however well intentioned, also involved cooptation. Homelands exhibitions were designed to gain the trust of immigrants who, it was hoped, would allow themselves to be helped by Americanization organizations. These events were not only displays of immigrant gifts--crafts, music, dance, and wholesome values. Equally important--and the organizers were explicit on this point--these events were good public relations for the Americanization workers and social reformers, who were themselves on display. Through such exhibits and festivals, they could show their success in working with immigrants and lobby for increased support. * Exhibitions, whether of objects or people, are displays of the artifacts of our disciplines. They are for this reason also exhibits of those who make them, no matter what their ostensible subject. The first order of business is therefore to examine critically the conventions guiding ethnographic display, to explicate how displays constitute subjects and with what implications for those who see and those who are seen. Museum exhibitions, folkloric performances, and folklife festivals are guided by a poetics of detachment, in the sense not only of material fragments, but also of a distanced attitude. The question is not whether or not an object is of visual interest, but rather, how interest of any kind is created. All interest is vested.