Expanding Internationalism - A Conference on ... - Mary Jane Jacob

show. Conceptually it is more problematic. In restoring an autonomous
context for tribal works, doesn't his separatism itself -- which is
polemically pitted against similitude -- suggest a kind of homogenous
time-frame that is part of the peculiar western ideology of national
cultures Does the "separation" not reproduce another form of the binary
ordering that I've argued against In the "separation" is there not the
shadow of the atomization of cultural experience that follows the
particular western division of the private and the public -- the socially
effective and the psychically, sensuously effective -- even while he is
asserting that tribal objects would be better compared with utilitarian
objects rather than objects d'art.
MCEvilley is right to question that specific juxtaposition of
objects, but by demanding a separate space he doesn't question the
"homogeneous empty time" that frames both the connoiseurship he condemns
and, ironically, his own espousal of cultural pluralism and his
problematic ethnographic desire for a problematic transparency in the
reproduction and representation of the "intentionality" of the cultural
Other.
Intentionalities -- as the horizons of social and collective meaning
are always transformed in relation to the institutions and locations in
which they are represented; they can never be inscribed or repeated in and
for themselves.
Their cultural displacement is itself a matter of
interest: a site of re-location and re-inscription.
To demand that cultural judgement and choice be free of
ego-projections is also to ask for a denial of the super-ego;a disavowal
of the norms and values that constitute our awareness of the social and
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