collections formed the material and epistemological foundation of the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology as they emerged at Michigan’s flagship public university. According to Carla Sinopoli, the director of the Museum of Anthropology and the Museum Studies Program at the University of Michigan, there is “no denying that the anthropology museum and department are direct products of United States colonialism.”5 Three Michiganders are associated with these founding collections: the explorer Joseph Beale Steere (1842–1940), the anthropologist Carl Guthe (1893–1947), and the zoologist and colonial administrator Dean Conant Worcester (1866–1924). Their biographies provide us with the tale of how accumulation takes place.
A graduate of the University of Michigan’s law school, Joseph Beale Steere collected about sixty thousand specimens—botanical, zoological, and anthropological—during a circumglobal expedition that included the Philippines in the 1870s and then an expedition solely to the Philippines in the 1880s.6 These expeditions were sponsored by the University of Michigan, and they make up a significant part of the founding collection for the university’s natural history museum.7 In a 2012 lecture about Steere, the curator of the University of Michigan’s herbarium described the explorer as a “great old man, as it were, of the university museums.”8 Much of the museum’s rhetoric about Steere’s expedition follows a narrative of adventurous discovery and the accomplishment of firsts and foundations. Steere’s bronze bust stands in the entrance to the UMMNH, and the bust’s inscription and other informational posters about him note that Steere received the university’s first honorary doctorate and that his donation of over sixty-two thousand specimens “prompted U-M to build its first natural history museum in 1881.” Indeed, a display case about the museum building’s history informs us that the erection of the museum building was the “first for any public university in America.” The didactic—the museum label with historical, interpretive, and narratological material—about Steere adds that he collected “representatives of a multitude of plant and animal species and human cultural artifacts previously unknown to science” (emphasis added).9 Here we see the museum making an explicit connection between exploration, accumulation, discovery, and knowledge. Ironically, the proclamation constitutes a confession that what is being discovered is not so much the unknown non-Western world as the Western scientific way of knowing. Far from building knowledge about the Filipino, the accumulation of the Filipino enabled the American university to establish and legitimate its epistemology of science, or what Sylvia Wynter has called the “overrepresentation” of Man. The UMMNH founding collection exemplifies how, as Wynter phrases it, a “present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man … overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself” even as it also creates a “secular slot of Otherness as a replacement for the theocentric slot of Otherness.”10 Moreover, Steere’s achievement is not that the non-Western world becomes known to science, but rather that Western science no longer is “unknown to science.” Science can become known to itself. Science can discover itself, but only at the price of discounting non-Western epistemology and value systems.11
Figure 1.3. Bronze bust of Joseph Beal Steere by sculptor Carlton W. Angell, on display in the rotunda of the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.
One of Steere’s undergraduate students, Dean Conant Worcester would go on to establish himself as one of the few Philippine experts in the United States at the time, a reputation based on his publication of highly popular books about the Philippines.12 Worcester first traveled to the Philippines as a member of Steere’s second 1887 expedition, also sponsored by the University of Michigan. In the 1890s Worcester headed his own expedition to the Philippines, sponsored by the Minnesota Academy of Natural Sciences. Upon returning to the United States, he taught zoology at the University of Michigan and published a number of scholarly and popular books about the Philippines during the U.S. conquest. Worcester then transitioned to service as a colonial administrator in the Philippines with positions on the first and second Philippine Commissions and then, for over a decade starting in 1901, as secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which included governance over non-Christian tribes and peoples. After resigning from colonial governance, Worcester remained in the Philippines to pursue lucrative agribusiness interests, which included the development of large tracts of land he previously had acquired as secretary of the interior and investments in coconut products and cattle.
Worcester’s influence in the United States has lived on to the present moment because of the monumental size and controversial nature of his collection of photographs of the Philippines. Worcester was a zealous amateur photographer who also eventually turned to the movie camera. According to Mark Rice, during his years in the Philippines, Worcester took more than fifteen thousand photographs and more than two miles of film footage with the singular goal of authorizing and disseminating a particular “truth” about Philippine incapacity and the resulting need for a strong civilizing American presence.13 Nerissa Balce has argued that Worcester’s portraits of partially or entirely unclothed women in the Philippines established what she calls an “erotics of empire” that further reinforced the American perception of the Philippines as a fascinating and docile colony.14 Today the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology houses more than five thousand of Worcester’s original negatives and lantern slides, an archive that Rice calls “perhaps the largest collection of original negatives of officially sponsored colonial photography found in the United States.”15 Rice also points out that the distinctiveness of this archive lies in how much power was concentrated in and wielded by a single individual: “Despite the different photographers included, the collection of photographs that the archive represents was conceived, collected, and organized by Worcester.”16 A current-day special collections curator at the University of Michigan has said of Worcester’s pursuit of photography, “He was collecting. Forgive me for the metaphor but he was collecting humans.”17
Even as he transitioned from colonial administrator to businessman in the Philippines, Worcester continued to correspond with University of Michigan administrators. By the 1920s, several decades after Steere’s inaugural expeditions to the Philippines, Worcester had convinced the University of Michigan to sponsor a major archaeological expedition to the Philippines. By that time, the university had decided to create a separate anthropology museum, and it appointed the anthropologist Carl Guthe to direct the expedition. Guthe’s appointment shows how a network of midwestern academics became the basis for a network of colonial rule. Guthe had earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and his archaeology doctoral degree from Harvard. He had specialized in the archaeology of the Americas and had no expertise in Asian archaeology, but his name was “known to Worcester” because he also had attended the University of Michigan as an undergraduate.18 When Guthe arrived in the Philippines, Worcester loaned Guthe the use of his yacht. As manager of the Visayan Refining Company’s factory in Cebu, Worcester also created a “laboratory space” in the factory for Guthe’s use.19
Figure 1.4. Reconstructed burial cave with objects from a mortuary site in Bohol, Philippines, that Carl Guthe excavated in 1923–1924. University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.
With this support from Worcester and the university, Guthe oversaw the acquisition of thousands of objects from sites in the southern Philippines from 1922 to 1925. Guthe’s expedition yielded what became the founding collection of the Museum of Anthropology and what current-day scholars of the collection have called “arguably the most important collection of Philippine archaeological materials and Asian trade ceramics in the United States.”20 Carla Sinopoli also is the current-day curator of the Guthe collection, and she cites the collection’s size as the primary reason for its importance. The collection is “remarkable in the sheer number of sites explored” and “impressive in its breadth.”21 Sinopoli lists the data associated with Guthe’s fieldwork, and the numbers seem to speak for themselves. She notes that “materials from 485 sites were packed into 285 shipping crates” and sent to Ann Arbor; and “13,000 discrete objects [were] catalogued … under some 5300 catalog numbers.”22 Those objects included “3732 glass, shell, and stone beads … 76