briefly mentioned in passing. As I mentioned earlier in the chapter, on the first page of her introduction, Sinopoli writes that “like many early archaeological projects around the world, the history of the University of Michigan’s Philippine Expedition Collection is a part of the history of colonialism, specifically U.S. colonialism in the Philippines.”44 But this fundamental fact has no impact on the historical narrative or conceptual framework of the essay that follows. The only limitation to the Guthe collection that Sinopoli mentions has to do with how “cursory” Guthe’s agents’ fieldnotes were.45 Another scholar who studied the skeletal material in the Guthe collection admits that Guthe’s goal was the “recovery of exotic material” and that the “excavation techniques [Guthe] employed may not be entirely acceptable by today’s standards.”46 Again, this kind of brief reference to the highly problematic nature of Guthe’s methods and goals—not to mention the larger context of American colonialism—does not have any impact on the contemporary scholar’s research goals, methods, and findings.
In fact, both Guthe and the contemporary archaeologist come to the same tautological conclusion that the open and collectivist nature of indigenous burial practices constitutes an impediment to the study of those very practices. As I mentioned above, Guthe noted in the 1927 report that he published in American Anthropologist that “recent use” of the burial caves by “native shamans”—their open and collectivist burial practices—created “havoc” and interfered with his attempt to preserve and gather material for the future archive. Nearly ninety years later, in the aforementioned 2013 special issue of Asian Perspectives, two scholars agree with Guthe. One scholar notes that the “open nature of cave burials … poses a challenge for chronological control.”47 The other regretfully concludes, “The practice of collective burial often results in loss of information about the primary treatment of individual burials … as earlier remains are distributed by later burials and commemorative ritual acts.… As a result, it is not possible to ascribe particular goods to particular individuals.”48 For both Guthe and the contemporary archaeologist, the preservation of individual remains is crucial for their gathering and processing of information, and ongoing Filipino collectivist and open practices contribute to the scientists’ failure and the “loss of information.” Of course, one instead might think that the collectivist practices that Guthe inadvertently documents constitute the beginning of significant research findings. But neither “old” nor “new” research questions allow for deviation from the emphasis on the individual as the basis for accurate or complete preservation. Both old and new approaches to the burial material in the Guthe collection show how these scholars’ accumulative epistemology hampers rather than enables the acquisition of knowledge about the ostensible object of research. The object of American knowledge turns out to be not so much the Filipino as accumulation in and of itself. Sinopoli concludes that the contemporary scholarship affirms the “enduring value of old museum collections for shaping our understandings of ancient Southeast Asia.”49 With that conclusion, Sinopoli unwittingly underscores the epistemic conservation of power/knowledge that is part of the colonial project.
Both the “old” and the “new” research share an investment in the principle of preservation. At first glance the archaeologist’s goal of preservation is commendable: The scientist attempts to preserve everything before it all disappears. The act of preservation constitutes the scientist as a scientist and not a looter. Guthe was concerned about how forces of nature—including “native shamans”—were creating “chaos” at his chosen sites and disrupting the preservationist principle of his fieldwork. The contemporary archaeologist is concerned about time and the difficulty of establishing chronology. For both Guthe and the contemporary archaeologist, the implication is that local or indigenous peoples are incapable of appreciating what they have.
The scientist’s goal of material preservation turns out to be an alibi for accumulation, which in turn is a euphemism for looting and imperial adventure. Sinopoli explicitly if briefly refers to the history of “looting” in Southeast Asia in a very curious fashion. She argues that the Guthe collection is “remarkable … because it was made several decades before extensive looting of archaeological sites had become widespread across Southeast Asia.”50 Here, the curator at once confesses and denies that there is a fundamental problem with “looting.” On the one hand, Sinopoli acknowledges the massive problem of the “looting” of Southeast Asian archaeological sites. On the other hand, she does not seem able to grasp the possibility that archaeological fieldwork itself—and especially Guthe’s exhumation of mortuary sites that showed evidence of ongoing veneration by indigenous peoples—might be an act of looting. Accumulative epistemology shows itself and then conceals itself behind the alibi of archaeological discovery and preservation. In both Guthe’s and Sinopoli’s writings, the principle of preservation disguises what turns out to be an intersection between the idea of the racial primitive and accumulative epistemology.
Headhunters
Guthe and Sinopoli exemplify how an archaeologist writing in 1927 and a curator writing in 2013 can share a lack of awareness about the political and ethical ramifications of their research. What divides the civilized European from the “primitive” is this capacity or incapacity to produce self-reflective knowledge. The capacity for thought demarcates the boundary between the rational “heads” and the savage headhunters, and this division permeates the study of the social sciences and the arts in the West. In her capacious assessment of the rise of the social sciences in the West, Denise da Silva has argued that this racialized difference between mind and body must be understood as a spatialized organization of the human, rather than simply a question of biological racism, such that the world is mapped into zones occupied by what Silva calls the subject of transparency and the subject of affectability.51 David Lloyd focuses on the ramifications of this division in the arena of aesthetics, and he has distinguished between what he calls the “Subject without properties” and the racial, colonial subject.52
The UMMNH Philippine exhibit reinforces this boundary between the rational white American “head” and the Filipino headhunter, and visitors to the museum—children and adults—absorb and reiterate this difference. During one of my several visits to the Philippine exhibit, I was studying one of the display cases when a group of two men, one woman, and a child entered the gallery. Since it is a rather small space, I could not help overhearing their conversation. They probably were Michiganders visiting from out of town and apparently were white. Led by the boy’s curiosity, the group paused in front of a display case entitled “The Deadly Tools of a Warrior,” which includes several weapons from Mindanao and northern Luzon along with a “warrior’s necklace” made of boars’ teeth. The boy exclaimed, “Look at that cannibal necklace!” The adults murmured confusedly. Then the group shuffled along to the next gallery, with an exhibition entitled “Explore Evolution” that opened with placards explaining that humans and chimpanzees are “cousins in life’s family tree.” I do not think that anyone in the group had paused long enough to read the exhibit labels, which contain references to wartime practices of “headhunting.” For example, the “warrior’s necklace” is described as “worn by warriors in ceremonies that followed successful head-hunting raids,” while the label accompanying the display case’s main theme, “The Deadly Tools of a Warrior,” explains that “small groups of warriors” sometimes “took the heads of victims as trophies.”53 But they contain no reference to cannibalism.
Figure 1.5. Display cases E3–E8, Philippine exhibit at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.
Figure 1.6. “The Deadly Tools of a Warrior.” University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.
Figure 1.7. Detail of boars’ teeth necklace next to a photograph of Ibilao men. University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.
Nonetheless, the child visitor absorbed and voiced the message of cannibalism