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64th IFLA Conference Logo

   64th IFLA General Conference
   August 16 - August 21, 1998

 


Code Number: 109-145(WS)-E
Division Number: II.
Professional Group: Art Libraries
Joint Meeting with: -
Meeting Number: 145.
Simultaneous Interpretation:   No

Kaledoscopic Classifications: Redefining Information in a World Cultural Context

Barbara Mathe
Department of Library Services
American Museum of Natural History
New York, USA


Abstract:

The cultural confluence that humanity has been witnessing over the last century began with the technological leaps in travel and communication in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Africa, Oceania and the Americas, stories and images of the colonialists and their homeland were sometimes as fanciful as the early western descriptions of exotic lands. The turn of the century populace in Europe and the United States, unsteadied by the overwhelming change in world society, sought a reassuring order in the organized array of the International Expositions. This order was manifest in the social evolutionist classification schemes devised to arrange the exhibits. One of these systems devised for the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition had a far reaching but unacknowledged effect on western epistemology. Apparently, Melvil Dewey used the scheme as the basis for his Decimal Classification System. A visual illustration of one of these classification schemes is apparent in a collection if photographs of indigenous people from Africa, Asia, North and South America who were exhibited at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition.


Paper

In 1819 Sir David Brewster described his invention of a viewing mechanism, a cylinder in which mirrors were set at angle. He called it a Kaleidoscope, "beautiful-image viewer" in Greek. The device created its beautiful images by collecting and combining different points of view into a single arrangement. (1) This paper is about perception and point of view. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they are not identical. Perceptions are based on point of view. As in the kaleidoscope, perceptions are based on combinations--collections of numerous points of view. This fact is acknowledged in the art of the cubists. It can be seen in the art of the indigenous people of the Northwest Coast of North America.. It is the basis of motion picture production. It is essential to understanding how collections of images acquire meaning.

Collections are the basis of systematic observation. Without the opportunity to compare or contrast-to discern the similarities and differences among objects--knowledge would not be possible. Traditionally, classifying objects in a collection serves two purposes; first, to name the item-in the tradition of Linnean nomenclature--according to similarities of features, and second-in the tradition of Cutter's collocation--to locate the item in place, preferably adjacent to other items which share similar features. How one arranges and describes objects in a collection defines the scheme of knowledge. There can be more than one single scheme of knowledge. Like the view through the kaleidoscope, the same collection of objects or images may be rearranged to create a different order. For example, natural history classification has changed radically with the introduction of cladistics.

Classification schemes were an integral part of American International Expositions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition held in St. Louis in 1904 continued the tradition of the World's Fairs of the previous half-century, extolling the virtues of the progress of Euro-American society. The essential message was the celebration of the modernist idea that the social evolution of the human race had reached its height in the rational order provided by scientific and technological advances. (2) Modernism as defined by Vaclav Havel could be defined as "a period dominated by the belief that the world is a wholly knowable system governed by a finite number of universal laws that might be grasped and used for the benefit of mankind." (3) But the rapidity of social change unsteadied the Euro-American populace which had moved from horse-drawn carriages, engravings and sailing ships to automobiles, moving pictures, telephones and flying machines in less than fifty years.

Travel, while a growing phenomenon, was still restricted to the few, but the increasing numbers of illustrated newspapers and magazines brought the outside world closer to home. Stereographs were so widespread in the second half of the nineteenth century that they have been called the first form of visual mass media. The inevitable centerpiece of the Victorian parlor was the stereograph where three dimensional representations of faraway places and unimaginable people were a source of fascination. Meanwhile the inhabitants of these now less distant lands were also being affected by growing contact with more technologically oriented nations.(4) Colonialism and acculturation were often the result. The world was becoming smaller.

The International Expositions provided a reassuring order firmly based on the epistemological authority of scientists and the social authority of those responsible for production. It was manifest in the classification schemes devised to arrange the exhibits at the expositions. William Phipps Blake, a geologist, exhibition specialist and descendant of early Massachusetts settlers, devised a scheme for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Beginning with raw materials and proceeding to food, clothing, furniture, tools, manufactures and architecture and culminating in intellectual and artistic achievements, the displays were arranged, as noted by the March 4, 1876, New York Times, "to carry the spectator through the successive steps of human progress." Blake's system had a far reaching if unacknowledged effect on western epistemology. Apparently, Melvil Dewey used the scheme as the basis for his Decimal Classification System.

"A Universal Exposition is a vast Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology, of man and his works" proclaimed F.J.V. Skiff, Director of the exhibits at St. Louis. His classification scheme for the Fair was structured to describe an ideal "composite of man," composed of aspects of each of the sixteen departments. Within each of the departments, the exhibits were arranged in a "sequential synopsis of the developments that have marked man's progress." The entire arrangement was based on the social evolutionist belief in the gradual progression of mankind culminating in the superiority of the white Euro-American (male). To illustrate the point, thousands of indigenous people were collected and brought from around the globe to be displayed at the St. Louis Fair for anthropological comparison, not only in the Department of Anthropology but on the Pike (the amusement area) and in the U.S. Government sponsored Philippine Exhibition. The directors intended to establish a "comprehensive Anthropological Exhibition, constituting a congress of races and exhibiting, particularly the barbarous and semi-barbarous people of the world."

William J. McGee, appointed to head the anthropology department, had rated the peoples of the world in four culture grades, savagery, barbarism, civilization and enlightenment. His statement outlined the purpose of the Anthropology Department at the St. Louis Fair: "to represent human progress from the dark prime to the highest enlightenment, from savagery to civic organization, from egoism to altruism. The method will be to use living peoples in their accustomed avocations as our great object lesson." (5)

The concept of object lesson had been promoted 15 years before by G. Brown Goode, Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Recognizing the increasing prominence of visual information in the late 19th century, Goode advocated visual means of education. When called upon to create the classification system for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he described his vision of the Fair as "an illustrated encyclopedia of civilization."

The photographic collection at the American Museum of Natural History holds over 300 original prints and glass plate negatives taken of the anthropological exhibits at the St. Louis Fair. Formerly under the auspices of the museum's education department, the collection is mounted on cards and had been loosely arranged by category in file cabinets with no regard for provenance. The photographs from St. Louis were discovered and found to be taken by a woman named Jessie Tarbox Beals, an official photographers at the fair and one of the first women photojournalists in the United States. For years, the Beals Collection was dispersed within the archive, primarily by geographic designation, and used, like the exhibits themselves, to illustrate life in the native lands of the people on display at the Fair. The reunified collection graphically illustrates the social Darwinist classification schemes prominent at the time as well as the contemporary attitudes to visual display and education at the turn of the century.

The photographs taken on the Pike most dramatically illustrate the post-modern spectacle of disconnected representation. A picture captioned "Eskimeaux Hut" records the conglomeration of imagery found in the Eskimo Village. Centered in front of what appears to be a large painted backdrop is a tiny log cabin, not large enough for a grown man to stand. Sitting, rather forlornly, in the doorway is an Inuit man and a child about two years old. In the front of the building is a curved track on which sit another child, and two huskies. To the right of the little cabin is a reconstruction of a plains Indian teepee and to the left, a miniature totem pole, both generalized symbols of exotic Indians still found at tourist attractions today with no regard for the fact that vastly different cultures, separated by thousands of miles are exhibited as a whole.

The Cliff Dwellers exhibit was a standard on the Exposition Midway Circuit. The mock pueblo structure, included Hopi and Zuni people from the U.S. Southwest. Beals photographed the exhibit, posing many of the people in front. However, she apparently borrowed at least two men, possibly from the Cummins Indian Congress down the Pike, who with their Plains feather headdresses better fit the requisite stereotype of the American Indian.

There were, in effect, two types of Anthropology exhibits, one presided over by showmen, the other by scientists. The result was a blurring of the distinction between scientific representation and diversion. The concessions on the Pike assumed the authority of the scientists, while the Anthropology Department and the Philippine Exhibition were often viewed with the same merriment as the Pike.

McGee's emphasis on the study of "savages" and "barbarians" resulted in an Anthropology Department collection of non-white people who had no real national representation. These were people without political power, aboriginal peoples from all parts of the globe; the Ainu from Northern Japan, the "Giant Patagonians" (Tehuelche) from Argentina, pygmies from Africa, the Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw) from British Columbia and various Native American tribes from within the U.S., including Chief Joseph, Quannah Parker and Geronimo, who was on display as a prisoner of the United States Government.

Beals would often make a point of showing exhibited people being gawked at by the curious and leering fairgoers. In one photograph, "Ainu Woman Making Mats for Wall and Door Hangings," she took the subject's point of view. In the center of the picture is the Ainu woman weaving, her young boy on the left behind her weaving frame. Directly behind her, stooping down to peer through the doorway are a group of fairgoers, behatted, starched and grinning. The Ainu woman's head is turned away from their stare.

Beals photographed Ota Benga, an African pygmy, who later acquired some notoriety for having been exhibited after the St. Louis Fair, at the New York Zoological Gardens in the primate cage. Less known is the fact that Samuel Verner, the missionary/amateur anthropologist responsible for bringing Ota Benga to the Fair, returned to the Congo with Ota Benga and demonstrated what had transpired in St. Louis by sitting on a rocking chair on display in an enclosure, reading and smoking a pipe while listening to a gramophone. (6)

The Philippine "Reservation" was arguably one of the first theme parks. Sponsored by the U.S. Government under the auspices of the War Department (7) , it was inhabited by over 1,400 Filipino men, women and children. Villages of the various Filipino "types" surrounded a central plaza of official buildings, Government, Forestry, Commerce, Education, etc., echoing the classification of the Fair itself. The evolution of the Filipino was illustrated in the 1904 World's Fair Bulletin, beginning with the Negritos, "the lowest type of humans in the islands," Next above were the Igorot, "capable of much higher development." The Moro were described as "Fierce Mohammedan Fighters." The Visayan (Christian converts) were shown in western dress and described as a "high type of native people." Finally, at the pinnacle, the Spanish-Filipino Mestizo family was described as "highly educated and refined."

Beals captured the implicit messages of racial hierarchy structured into the Fair in her photographs. She shows two Visayan woman, both in American style dress. One is sewing manufactured cloth on a sewing machine, the other stands in a doorway. The Visayan, both Christianized and acculturated, were ranked highest among the Filipino people on display. In contrast, "Igorrote Women Weaving Cloth" places the Igorote at a lower level of development by virtue of their simple technology.

The American Museum of Natural History opened an enormous Philippine Hall in 1909, based on the collection of ethnographic material purchased from the St. Louis Exposition. Two photographs of Igorrote women weaving were used as visual references for life groups created for hall, which were obviously designed with the exposition displays in mind. In addition a number of Beals's photos were enlarged and displayed as transparencies in the Hall along with photographs actually taken in the Philippines. Until recently the same grouping existed in the photographic collection, where the Filipino images were filed under Philippines, the Kwakiutl under British Columbia and the Pygmy under Africa.

Curatorial duties of librarians and archivists in charge of photographic collections go beyond researching and mounting exhibitions. Collections formerly organized by subject should be reevaluated and rearranged, as much as possible, according to the two archival principles of provenance and original order. Nevertheless, it must be kept in mind that arrangements are artificial structures. It is obvious that Beals herself used some of these images to represent people in their native lands and not in St. Louis. A number of the original negatives were retouched to remove traces of the Fair. In many cases it is impossible to tell by looking if the photographs were taken at the Fair or at home. And some of these pictures are still reproduced in books without mention of the Fair.

Mercifully we live in a world where the collections may be kept together according to archival principles while at the same multiple subject headings can provide greater access to the material. Digitization of photographic collections will also make it possible for the images to be used in many of the local museums being established by indigenous people. We can hope that their own subject headings, meaningful to their cultural history might be added to the record and in some way add a different point of view to the meaning of the images.

Footnotes

  1. Gombrich. E.H., The Sense of Order, London 1979, 149.

  2. Rydell, Robert W., All the World's a Fair, Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916, Chicago, 1984, 2-4.

  3. Havel, Vaclav, The End of the Modern Era, New York Times, June 24, 1992

  4. Indigenous classification systems have been largely ignored and deserve closer examination.

  5. Ibid. Rydell, p. 159-162

  6. Bradford, Phillips Verner and Harvey Blume. Ota Benga: The Pygmy at the Zoo, New York, p. 139

  7. The United States had recently acquired the Philippines as a possession as a result of the 1898 treaty ending the Spanish-American War.