Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

In a “prestige-goods economy,” writes Daniel K. Richter in “Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America,” “political advantage is gained through exercising control over access to resources that can only be obtained through external trade. These resources are not basic utilitarian items but wealth objects needed in social transactions” (p.15). The provenance of many wealth objects in collections of Native North American art goes back to gift exchanges when Indian women married French Canadian fur traders to solidify alliances for trade and peace. To solemnize such marriages, the women’s relatives exchanged Winter Counts, peace pipes, and parfleches for European trade cloth and brass kettles “acquired ready-made from geographically distant places” or glass beads “valued in their natural, unworked form as inherently endowed with qualitative worth” (Richter, p. 15.) “In either case,” according to Richter, “they constitute a type of inalienable wealth” in Native terms, “meaning they are goods that cannot be conceptually separate from their place or condition of origin but always relate whoever possesses them to that place or condition. The social power of such goods thus comes from their association with their source [and the] cultural skills [that went into their creation.] Indeed, inalienable goods never fully belong to those to whom they have been given; they always remain in some sense of the property of the giver. Those who control such prestige goods wield power because of their connection to—and control over—power at the goods source” (Richter, p. 15). About this power, anthropologist Bruce M. White writes, in “Encounters with Spirits: Ojibwa and Dakota Theories about the French and Their Merchandise”: “Indians believed that French technology was beyond the power of ordinary human beings and that the French themselves had nonhuman power” (Ethnohistory, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Summer, 1994), pp. 369-405.) The spiritual power of objects that Frenchmen themselves acquired from tribal people was reciprocally felt in 1906 when Picasso visited the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro: “the Negro sculptures were intercessors against threatening spirits. All the fetishes were weapons to help people stop being dominated by spirits. I understood why I was a painter. [T]he masks, the Red Indian dolls. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that day.” When the trading season ended, traders often returned to white wives in Montreal. “The age-old description of the trader [who] comes out of nowhere looking for things to exchange, then just as quickly disappears is very close,” writes Lane Relyea in “Your Everyday Artworld,” to the contemporary artist who swaps one setting for the next in a nomadic life. To describe how contemporary artists use whatever tools and materials come to hand, “the term bricoleur,” says Relyea, underwent “an immense surge in popularity in today’s art world.” In 1962, Claude Lévi-Strauss had used the term bricoleur to describe natives who recontextualized building blocks and tools of their material culture. In the 1970s, Birmingham School anthropologists applied the term bricoleur to post-industrial capitalists who recontextualize signs in their culture of consumption, leisure, and fashion.