![2 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott
aesthetics. He posits instead that a proper anthropology of art should
take place within the ‘socio-relational matrix in which [art] is embedded’
(Gell 1998: 7). In this way, he proposes to treat art as ‘a system of action,
intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions
about it’ (ibid.: 6).
Thus equipped, Gell takes the reader on an intense, sometimes mind-
bending, exploration of art, agency, personhood, objecthood, cognition,
temporality and creativity. Here, nkisi ‘power figures’, religious icons,
aging Toyotas and landmines jostle freely with oil paintings, tattoos and
Marcel Duchamp’s compositions as potential ‘art-objects’ that connect
– or even act as – persons. Somewhere along the line, ‘aesthetics’ creeps
back in under a different guise as a vital feature of transformation and cre-
ativity. By this stage, however, so many commonsense notions have been
destabilized that – for some critics, at least – this is more a strength of the
theory than a contradiction. At its close, the book is no longer just about
‘art’, but has morphed into a whole new theory of personhood, material-
ity, cognition and sociality. Many scholars find this prospect irresistibly
exciting. Others have denounced it as verbose claptrap.
When we first discussed holding a symposium to mark the tenth anni-
versary of Art and Agency’s publication, these extreme responses were
foremost in our mind. We were not motivated merely by a desire to cel-
ebrate the book or its author. Rather, we both felt the need to address
a shared, nagging discomfort: that ten years after its emergence, during
which time it had been read by students and academics across a range of
disciplines and traditions, Art and Agency was beginning to lose the con-
troversial edge that had brought it to prominence. Indeed, there was and
remains a sense in which it had never really fulfilled its potential, in part
because the conversation around the book had never gone far enough:
people either loved it or hated it, but there was little discussion between
the two poles.
In some ways, Gell’s theory has been the victim of its own success. As
doctoral students in Cambridge in the 2000s, we found it hard to escape
the sense of excitement that surrounded Art and Agency, and functioned
almost as a protective aura. The book had a certain ‘technical virtuosity’
(Gell 1992: 52) about it; it seemed fiendishly difficult and captivatingly
clever, and therein lay its allure. Yet as we began teaching undergradu-
ate and graduate courses on artefacts, materiality, art and museums – all
topics on which Gell had something to say – we also began to see this
captivation as a stumbling block. Although our students had all picked
up Art and Agency, few engaged with it beyond the first three chapters.
Perhaps this was because the book’s reputation was beginning to precede
it. Everyone knew, and repeated, the maxim that Gell’s theory was all
about how objects could be person-like in exercising social agency. While](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25873606-250521034255-a5c2ef81/85/Distributed-Objects-Meaning-And-Mattering-After-Alfred-Gell-Liana-Chua-Editor-Mark-Elliott-Editor-16-320.jpg)
![Adventures in the Art Nexus 5
Art and Agency opens as a gauntlet which Gell throws down to the
anthropological and art historical establishment. Elaborating on the
arguments in his 1992 essay, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and
the Enchantment of Technology’, Gell criticizes prevailing approaches to
the anthropology of art for ‘reify[ing] the “aesthetic response” indepen-
dently of the social context of its manifestations’ (Gell 1998: 4). For him,
a properly anthropological theory should revolve around ‘social relation-
ships, and not anything else’ (ibid.: 5). Consequently, he argues, what
analysts need to understand is not what art objects represent or symbol-
ize, but what they do within their social worlds – that is, their ‘practical
mediatory role . . . in the social process’ (ibid.: 6). An Asmat shield, for
example, may be of aesthetic interest to a scholar or Western museum
visitor, but to the opposing warrior for whom it was designed to be seen,
it was surely ‘fear-inducing’ (ibid.). From this perspective, ‘the nature of
the art object is a function of the social-relational matrix in which it is
embedded’ (ibid.: 7): the shield is effective not because of its aesthetic
beauty, but because of what it causes to happen. In this capacity, then, it
is a ‘social agent’: a person or a thing ‘seen as initiating causal sequences
of a particular type, that is, events caused by acts of mind or will or inten-
tion, rather than the mere concatenation of physical events’ (ibid.: 16).
This is where Gell begins to rattle the cage. This definition of agency
applies equally to persons and things; indeed, he ventures, if art objects
can be defined by their status as social agents, then ‘anything whatsoever
could, conceivably, be an art object from the anthropological point of
view, including living persons’ (Gell 1998: 7). Persons can be things and
things can be persons, because the focus here is not on essences (what
entities ‘are’) but on agency – what they ‘do in relation’ to each other. In
one fell swoop, Gell thus overturns a foundational distinction on which
most anthropologies and studies of art have been based. Suddenly, ques-
tions of authorship, creativity, control and indeed sociality are thrown
wide open. Can material entities be more than mere canvasses on which
humans exert their will? Wherein lies the power, the effect, of art? Where,
for that matter, are relations crafted and reshaped?
In Chapters 2 and 3, Gell expounds on ideas of ‘agency, intention,
causation, result, and transformation’ (ibid.: 6, italics in original) within
an analytical framework which he calls ‘the art nexus’. In it, he outlines
four key players. Chief among these is the ‘index’ – usually a made arte-
fact such as an art object – which enables its observer, or ‘recipient’,
to ‘make a causal inference’ (ibid.: 13, italics in original) regarding the
capabilities or intentions of its originator, usually the ‘artist’. Taking his
cue from the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, Gell calls this ‘particular
cognitive operation’ ‘the abduction of agency’ (ibid.: 13). The picture is
complicated with the addition of the ‘prototype’, that is, ‘the entity which](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25873606-250521034255-a5c2ef81/85/Distributed-Objects-Meaning-And-Mattering-After-Alfred-Gell-Liana-Chua-Editor-Mark-Elliott-Editor-19-320.jpg)
![8 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott
canoe prow board, for example, may be defined by the anthropologist as a
social agent because of its mediatory role in trade – and more specifically,
because it causes Trobrianders’ trading partners to ‘disgorg[e] their best
valuables without demur’ upon viewing it (ibid.: 71). Yet its ability to do
so rests on the socio-cultural context in which such exchanges occur, for
its viewers are likely to see in its ‘virtuosity’ evidence of its users’ ‘supe-
rior magic’, to which they must submit (ibid.: 71; see also Gell 1992).
Here, Trobriand magic is the ‘folk’ model of agency on which Gell’s
anthropological analysis is built.
The first chapters of Art and Agency thus feature a constant interplay
between two distinct levels and types of ‘agency’ – one anthropological,
one ‘folk’ – with Gell showing how the former should revolve around, and
indeed derive from, the latter. So far, so familiar. In the second part of the
book, however, Gell begins to pay more attention to a third kind of agency:
one which, unlike the previous two, is fundamentally ontological rather
than epistemological. Once again, the linchpin of this project is the index.
Most scholars have picked up on the notion that the Gellian index functions
chiefly as a sign that points to something else. In this vein, Art and Agency
has been described by Daniel Miller as a theory of ‘inferred intentional-
ity’, whereby the author looks ‘through objects to the embedded human
agency we infer that they contain’ (Miller 2005: 13). This much is true.
But what has often been glossed over, or perhaps overlooked, is another
vital aspect of the index: the fact that, in a properly Peircian sense, it bears
a direct causal relationship to its origin. It is, as Gell puts it, ‘the outcome,
and/or the instrument of, social agency’ (1998: 15; italics in original).
Put differently, Gell’s index is not a mere representation of its object –
say, a god or a set of social relations – but is fundamentally (part of) the
thing itself, just as ‘[a]n ambassador is a spatio-temporally detached frag-
ment of his nation’ (Gell 1998: 98). A West African nkisi figure, studded
with nails, is thus described as ‘the visible knot which ties together an
invisible skein of relations, fanning out in social space and social time’
(ibid.: 62), and the made artefact more generally as ‘a congealed residue
of performance and agency in object-form’ (ibid.: 68). This is a vital point
in Gell’s theory, which provides a link between the different sections of
the book. More than looking backwards through an index to its origina-
tor, we can also use it to move forward, to create, improvise and expand.
The index is not some dead-end, but a generative agent in itself which can
spawn new and modified forms as a locus of social creativity. As agents,
persons and things are thus inescapably temporal, ‘occupy[ing] a certain
biographical space, over which culture is picked up, transformed, and
passed on, through a series of life-stages’ (ibid.: 11).
Gell expands on this theme from Chapter 6 (Gell 1998; see also Gell,
this volume), where he begins to examine the mechanisms through which](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25873606-250521034255-a5c2ef81/85/Distributed-Objects-Meaning-And-Mattering-After-Alfred-Gell-Liana-Chua-Editor-Mark-Elliott-Editor-22-320.jpg)
![10 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott
transcend the distinction between them, and for apparently subordinat-
ing the ‘secondary agency’ of things to the ‘primary agency’ of persons
(Gell 1998: 20–21). Yet, by the end of the book, it has become impos-
sible to take even commonsense Western conceptions of ‘persons’ and
‘things’ for granted. While retaining the words, Gell is busy reconfiguring
the concepts by asking crucial ontological questions about the nature,
location and temporality of agency. This is illustrated, for example, in his
depiction of the creative agency of the artist.2
The oeuvre of a painter, he
points out, is innately temporal: each finished work usually builds on a
series of preparatory studies, and in turn becomes a study for later works.
Works of art taken together thus ‘form a macro-object, or temporal
object, which evolves over time’ (ibid.: 233).
The evolution of thought, that creative transformative process which
creates the macro-object, does not merely take place in the artist’s con-
sciousness. Rather, Gell argues, ‘“thinking” takes place outside us as well
as inside us’ (ibid.: 236). The artist’s creativity lies at the conjunction
of mind and canvas – or rather, they act as one within a single temporal
process. Like the poet who ‘writes down his lines, and then scratches them
out’, the artist’s ability to create and innovate relies ‘on the existence of
physical traces of his previous (mental) activity’ (ibid.: 236). While, ter-
minologically, Gell continues to privilege ‘cognition’ and ‘personhood’ as
the key foci of his approach, conceptually he actually reaches a point not
dissimilar to that of Tim Ingold (2000) or Bruno Latour (1993, 2005),
both of whom highlight the ontological symmetry (Latour 1993) of
humans and non-humans in the production of sociality (and indeed life
in general).3
The artefacts created by Gell’s artist are irreducibly person-
things – nodes in a form of cognition that, far from being purely mental
or internal, is ‘diffused in space and time, and . . . carried on through the
medium of physical indexes and transactions involving them’ (ibid.: 232).
Gell articulates this proposition through a theory of ‘distributed per-
sonhood’, in which he proposes to treat persons ‘not as bounded biologi-
cal organisms, but . . . all the objects and/or events in the milieu from
which agency or personhood can be abducted’ (Gell 1998: 222). In
this way,
[a] person and a person’s mind are not confined to particular spatio-temporal
coordinates, but consist of a spread of biographical events and memories of events,
and a dispersed category of material objects, traces, and leavings, which can be
attributed to a person and which, in aggregate, testify to agency and patienthood
during a biographical career which may, indeed, prolong itself long after biological
death. (ibid.: 222)
By this stage, Art and Agency has become a theory of creativity and (re)
generation. While the book thus closes on the same note on which it](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25873606-250521034255-a5c2ef81/85/Distributed-Objects-Meaning-And-Mattering-After-Alfred-Gell-Liana-Chua-Editor-Mark-Elliott-Editor-24-320.jpg)
![12 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott
323). Despite opening with the question of art – or more specifically, the
question of what an anthropology of art should entail – it nevertheless
consistently ‘brackets out the question of art might be’ (Rampley 2005:
542). For Gell, this is a deliberate analytical move (1998: 7): one that
enables him to discuss an eclectic jumble of examples, from Hindu idols
to Melanesian kula valuables, without fear of contradiction or incon-
sistency. Indeed, it is only through such examples that one can discern
what Gell sees as the important characteristics of art, such as technical
virtuosity, visual and cognitive ‘stickiness’ and temporality.
This lingering ambiguity over the conceptual place of art has infuri-
ated and inspired readers in equal measure. Ross Bowden, for example,
complains that ultimately, ‘it is completely irrelevant whether the indexes
he is discussing come under the heading of “art” or not’ (2004: 324),
while Robert Layton insists that ‘what Gell has identified as the distinc-
tive features of art cannot be understood except by recognizing the status
of art as a culturally constructed medium of visual expression’ (2003:
461). Several scholars have taken Gell to task for dismissing aesthetics as
a viable consideration in the anthropology of art, yet later building his
argument around ‘what most people might refer to as the aesthetic and
semantic dimensions of objects’ (Morphy 2009: 8; see also Layton 2003:
447; Bowden 2004: 320–22).4
For these and other critics, ‘art’ clearly
does exist out there, often as a highly problematic category (Graburn and
Glass 2004: 113), and Gell’s seemingly cavalier dismissal of what is widely
taken to be its most crucial aspect must surely detract from the viability
of his argument.
Had Gell lived to revise his theory, we wonder if he might have quali-
fied his argument about art and aesthetics more thoroughly. As Matthew
Rampley points out, Gell was not rejecting aesthetics per se, but aes-
thetics as a reified category which had been ‘artificially separate[d] . . .
from the larger transactional nexus to which it belongs’ (2005: 542).
Similarly, Jeremy Tanner and Robin Osborne note that ‘Gell’s stric-
tures concerning aestheticism . . . have a very specific anthropological
target, namely the contemporary program in anthropological aesthetics
developed by Howard Morphy, Jeremy Coote, and Anthony Shelton’
(2007: 6; see also Thomas 2001: 4). Indeed, as Eric Hirsch shows in
this volume, the study of meaning and aesthetics in an artefact or event’s
‘temporal presence’ is not necessarily incompatible with the approach laid
out in Art and Agency. Instead of undermining his theory, then, Gell’s
refusal to conform to the ‘aesthetics’ template arguably enriches it, by
clearing the way for comparisons of things and events which, while not
commonsensically art-like, nevertheless share important characteristics.
The indeterminacy and hence analytical elasticity of ‘art’ (Gell 1998:
7) is central to this project. As Janet Hoskins argues, Gell’s theory ‘about](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25873606-250521034255-a5c2ef81/85/Distributed-Objects-Meaning-And-Mattering-After-Alfred-Gell-Liana-Chua-Editor-Mark-Elliott-Editor-26-320.jpg)
![Adventures in the Art Nexus 13
the creation of art objects . . . could in fact be a theory about the creation
of all forms of material culture’ (2006: 75). In this reading, the contested
notion of art may be Gell’s springboard into the debate, but it is not the
end-point of his theoretical explorations. Perhaps the art nexus is better
thought of as what Rampley calls ‘a meta-concept: [in which] some “art”
transactions will be coded as aesthetic, some as magical and others as
religious, and so forth’ (2005: 542). Put differently, the advantage of
Gell’s framework is that it can potentially apply to anything involving the
artefactual or performative mediation of social agency – a notion substan-
tiated by the contributions to the present volume. In sum, while some
scholars have criticized Gell for his definition – or lack thereof – of ‘art’,
others have opted to run with it, using it as a theoretical and methodo-
logical tool through which to explore wider questions of agency, efficacy,
cognition and creativity.
A ‘Theory of Natural Anthropomorphism’? Persons, Things and
Material Agency
If Gell’s theory is not about ‘art qua art’ (Graburn and Glass 2004: 113),
it has certainly been widely depicted as a theory about objecthood and
materiality. Art and Agency was published at a time of revived social sci-
entific interest in material things (e.g. Barringer and Flynn 1998; Brown
2001; Gosden and Knowles 2001; Haraway 1991; Hoskins 1998; Ingold
2000; Latour 1993; Myers 2001; Spyer 1998; Thomas 1991) – when
scholars began shifting away from the ‘panegyric of textuality and discur-
sivity, to catch our theoretical sensitivities on the hard edges of the social
world again’ (Pels, Hetherington and Vandenberghe 2002: 1). Whether
or not Gell saw himself as part of this wave, it is undeniable that his book
became a prominent, almost metonymic, part of it.
Gell’s treatment of materiality, however, has been more controversial
than would initially appear. Over the years, he has been criticized for
doing both too much and too little with objects. Howard Morphy, for
example, has recently charged Gell with ‘deflect[ing] attention away from
human agency and attributing agency to the objects themselves’ (2009:
5). He argues that Gell’s ‘agentive object . . . is a case of analogy gone
too far’, for what an object can actually do (not that much) is not the
same as what some people ‘think’ an object can do (quite a lot; ibid.: 6).
For him, people’s relations to objects are inevitably contingent on ‘their
cultural background, their religious beliefs, their social status or gender
and so on’, such that ‘[m]eaning pre-exists action and indeed is one of
the things that makes agency possible’ (ibid.: 14). Yet in ‘focusing at
the level of social action with objects as agents’, Gell obscures all these](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25873606-250521034255-a5c2ef81/85/Distributed-Objects-Meaning-And-Mattering-After-Alfred-Gell-Liana-Chua-Editor-Mark-Elliott-Editor-27-320.jpg)
![14 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott
factors, and hence ‘the role of human agency in artistic production’ and
reception (ibid.: 6).
Interestingly, the opposite position has been taken by a number of
recent works on materiality, which accuse Gell of falling back on a
fundamentally social, person-based notion of agency. Daniel Miller, for
example, depicts Art and Agency as ‘a theory of natural anthropomor-
phism, where our primary reference point is to people and their inten-
tionality behind the world of artifacts’ (2005: 13), while the editors of
Thinking Through Things argue that Gell’s depiction of objects as ‘second-
ary agents’ ‘stops short of revising our commonsense notions of “person”
or “thing”’ (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007: 17; see also Leach
2007: 174). For these commentators, Gell’s failing is not that he occludes
human agency, but that he does not go far enough in challenging its tradi-
tional primacy in social anthropology. Despite briefly exploring the ‘thing-
ly causal properties’ of objects – to which he alludes in his example of Pol
Pot’s soldiers and their landmines (Gell 1998: 20–21) – he ultimately fails
to acknowledge the intrinsic agentive properties of artefacts.
Such contradictory readings of Art and Agency are as much responses
to wider debates within artefact-oriented fields as they are to the theory
itself. Until relatively recently, objects and materiality were of merely
intermittent interest in many of the humanities and social sciences (e.g.
Appadurai 1986; Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Mauss 2000; Miller
1987; Strathern 1988). It was only from the 1990s that scholars began
looking at things in themselves, rather than as symbols, language-like
units or bearers of social meanings and values, ‘enliven[ed]’ only by
‘human transactions and calculation’ (Appadurai 1986: 5). Focusing
on the different ways in which ‘the social is ordered, held, and “fixed”
by the material’, academics began talking about ‘entangled networks of
sociality/materiality’ (Pels, Hetherington and Vandenberghe 2002: 2),
and not simply the relations between them.
This ‘material turn’ has engendered numerous intriguing, often diver-
gent, theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of mate-
riality. While some scholars treat the study of things as an ontological
project, a means of exploring the mutual, symmetrical constitution of
humans and non-humans (e.g. Ingold 2000; Knappett 2002, 2005;
Latour 1993), others focus on people’s socially, culturally and religiously
mediated experiences of them (e.g. Engelke 2007; Hoskins 1998; Keane
1997; Miller 2005; Morgan 2010; Spyer 1998). Still others use objects
as methodological ‘hooks’ on which to explore anything from science to
identity to emotional attachment (e.g. Brown 2001; Miller 2008; Daston
2000; Turkle 2007).
Gell’s theory could potentially both substantiate and challenge each
of these approaches, depending on how it is construed and deployed.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25873606-250521034255-a5c2ef81/85/Distributed-Objects-Meaning-And-Mattering-After-Alfred-Gell-Liana-Chua-Editor-Mark-Elliott-Editor-28-320.jpg)
![16 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott
but what Carl Knappett, following Mauss (1936), calls ‘l’homme total’:
irreducible combinations of ‘biological organism, psychological agent,
and social person’ (Knappett 2005: 15).
In this respect, there was something of a nineteenth-century ethnolo-
gist about Gell. In scope and method, at least, he was more like James
Frazer or E.B. Tylor than, as Layton (2003: 448) and Morphy (2009:
22) imply, like Radcliffe-Brown.6
In common with the first two, he had
a resolutely comparative streak, pulling disparate theoretical and the-
matic fragments into his book; eclecticism itself was his method (see also
Thomas, this volume). Unsurprisingly, this approach, redolent as it is
of an earlier anthropological era, has ruffled a few feathers. Even before
postmodernism thrust the discipline into a ‘vortex of epistemological
anxieties’ (Metcalf 2002: 11), anthropologists were already shying away
from large-scale theorizing, from devising unifying theories to account
for multitudinous phenomena. While comparison remains acceptable,
universalist pronouncements are now panned as reductive, ethnocen-
tric, dehumanizing, overly vague and overly specific: in short, hopelessly
flawed. In trying to formulate a single anthropological theory with pre-
cisely that sort of universal reach, as applicable to ritual sculptures as it was
to modern art, Gell was straying into extremely awkward territory.
This has, of course, had repercussions. Gell’s selective incorporation
of insights from non-anthropological disciplines has sometimes been
depicted as flippant cherry-picking. Bowden, for example, has reproached
him for relying on ‘an anthropologically uninformed essay by the phi-
losopher Wollheim’ (2004: 315; italics added) in his discussion on style,
implying that this in itself detracts from his argument. Correspondingly,
Gell’s willingness to put Hindu idols, Marquesan tattoos and Marcel
Duchamp’s artworks next to each other as homologues (Gell 1992)
has understandably been construed as showing an audacious disregard
for that holy grail of anthropology and its cognate disciplines – context
(Strathern 1995: 160). Both Layton and Morphy, for instance, point
out that his strategy of ‘imagining oneself in the position of a member
of another culture’ (Layton 2003: 457) and hence claiming to know
what they think when considering an art object, ‘brackets off – almost
provides shutters to . . . the context of viewing’ (Morphy 2009: 7). The
implication, for contemporary readers at least, is clear: that an anthropol-
ogy of art, and indeed any sort of anthropology, must be premised on
‘how the objects [or other phenomena] are understood in the way they
are and how that relates to the ways in which they are used in context
and in turn how that contributes to ongoing socio-cultural processes’
(Morphy 2009: 9). In other words, any anthropology that has the temer-
ity to posit a mental unity to all of humanity, irrespective of context, is
highly suspicious.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25873606-250521034255-a5c2ef81/85/Distributed-Objects-Meaning-And-Mattering-After-Alfred-Gell-Liana-Chua-Editor-Mark-Elliott-Editor-30-320.jpg)
![Adventures in the Art Nexus 17
Such responses arguably reflect a widespread, deeply ingrained instinct
to protect the particular – those thematic and theoretical ‘small places’
(Eriksen 1995) that are academic specialists’ own backyards – against
the dangers inherent in generalization. While legitimate, these criticisms
highlight the tensions between different modes of scholarship in the
humanities and social sciences today. The questions they raise are funda-
mentally methodological: is there a place today for ‘grand’ theories, or at
least theories that can transcend the particularities of context? Are ‘big’
thought experiments of equal scholarly merit to thickly described case
studies and analyses? Is there a danger, conversely, of descending into
a paralysing ‘hyper-particularism’ (Keane 2008: S115) that eschews any
sort of comparison?
On these points, it is equally instructive to look at those responses to
Art and Agency which seek to extend its analytical and conceptual pos-
sibilities to larger disciplinary (sub)fields. While Gell’s indifference to
contextual histories, politics, transformations, contradictions and ‘messes
of real life’ (Chua 2009: 48), and his tendency to operate ‘ethnographi-
cally within closed contexts’ (Arnaut 2001: 206) has been widely com-
mented upon (e.g. Graburn and Glass 2004: 113; Lipset 2005: 111;
Morphy 2009: 17; Thomas 2001: 9), a number of writers have actually
seen this as a strength of his theory. Rampley, for example, points out
that it is precisely Art and Agency’s focus on ‘micro-social interactions’
that enables it to ‘illuminate various issues in art practice and theory in
Western societies’ (2005: 543) which might otherwise be obscured by a
focus on art as a social institution. Similarly, Tanner and Osborne reflect
that Gell’s ‘formulae and diagrams offer what is potentially an extremely
valuable tool for historical and comparative analysis’ in ‘allow[ing] one to
focus on fundamental underlying relational structures’ (2007: 21) – even
if, they hazard, he eventually found that formal diagrammatic analysis
could not capture the shifting, unfolding nature of agency (ibid.: 22). In
a different vein, Hoskins argues that Gell’s work is a useful means of stud-
ying ‘cross-cultural visuality’ – the ‘efficacy of an object’s appearance’ in
potentially any context (2006: 76). Nicholas Thomas pushes this further
by suggesting that even if Art and Agency is ‘largely unconcerned with
the political manipulation of art in a more concrete sense’ (2001: 9), it
is also plausible that ‘[t]he political may be enriched by an anthropology
“beyond aesthetics”’ (2001: 11).
For these writers, Art and Agency stands less as a behemoth to be taken
down a peg than as a catalyst to further exploration, innovation and, most
intriguingly, cross-disciplinary engagement. It is this invitation which we,
and the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume, have endeavoured
to take up.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25873606-250521034255-a5c2ef81/85/Distributed-Objects-Meaning-And-Mattering-After-Alfred-Gell-Liana-Chua-Editor-Mark-Elliott-Editor-31-320.jpg)
![20 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott
the limitations of Gell’s approach – in particular his ‘Durkheimian lean-
ings’, his ‘resilient, if ambivalent humanism’ that stops short of engaging
with the ‘thing-ly’ properties of objects and the socio-cultural ontolo-
gies in which they are produced. Looking at the ‘relay of social and
material mediation’ in three distinctive musical ontologies from the nine-
teenth century to the present, her chapter ‘expand[s] considerably on the
account of art’s social mediation proffered by Gell’.
Translating Gell’s approach into a new arena is similarly productive
for Warren Boutcher, who contributes a richly evocative analysis of the
agency of the book, writing and literature. Taking us into a realm where
materiality and the visual have often appeared to play different roles,
Boutcher sidesteps Gell’s apparent refusal to discuss literary theory, and
explores literature as a technology that magically extends the operations
of human faculties such as memory, and books and other literary artefacts
as indexes of social relations. His argument that ‘the magic of letters,
handwriting and the manuscript or printed codex’ which characterize
medieval attitudes to the book have their echo in recent and even con-
temporary readers’ engagement with the printed word, suggests how
the interaction between artwork and recipient must be considered across
great distances, both spatially and temporally.
Eric Hirsch extends the thread of comparison that has run through-
out this volume by pulling together anthropological studies of Australian
Aboriginal ritual painting and contemporary ritual performances in Papua
New Guinea, and art historical studies of Western painting in an investiga-
tion of how ‘artworks’ of different kinds can be understood as having their
own ‘temporal presence’ in addition to existing, as Gell argues, in time.
Drawing on Gell’s exploration of the extended mind and on Roy Wagner’s
notion of ‘epoch’ – that time which stands for itself, or is always ‘now’
– Hirsch argues that artworks are fundamentally performances that exist
within, but also generate, their own time. His emphasis on time’s presence
reaffirms the importance of aesthetics and meaning in a manner which
complements Gell’s stress on art as a performance and field of action.
Just as Art and Agency cuts controversially back and forth across space
and time, each contributor to this volume reaches across disciplinary,
cultural, methodological and temporal boundaries. The 2008 Cambridge
symposium concluded with a reception in the gallery of the Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) – a space in which artefacts from
across the world are assembled together. Thinking and talking about
Gell and his eclectic approach made a particular kind of sense amidst a
collection which, for over a century, had been fuelled by the relentless
acquisition, juxtaposition and comparison of artefacts from around the
world and throughout human history by generations of archaeologists
and anthropologists.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25873606-250521034255-a5c2ef81/85/Distributed-Objects-Meaning-And-Mattering-After-Alfred-Gell-Liana-Chua-Editor-Mark-Elliott-Editor-34-320.jpg)
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- 7. Distributed Objects Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell Edited by Liana Chua and Mark Elliott berghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com
- 8. First published in 2013 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2013, 2015 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott First paperback edition published in 2015 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Parts of Chapter 4 were previously published in Gell, Alfred. The Anthropology of Time (Oxford: Berg, 1992). Reproduced with the permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Distributed objects : meaning and mattering after Alfred Gell / edited by Liana Chua and Mark Elliott. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-744-8 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-78238- 913-2 (paperback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-85745-743-1 (ebook) 1. Art and anthropology. 2. Art and society. 3. Creative ability. 4. Gell, Alfred. I. Chua, Liana. II. Elliott, Mark. N72.A56D57 2013 701’.03--dc23 2012017051 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed on acid-free paper ISBN 978-0-85745-744-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-78238-913-2 paperback ISBN 978-0-85745-743-1 ebook
- 9. CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Preface ix Introduction: Adventures in the Art Nexus 1 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott 1. Threads of Thought: Reflections on Art and Agency 25 Susanne Küchler 2. Technologies of Routine and of Enchantment 39 Chris Gosden 3. Figuring out Death: Sculpture and Agency at the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and the Tomb of the First Emperor of China 58 Jeremy Tanner 4. The Network of Standard Stoppages (c.1985) 88 Alfred Gell 5. Gell’s Duchamp/Duchamp’s Gell 114 Simon Dell 6. Music: Ontology, Agency, Creativity 130 Georgina Born 7. Literary Art and Agency? Gell and the Magic of the Early Modern Book 155 Warren Boutcher
- 10. vi Contents 8. Art, Performance and Time’s Presence: Reflections on Temporality in Art and Agency 176 Eric Hirsch 9. Epilogue 201 Nicholas Thomas Notes on Contributors 207 Index 211
- 11. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 0.1 Alfred Gell, n.d. Worshippers before an Idol. 6 0.2 Alfred Gell, n.d. Preliminary sketch of the ‘art nexus’. 7 2.1 Bronze Age socketed axes from the late Bronze Age site at Tower Hill, Oxfordshire. 44 2.2 The Grotesque torc from Snettisham. 48 2.3 The Sutton scabbard. 50 2.4 Gallo-Belgic C coin abstraction. 51 3.1 Tomb of Mausolus of Caria, Halicarnassus, c. 350 BC. Reconstruction by Peter Jackson. 62 3.2 The Tomb Mound of the First Emperor, erected c. 221–210 BC. 63 3.3 The Terracotta Army. Pit 1. 221–210 BC. 64 3.4 Plan of Changtaiguan tomb M1, Xinyang, Henan Province. Fifth to fourth century BC. 67 3.5 Early Chinese funerary figurines. (a) From Mashan, Jiangling, Hubei. Fourth century BC. 68 (b) Wooden figure of a warrior, from a fourth century BC Chu tomb. 68 (c) From Bao Shan, Hubei. 69
- 12. viii List of Illustrations 3.6 (a) Terracotta armoured infantry man, from Pit 1. 221–210 BC. 71 (b) Characters identifying responsible producers, on the back of a figure. 71 3.7 (a–b) Slabs 1014 and 1021 from the Amazonomachy Frieze of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, c. 350 BC. 78 4.1 Duchamp, Marcel (1887–1968). Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, oil on canvas, 1912. 94 4.2 Duchamp, Marcel (1887–1968). Network of Stoppages, 1914. 98 4.3 Alfred Gell, model of Husserl’s internal time-consciousness. 104 4.4 Alfred Gell, The artist’s oeuvre as a temporal-relational diagram. 108 5.1 Marcel Duchamp, Pharmacy, from View, New York, magazine containing a rectified readymade after the original of 1914. 124 5.2 Marcel Duchamp, The Box in a Valise 1935–1941 (leather- covered case containing miniature replicas and photographs). 125 7.1 G. Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leiden: C. Plantin, 1586), sig. R2r (‘Scripta manent’). 165 8.1 Body paintings on initiates at a Yolngu circumcision ceremony. The boys lie still for several hours while the designs are painted on their chests. They are surrounded by members of clans of their own moiety who sing songs that relate to the paintings that are being produced, referring to the journeys of the ancestral beings manifest in the images. 186 8.2 The Family of Felipe IV, or Las Meninas, by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1656). 187 8.3 Esa u kum women dancing disco kere at Hausline village. 193 8.4 Migu performing kere in conventional manner at Hausline village. 193
- 13. PREFACE This volume is both a protention and a retention: a nodal point in a series of conversations between Alfred Gell and a collection of scholars who have in various ways drawn inspiration from, critiqued and expanded his seminal ‘anthropological theory of art’, Art and Agency (1998). Its origins lie in the ‘Art and Agency: Ten Years On’ symposium, which we convened in Cambridge on 15 November 2008 to mark the tenth anniversary of the book’s posthumous publication. We are grateful to the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) for sponsoring and organizing the symposium, to the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology for hosting the post-symposium reception, to all the speakers whose papers are now collected in this volume, and to the guest chairs and discussants who held the panels together so nicely on the day: Marilyn Strathern, Martin Holbraad, Graeme Were and Stephen Hugh-Jones. Fittingly, the speakers and their papers were given a pretty serious (but good- natured) grilling by an audience that remained engaged, incisive and very generous throughout. In preparing the present volume, we have added a few contributions to the symposium’s original line-up. Chief among these is ‘The Network of Standard Stoppages’, a hitherto unpublished essay written around 1985 by Gell himself, which his wife Simeran found amidst his files and boxes. With some luck, we managed to assemble all the relevant pages (though not, sadly, all the accompanying diagrams) to form the full document, which is published here for the first time. An engaging piece centred on the work of Marcel Duchamp, it may be read as a precursor to some of Gell’s most innovative arguments on time, change and creativity towards the end of Art and Agency. Alternatively, it could simply be taken as a recently rediscovered component of Gell’s oeuvre; an insight into an extraordinarily fertile mind that was engaging in serious cross-disciplinary
- 14. x Preface study well before the concept became fashionable. ‘NSS’, as we now call it, is followed by a short commentary by Simon Dell, who provides an art- historical perspective on its content. Finally, the book closes with an epi- logue by Nicholas Thomas – one of Gell’s closest collaborators, who was among those responsible for preparing Art and Agency for publication after his death. From the time we began work on this project, we enjoyed the blessing and unwavering support of Simeran and Rohan Gell. We are particularly indebted to Simeran for letting us into her (and her late husband’s) life, giving us full access to Gell’s vast collection of papers, fieldnotes, lecture notes, and most intriguingly, drawings and diagrams which he made in both his childhood and later years, which reveal the intense visuality of his thought. (Some of these ended up in Art and Agency; two have been reproduced here.) For all this and more, we are immensely grateful. Liana Chua and Mark Elliott
- 15. INTRODUCTION ADVENTURES IN THE ART NEXUS Liana Chua and Mark Elliott Visceral Reactions Participants at the symposium, ‘Art and Agency: Ten Years On’, held in Cambridge at the end of 2008, will remember one of the succession of animated debates that took place during the proceedings. Towards the end of the day, a prominent anthropologist sitting in the audience rose in excitement in response to the final paper. ‘I’m sorry,’ she began, ‘but I’m having a visceral reaction to what you’ve just said!’ Minutes later she was joined by another colleague who professed to feel the same, and there ensued a robust exchange between them and the speaker at the front of the room. While this particular exchange centred on social scientific portrayals of prehistoric society, the phrase ‘visceral reaction’ aptly characterized both the symposium and the theory around which it revolved. Art and Agency, Alfred Gell’s ‘anthropological theory of art’, is the sort of book that has consistently, perhaps deliberately, incited intense responses in its readers. Whether positive or negative, such responses are rarely insipid or noncommittal, but passionate to a degree seldom seen in academia. Since its posthumous publication in 1998, Gell’s book has elicited both fervent acclaim and strident criticism, and become virtually mandatory reading in artefact-oriented disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. Today, the observation that ‘objects have agency (as Alfred Gell shows)’ is almost axiomatic in such fields. But what exactly does this entail? And is it ‘a Good or a Bad Thing’? On this point, consensus has yet to be obtained: Art and Agency began as, and continues to be, a controversial piece of work. A ‘demanding book’ (Thomas 1998: xiii), Gell’s final work begins with a provocation: a challenge to extant approaches to the anthropol- ogy of art which, he argues, have become shackled by an obsession with
- 16. 2 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott aesthetics. He posits instead that a proper anthropology of art should take place within the ‘socio-relational matrix in which [art] is embedded’ (Gell 1998: 7). In this way, he proposes to treat art as ‘a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it’ (ibid.: 6). Thus equipped, Gell takes the reader on an intense, sometimes mind- bending, exploration of art, agency, personhood, objecthood, cognition, temporality and creativity. Here, nkisi ‘power figures’, religious icons, aging Toyotas and landmines jostle freely with oil paintings, tattoos and Marcel Duchamp’s compositions as potential ‘art-objects’ that connect – or even act as – persons. Somewhere along the line, ‘aesthetics’ creeps back in under a different guise as a vital feature of transformation and cre- ativity. By this stage, however, so many commonsense notions have been destabilized that – for some critics, at least – this is more a strength of the theory than a contradiction. At its close, the book is no longer just about ‘art’, but has morphed into a whole new theory of personhood, material- ity, cognition and sociality. Many scholars find this prospect irresistibly exciting. Others have denounced it as verbose claptrap. When we first discussed holding a symposium to mark the tenth anni- versary of Art and Agency’s publication, these extreme responses were foremost in our mind. We were not motivated merely by a desire to cel- ebrate the book or its author. Rather, we both felt the need to address a shared, nagging discomfort: that ten years after its emergence, during which time it had been read by students and academics across a range of disciplines and traditions, Art and Agency was beginning to lose the con- troversial edge that had brought it to prominence. Indeed, there was and remains a sense in which it had never really fulfilled its potential, in part because the conversation around the book had never gone far enough: people either loved it or hated it, but there was little discussion between the two poles. In some ways, Gell’s theory has been the victim of its own success. As doctoral students in Cambridge in the 2000s, we found it hard to escape the sense of excitement that surrounded Art and Agency, and functioned almost as a protective aura. The book had a certain ‘technical virtuosity’ (Gell 1992: 52) about it; it seemed fiendishly difficult and captivatingly clever, and therein lay its allure. Yet as we began teaching undergradu- ate and graduate courses on artefacts, materiality, art and museums – all topics on which Gell had something to say – we also began to see this captivation as a stumbling block. Although our students had all picked up Art and Agency, few engaged with it beyond the first three chapters. Perhaps this was because the book’s reputation was beginning to precede it. Everyone knew, and repeated, the maxim that Gell’s theory was all about how objects could be person-like in exercising social agency. While
- 17. Adventures in the Art Nexus 3 a useful and perfectly valid summary of the book, it nonetheless revealed only a fraction of the complex story which anthropologists, archaeolo- gists, art historians and others are still unravelling today. Our decision to hold the symposium was thus partly to redirect attention to the rest of that story – to work out how much more there was, and might be, to this iconic theory. The other impetus came from the surprising fact that there had been frustratingly few attempts to draw scholars together to take stock of the myriad responses to Gell’s theory: up to the present, the corpus of lit- erature on Art and Agency remains dispersed, distributed and inchoate. An anthropological conference held in Canberra the year it was pub- lished marked a first step in exploring its potential; its contributions were subsequently collected in Beyond Aesthetics (Pinney and Thomas 2001). Outside of Gell’s native anthropology, a panel at the 2000 Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting, which subsequently grew into a 2003 con- ference and later the volume Art’s Agency and Art History (2007), has eloquently plotted the implications of Gell’s theory for art historians. As richly illustrated, theoretically innovative collections, these two volumes offer much to mull over. However, they both remain con- strained by disciplinary boundaries and concerns, with each volume con- sisting largely of scholars within the same academic domains speaking to each other. By 2008, to our knowledge, there had never been a con- sciously interdisciplinary forum engaging with Gell’s work. Considering the evident eclecticism of Gell’s approach, as well as the cross-disciplinary reach of his book, this seemed to us a rather odd, and unfortunate, omis- sion. One of our key aims in this respect was to translate the bold disre- gard for disciplinary borders so characteristic of Art and Agency into a real, live symposium; to give practitioners from different fields the chance to discuss a theory and subject of common interest. What, we won- dered, could other disciplinary perspectives bring to a discussion of the impact and value of Gell’s anthropological theory over the previous ten years? Would such a discussion offer further directions in which his theory could be developed? And most importantly, how might all these devel- opments and reflections broaden our understandings of art, objecthood, personhood and other (sometimes unexpected) topics? The papers assembled in this volume are intended to offer some answers to these questions. Like the theory which motivated it, we see this book as ‘unfinished business’ (Gell 1998: 80): a springboard to further engagement with art, objecthood, cognition, personhood and sociality. In keeping with Gell’s characteristic, and controversial, magpie-like selec- tiveness, the contributions range across diverse ethnographic, archaeo- logical, literary and art historical contexts: from disco in Papua New Guinea to the tomb of the First Emperor of China; from Renaissance
- 18. 4 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott texts to twentieth-century jazz. Like the objects in an artist’s oeuvre, this book may thus be seen as a ‘nodal point’ (ibid.: 225) of critique, exchange and innovation involving a group of leading scholars in the arts and social sciences. Before delving into their chapters, however, we would like to engage in a bit of context-filling – first, by summarizing the theory around which they all revolve, and second, by surveying the extensive field of responses to it, to which their voices have now been added. Art and Agency: A Summary The manner in which Art and Agency was produced has arguably become part of its mythology and efficacy. Gell wrote the bulk of the book in the last months of his life, and it was prepared for publication by some of his closest friends and colleagues. The final product has consequently seemed to many readers like an impermeable entity come down from the mountain: we can engage with the book itself, but not with the author in person. We cannot ask for clarification or enter into debate in a seminar,1 and he cannot revise or defend his arguments. We can, however, attempt to highlight some of its recurrent themes and ideas, many of which are taken up by the contributors to this volume. As Chris Gosden observed at the 2008 symposium, it was evident from the day’s discussions that everyone had read a slightly different version of Art and Agency. This is our version of it, or rather, an amalgam of our individual versions – indices both of our own engagements with the book, and with people and objects in Cambridge and our field-sites. Nothing so clearly illustrates Gell’s emphasis on the agency of the viewer, or in this case the reader, in actively creating an artefact. Moreover, as Georgina Born suggests in this volume, this multiplicity extends to the author himself – more so because of the intrinsic connection between his biography and his book: ‘It seems that we all have our own Alfred Gell’. The symposium participants were not the only ones to observe that Art and Agency is in many ways a book of two halves (Arnaut 2001: 192; Davis 2007: 202), the first consisting mainly of objects and agency, and the second, more neglected by subsequent scholars, a melange of cogni- tion, psychology, creativity, temporality and personhood. At first glance, the earlier chapters seem removed from the cognitive twists and turns of the later ones, which cover everything from transformations in ‘style’ to ‘distributed personhood’. Yet, we suggest that amid the complex, some- times infuriating, maze that is Art and Agency, there is a discernible logic – a consistent interest, rather than a watertight theory, in working out just how mind, matter and personhood relate to each other. The following summary attempts to trace some of this logic as it progresses.
- 19. Adventures in the Art Nexus 5 Art and Agency opens as a gauntlet which Gell throws down to the anthropological and art historical establishment. Elaborating on the arguments in his 1992 essay, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, Gell criticizes prevailing approaches to the anthropology of art for ‘reify[ing] the “aesthetic response” indepen- dently of the social context of its manifestations’ (Gell 1998: 4). For him, a properly anthropological theory should revolve around ‘social relation- ships, and not anything else’ (ibid.: 5). Consequently, he argues, what analysts need to understand is not what art objects represent or symbol- ize, but what they do within their social worlds – that is, their ‘practical mediatory role . . . in the social process’ (ibid.: 6). An Asmat shield, for example, may be of aesthetic interest to a scholar or Western museum visitor, but to the opposing warrior for whom it was designed to be seen, it was surely ‘fear-inducing’ (ibid.). From this perspective, ‘the nature of the art object is a function of the social-relational matrix in which it is embedded’ (ibid.: 7): the shield is effective not because of its aesthetic beauty, but because of what it causes to happen. In this capacity, then, it is a ‘social agent’: a person or a thing ‘seen as initiating causal sequences of a particular type, that is, events caused by acts of mind or will or inten- tion, rather than the mere concatenation of physical events’ (ibid.: 16). This is where Gell begins to rattle the cage. This definition of agency applies equally to persons and things; indeed, he ventures, if art objects can be defined by their status as social agents, then ‘anything whatsoever could, conceivably, be an art object from the anthropological point of view, including living persons’ (Gell 1998: 7). Persons can be things and things can be persons, because the focus here is not on essences (what entities ‘are’) but on agency – what they ‘do in relation’ to each other. In one fell swoop, Gell thus overturns a foundational distinction on which most anthropologies and studies of art have been based. Suddenly, ques- tions of authorship, creativity, control and indeed sociality are thrown wide open. Can material entities be more than mere canvasses on which humans exert their will? Wherein lies the power, the effect, of art? Where, for that matter, are relations crafted and reshaped? In Chapters 2 and 3, Gell expounds on ideas of ‘agency, intention, causation, result, and transformation’ (ibid.: 6, italics in original) within an analytical framework which he calls ‘the art nexus’. In it, he outlines four key players. Chief among these is the ‘index’ – usually a made arte- fact such as an art object – which enables its observer, or ‘recipient’, to ‘make a causal inference’ (ibid.: 13, italics in original) regarding the capabilities or intentions of its originator, usually the ‘artist’. Taking his cue from the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, Gell calls this ‘particular cognitive operation’ ‘the abduction of agency’ (ibid.: 13). The picture is complicated with the addition of the ‘prototype’, that is, ‘the entity which
- 20. 6 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott the index represents visually (as an icon, depiction, etc.) or non-visually’ (ibid.: 26). These four entities are all relational slots within the art nexus that can potentially be filled by anything or anyone. Each acts as an agent or a patient (that is, the recipient of a person or thing’s agency) vis-à-vis the others, sometimes doing so simultaneously or at different points in time (ibid.: 30). There are numerous configurations in which the index, artist, recipient and prototype might occur, but one of Gell’s own examples will suffice. Early in the book, he refers to Francisco de Goya’s famous portrait of the Duke of Wellington (1812–1814), shown clad in full military attire, adorned with military crosses and medals. Analysed within the art nexus, the painting may be viewed by its ‘recipients’ as an ‘index’ of the Duke of Wellington’s greatness as produced by the artist, Goya. Yet Goya was not the sole agent in this relationship. If he had depicted the Duke as ‘a little girl with golden curls . . . he would have been regarded as insane and the Duke would have been understandably displeased’ (ibid.: 35). Instead, ‘he had to produce a portrait depicting the features actually possessed by the Duke and regarded as characteristic of his persona, his Roman nose, 0.1 Alfred Gell, n.d. Worshippers before an Idol. Courtesy of Simeran Gell.
- 21. Adventures in the Art Nexus 7 serious demeanour, military attire, etc.’ (ibid.: 35). In this sense, the artist’s strokes were ‘dictated’ not only by the agency of his patron, the Duke, but also by a ‘prototype’ – an ideal image on which expectations are based – of a great military hero. While this case is unambiguously art-like, Gell uses numerous examples to demonstrate how his theory can potentially be applied to any material thing – cars, landmines, religious idols – embedded in a network of social relations. In this respect, his anthropology of art is ‘just anthropology itself, except that it deals with those situations in which there is an “index of agency” which is normally some kind of artefact’ (Gell 1998: 66). Woven into this anthropological definition of agency, however, are also the ‘“folk” notions of agency’ (ibid.: 17) invoked and deployed by the people with whom anthropologists work. As socio-cultural interpretations of agentive interactions, such models overlap but are not always congru- ent with those of anthropologists. In this respect, Gell’s interest is also in how people attribute agency to things: a process which itself shapes their capacity to be social agents. An elaborately carved and painted Trobriand 0.2 Alfred Gell, n.d. Preliminary sketch of the ‘art nexus’. Courtesy of Simeran Gell.
- 22. 8 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott canoe prow board, for example, may be defined by the anthropologist as a social agent because of its mediatory role in trade – and more specifically, because it causes Trobrianders’ trading partners to ‘disgorg[e] their best valuables without demur’ upon viewing it (ibid.: 71). Yet its ability to do so rests on the socio-cultural context in which such exchanges occur, for its viewers are likely to see in its ‘virtuosity’ evidence of its users’ ‘supe- rior magic’, to which they must submit (ibid.: 71; see also Gell 1992). Here, Trobriand magic is the ‘folk’ model of agency on which Gell’s anthropological analysis is built. The first chapters of Art and Agency thus feature a constant interplay between two distinct levels and types of ‘agency’ – one anthropological, one ‘folk’ – with Gell showing how the former should revolve around, and indeed derive from, the latter. So far, so familiar. In the second part of the book, however, Gell begins to pay more attention to a third kind of agency: one which, unlike the previous two, is fundamentally ontological rather than epistemological. Once again, the linchpin of this project is the index. Most scholars have picked up on the notion that the Gellian index functions chiefly as a sign that points to something else. In this vein, Art and Agency has been described by Daniel Miller as a theory of ‘inferred intentional- ity’, whereby the author looks ‘through objects to the embedded human agency we infer that they contain’ (Miller 2005: 13). This much is true. But what has often been glossed over, or perhaps overlooked, is another vital aspect of the index: the fact that, in a properly Peircian sense, it bears a direct causal relationship to its origin. It is, as Gell puts it, ‘the outcome, and/or the instrument of, social agency’ (1998: 15; italics in original). Put differently, Gell’s index is not a mere representation of its object – say, a god or a set of social relations – but is fundamentally (part of) the thing itself, just as ‘[a]n ambassador is a spatio-temporally detached frag- ment of his nation’ (Gell 1998: 98). A West African nkisi figure, studded with nails, is thus described as ‘the visible knot which ties together an invisible skein of relations, fanning out in social space and social time’ (ibid.: 62), and the made artefact more generally as ‘a congealed residue of performance and agency in object-form’ (ibid.: 68). This is a vital point in Gell’s theory, which provides a link between the different sections of the book. More than looking backwards through an index to its origina- tor, we can also use it to move forward, to create, improvise and expand. The index is not some dead-end, but a generative agent in itself which can spawn new and modified forms as a locus of social creativity. As agents, persons and things are thus inescapably temporal, ‘occupy[ing] a certain biographical space, over which culture is picked up, transformed, and passed on, through a series of life-stages’ (ibid.: 11). Gell expands on this theme from Chapter 6 (Gell 1998; see also Gell, this volume), where he begins to examine the mechanisms through which
- 23. Adventures in the Art Nexus 9 transmission, change and creativity take place. Here, he shifts his focus from an ‘externalist’ theory of agency – one that deals with intersubjec- tive relations (ibid.: 127) – towards an ‘internalist’ theory of perception, cognition and psychology. For him, neither approach alone is sufficient for an anthropology of art; the key is rather in recognizing that ‘cognition and sociality are one’ (ibid.: 75) and must hence be explored simultane- ously. His initial examples centre on decorative art, and it is here that he obliquely slides aesthetics back into the frame in the form of ‘decoration’. His aim, however, is not to reify aesthetics as an asocial topic, but to study it in relation to the ‘psychological functionality of artefacts, which cannot be disassociated from the other types of functionality they possess, notably their practical, or social functions’ (ibid.: 74). Central to this undertaking is a detailed examination of how decorative patterns act visually and cognitively on humans, often with social impli- cations. Drawing on psychological research and a range of case studies including Tamil threshold designs, Cretan mazes and Marquesan tattoos, Gell places the index – on or in which such patterns might be found – at the crux of his exploration. An index may be a social slot (Gell 1998: 7), but we must also attend to each individual index’s visual and corporeal features, which are the source of its efficacy. How, he asks, do complex patterns act on the human eye? What is the link between visual perception and cognition? How might a person, or indeed a demon, become trapped – mentally, socially and physically – by a pattern? It is here, we suggest, that a third mode of agency is most fully explored as the actual ‘thing-ly’ (Gell 1998: 20) capacity of artefacts qua artefacts to make things happen. The most sustained examination of this idea takes place in Chapter 8, which some critics have viewed as an anomaly due to its concerted, almost overly technical, focus on style (e.g. Arnaut 2001: 192, n.1). In these pages, we are taken through seemingly endless explo- rations of ‘relations between relations’ (1998: 215), as Gell shows how one Marquesan motif can transform into another and yet another through a series of modifications. Yet, this discussion makes more sense if viewed in the context of the author’s developing meta-interest in the relationship between visuality, cognition and social action. For Gell, the study of art and material forms in general is inevitably the study of the ‘enchainment’ (ibid.: 141) between mind, body, sociality and world. Crucially, agency is distributed across this chain: it is not the preserve of humans’ actions and relations, because they too are acted on by patterns and other art-like features of the index. Innovation and creation, as Chapter 8 shows, are constantly taking place ‘in and through’ the visual and the material, not just in human minds. This brings us back to the relationship between persons and things. As we later explain, Gell has sometimes been taken to task for refusing to
- 24. 10 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott transcend the distinction between them, and for apparently subordinat- ing the ‘secondary agency’ of things to the ‘primary agency’ of persons (Gell 1998: 20–21). Yet, by the end of the book, it has become impos- sible to take even commonsense Western conceptions of ‘persons’ and ‘things’ for granted. While retaining the words, Gell is busy reconfiguring the concepts by asking crucial ontological questions about the nature, location and temporality of agency. This is illustrated, for example, in his depiction of the creative agency of the artist.2 The oeuvre of a painter, he points out, is innately temporal: each finished work usually builds on a series of preparatory studies, and in turn becomes a study for later works. Works of art taken together thus ‘form a macro-object, or temporal object, which evolves over time’ (ibid.: 233). The evolution of thought, that creative transformative process which creates the macro-object, does not merely take place in the artist’s con- sciousness. Rather, Gell argues, ‘“thinking” takes place outside us as well as inside us’ (ibid.: 236). The artist’s creativity lies at the conjunction of mind and canvas – or rather, they act as one within a single temporal process. Like the poet who ‘writes down his lines, and then scratches them out’, the artist’s ability to create and innovate relies ‘on the existence of physical traces of his previous (mental) activity’ (ibid.: 236). While, ter- minologically, Gell continues to privilege ‘cognition’ and ‘personhood’ as the key foci of his approach, conceptually he actually reaches a point not dissimilar to that of Tim Ingold (2000) or Bruno Latour (1993, 2005), both of whom highlight the ontological symmetry (Latour 1993) of humans and non-humans in the production of sociality (and indeed life in general).3 The artefacts created by Gell’s artist are irreducibly person- things – nodes in a form of cognition that, far from being purely mental or internal, is ‘diffused in space and time, and . . . carried on through the medium of physical indexes and transactions involving them’ (ibid.: 232). Gell articulates this proposition through a theory of ‘distributed per- sonhood’, in which he proposes to treat persons ‘not as bounded biologi- cal organisms, but . . . all the objects and/or events in the milieu from which agency or personhood can be abducted’ (Gell 1998: 222). In this way, [a] person and a person’s mind are not confined to particular spatio-temporal coordinates, but consist of a spread of biographical events and memories of events, and a dispersed category of material objects, traces, and leavings, which can be attributed to a person and which, in aggregate, testify to agency and patienthood during a biographical career which may, indeed, prolong itself long after biological death. (ibid.: 222) By this stage, Art and Agency has become a theory of creativity and (re) generation. While the book thus closes on the same note on which it
- 25. Adventures in the Art Nexus 11 opened – social relations – it does not revert to a stultified notion of ‘the social’ that is distinct from ‘the material’. Instead, the very idea of the social has now been enlarged and reshaped, such that it is simultane- ously cognitive, material and temporal. Gell has outlined not only a new approach to the anthropology of art, but to anthropology itself. Responses to Art and Agency: A State-of-the-Field Survey The themes and ideas outlined above will be played out, debated and expanded throughout this book. Before examining the individual chap- ters, however, it is worth pausing to survey the sizeable field of responses to Art and Agency. Doing so situates the present volume within its broader scholarly context, while also lending shape to its arguments, many of which have been forged in dialogue with or as departures from the existing literature. On the whole, there have been three overlapping modes of engage- ment with Art and Agency. First are the robust critiques, or at least critical analyses (e.g. Bowden 2004; Layton 2003; Morphy 2009), of theoretical and ethnographic facets of Gell’s theory. Then there are several tentative but expansive efforts to adapt its analytical framework and methodology to whole academic disciplines or fields of study, such as art history (e.g. Osborne and Tanner 2007; Pinney and Thomas 2001; Rampley 2005). Finally, forming the largest category, are numerous applications of (aspects of) the theory to a staggering range of historical and cultural settings. These include case studies of cross-cultural art transactions (Graburn and Glass 2004; Harrison 2006; Lipset 2005), photography (Chua 2009; Hoskins 2006), music (Born 2005), art-science collaborations (Leach 2007), Malay martial arts (Farrer 2008), Renaissance European altar- pieces (O’Malley 2005), Vietnamese sacred images (Kendall, Vũ and Nguyên 2008, 2010) and Anglo-Saxon cremation rites (Williams 2004). Cumulatively, these works constitute important forays that test the applicability and analytical usefulness of Gell’s theory across historical, geographical and disciplinary boundaries. Their concerns have largely clustered around three main themes, which in turn feed into broader scholarly debates: the question of art, the notion of material agency and the very nature of anthropology. ‘But is it art?’ The Art in Art and Agency A common contention among both critics and admirers is that Gell’s book, ‘despite its title, is not primarily about art at all’ (Bowden 2004:
- 26. 12 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott 323). Despite opening with the question of art – or more specifically, the question of what an anthropology of art should entail – it nevertheless consistently ‘brackets out the question of art might be’ (Rampley 2005: 542). For Gell, this is a deliberate analytical move (1998: 7): one that enables him to discuss an eclectic jumble of examples, from Hindu idols to Melanesian kula valuables, without fear of contradiction or incon- sistency. Indeed, it is only through such examples that one can discern what Gell sees as the important characteristics of art, such as technical virtuosity, visual and cognitive ‘stickiness’ and temporality. This lingering ambiguity over the conceptual place of art has infuri- ated and inspired readers in equal measure. Ross Bowden, for example, complains that ultimately, ‘it is completely irrelevant whether the indexes he is discussing come under the heading of “art” or not’ (2004: 324), while Robert Layton insists that ‘what Gell has identified as the distinc- tive features of art cannot be understood except by recognizing the status of art as a culturally constructed medium of visual expression’ (2003: 461). Several scholars have taken Gell to task for dismissing aesthetics as a viable consideration in the anthropology of art, yet later building his argument around ‘what most people might refer to as the aesthetic and semantic dimensions of objects’ (Morphy 2009: 8; see also Layton 2003: 447; Bowden 2004: 320–22).4 For these and other critics, ‘art’ clearly does exist out there, often as a highly problematic category (Graburn and Glass 2004: 113), and Gell’s seemingly cavalier dismissal of what is widely taken to be its most crucial aspect must surely detract from the viability of his argument. Had Gell lived to revise his theory, we wonder if he might have quali- fied his argument about art and aesthetics more thoroughly. As Matthew Rampley points out, Gell was not rejecting aesthetics per se, but aes- thetics as a reified category which had been ‘artificially separate[d] . . . from the larger transactional nexus to which it belongs’ (2005: 542). Similarly, Jeremy Tanner and Robin Osborne note that ‘Gell’s stric- tures concerning aestheticism . . . have a very specific anthropological target, namely the contemporary program in anthropological aesthetics developed by Howard Morphy, Jeremy Coote, and Anthony Shelton’ (2007: 6; see also Thomas 2001: 4). Indeed, as Eric Hirsch shows in this volume, the study of meaning and aesthetics in an artefact or event’s ‘temporal presence’ is not necessarily incompatible with the approach laid out in Art and Agency. Instead of undermining his theory, then, Gell’s refusal to conform to the ‘aesthetics’ template arguably enriches it, by clearing the way for comparisons of things and events which, while not commonsensically art-like, nevertheless share important characteristics. The indeterminacy and hence analytical elasticity of ‘art’ (Gell 1998: 7) is central to this project. As Janet Hoskins argues, Gell’s theory ‘about
- 27. Adventures in the Art Nexus 13 the creation of art objects . . . could in fact be a theory about the creation of all forms of material culture’ (2006: 75). In this reading, the contested notion of art may be Gell’s springboard into the debate, but it is not the end-point of his theoretical explorations. Perhaps the art nexus is better thought of as what Rampley calls ‘a meta-concept: [in which] some “art” transactions will be coded as aesthetic, some as magical and others as religious, and so forth’ (2005: 542). Put differently, the advantage of Gell’s framework is that it can potentially apply to anything involving the artefactual or performative mediation of social agency – a notion substan- tiated by the contributions to the present volume. In sum, while some scholars have criticized Gell for his definition – or lack thereof – of ‘art’, others have opted to run with it, using it as a theoretical and methodo- logical tool through which to explore wider questions of agency, efficacy, cognition and creativity. A ‘Theory of Natural Anthropomorphism’? Persons, Things and Material Agency If Gell’s theory is not about ‘art qua art’ (Graburn and Glass 2004: 113), it has certainly been widely depicted as a theory about objecthood and materiality. Art and Agency was published at a time of revived social sci- entific interest in material things (e.g. Barringer and Flynn 1998; Brown 2001; Gosden and Knowles 2001; Haraway 1991; Hoskins 1998; Ingold 2000; Latour 1993; Myers 2001; Spyer 1998; Thomas 1991) – when scholars began shifting away from the ‘panegyric of textuality and discur- sivity, to catch our theoretical sensitivities on the hard edges of the social world again’ (Pels, Hetherington and Vandenberghe 2002: 1). Whether or not Gell saw himself as part of this wave, it is undeniable that his book became a prominent, almost metonymic, part of it. Gell’s treatment of materiality, however, has been more controversial than would initially appear. Over the years, he has been criticized for doing both too much and too little with objects. Howard Morphy, for example, has recently charged Gell with ‘deflect[ing] attention away from human agency and attributing agency to the objects themselves’ (2009: 5). He argues that Gell’s ‘agentive object . . . is a case of analogy gone too far’, for what an object can actually do (not that much) is not the same as what some people ‘think’ an object can do (quite a lot; ibid.: 6). For him, people’s relations to objects are inevitably contingent on ‘their cultural background, their religious beliefs, their social status or gender and so on’, such that ‘[m]eaning pre-exists action and indeed is one of the things that makes agency possible’ (ibid.: 14). Yet in ‘focusing at the level of social action with objects as agents’, Gell obscures all these
- 28. 14 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott factors, and hence ‘the role of human agency in artistic production’ and reception (ibid.: 6). Interestingly, the opposite position has been taken by a number of recent works on materiality, which accuse Gell of falling back on a fundamentally social, person-based notion of agency. Daniel Miller, for example, depicts Art and Agency as ‘a theory of natural anthropomor- phism, where our primary reference point is to people and their inten- tionality behind the world of artifacts’ (2005: 13), while the editors of Thinking Through Things argue that Gell’s depiction of objects as ‘second- ary agents’ ‘stops short of revising our commonsense notions of “person” or “thing”’ (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007: 17; see also Leach 2007: 174). For these commentators, Gell’s failing is not that he occludes human agency, but that he does not go far enough in challenging its tradi- tional primacy in social anthropology. Despite briefly exploring the ‘thing- ly causal properties’ of objects – to which he alludes in his example of Pol Pot’s soldiers and their landmines (Gell 1998: 20–21) – he ultimately fails to acknowledge the intrinsic agentive properties of artefacts. Such contradictory readings of Art and Agency are as much responses to wider debates within artefact-oriented fields as they are to the theory itself. Until relatively recently, objects and materiality were of merely intermittent interest in many of the humanities and social sciences (e.g. Appadurai 1986; Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Mauss 2000; Miller 1987; Strathern 1988). It was only from the 1990s that scholars began looking at things in themselves, rather than as symbols, language-like units or bearers of social meanings and values, ‘enliven[ed]’ only by ‘human transactions and calculation’ (Appadurai 1986: 5). Focusing on the different ways in which ‘the social is ordered, held, and “fixed” by the material’, academics began talking about ‘entangled networks of sociality/materiality’ (Pels, Hetherington and Vandenberghe 2002: 2), and not simply the relations between them. This ‘material turn’ has engendered numerous intriguing, often diver- gent, theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of mate- riality. While some scholars treat the study of things as an ontological project, a means of exploring the mutual, symmetrical constitution of humans and non-humans (e.g. Ingold 2000; Knappett 2002, 2005; Latour 1993), others focus on people’s socially, culturally and religiously mediated experiences of them (e.g. Engelke 2007; Hoskins 1998; Keane 1997; Miller 2005; Morgan 2010; Spyer 1998). Still others use objects as methodological ‘hooks’ on which to explore anything from science to identity to emotional attachment (e.g. Brown 2001; Miller 2008; Daston 2000; Turkle 2007). Gell’s theory could potentially both substantiate and challenge each of these approaches, depending on how it is construed and deployed.
- 29. Adventures in the Art Nexus 15 While his distinction between ‘primary’ (intentional human) and ‘sec- ondary’ (artefactual) agents appears to downplay the agency of objects, for example, his later chapters on creativity and distributed personhood (e.g. Gell 1998: 232–42) arguably demonstrate how the socio-cultural forms of things are shaped by their intrinsic properties. Rather than view these as contradictions, we suggest that they are better understood in terms of the three different layers of agency identified in this chapter: as overlapping but nonetheless distinct variants on the theme of causality, relationality and effect. In this capacity, Art and Agency does not only echo recent – and still contentious – debates about the relation between persons and things, but has played a significant part in precipitating and complicating them. The State of the Art of Anthropology Gell’s immediate contribution to the field of artefact-oriented studies was to provide a theory which, in its simplified form, compellingly articulated what was becoming a widespread argument – that objects had ‘agency’. Consequently, its reputation has fostered the assumption among many ‘mainstream’ social anthropologists that it has very little to do with the world beyond art, objecthood and materiality. However, Art and Agency also provokes serious questions about the very nature and scope of social anthropology – many of them equally germane to art history, archaeol- ogy and other disciplines. Key among these is a familiar dilemma: what is the relationship between the general and the particular? Are universal- izing theories actually helpful in the study of particular case studies? How can singular phenomena be made to do comparative work? Are different socio-cultural units ultimately incommensurate? In some ways, Gell strikes us as a fundamentally old-fashioned anthro- pologist, not so much because he saw social anthropology as being about the social, but because he was asking some seriously ‘big’ ques- tions about human nature and society through comparison, extrapola- tion and analogy – questions which many contemporary anthropologists studiously eschew.5 Never satisfied to simply linger on the minutiae of particular art objects or case studies, he constantly drew them into a comparative, potentially universal, analytical framework: the ‘art nexus’. Accordingly, he drew inspiration not only from social anthropology, but also psychology, biology, linguistics, philosophy and art history. In order to understand the social, he seemed to be saying, anthropologists had to understand the whole ‘panoply’ (Gell 1998: 126) of mind, body, matter, space and time that constitute it. The persons that populate Art and Agency are thus not social beings in a narrow sense, as some critics charge,
- 30. 16 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott but what Carl Knappett, following Mauss (1936), calls ‘l’homme total’: irreducible combinations of ‘biological organism, psychological agent, and social person’ (Knappett 2005: 15). In this respect, there was something of a nineteenth-century ethnolo- gist about Gell. In scope and method, at least, he was more like James Frazer or E.B. Tylor than, as Layton (2003: 448) and Morphy (2009: 22) imply, like Radcliffe-Brown.6 In common with the first two, he had a resolutely comparative streak, pulling disparate theoretical and the- matic fragments into his book; eclecticism itself was his method (see also Thomas, this volume). Unsurprisingly, this approach, redolent as it is of an earlier anthropological era, has ruffled a few feathers. Even before postmodernism thrust the discipline into a ‘vortex of epistemological anxieties’ (Metcalf 2002: 11), anthropologists were already shying away from large-scale theorizing, from devising unifying theories to account for multitudinous phenomena. While comparison remains acceptable, universalist pronouncements are now panned as reductive, ethnocen- tric, dehumanizing, overly vague and overly specific: in short, hopelessly flawed. In trying to formulate a single anthropological theory with pre- cisely that sort of universal reach, as applicable to ritual sculptures as it was to modern art, Gell was straying into extremely awkward territory. This has, of course, had repercussions. Gell’s selective incorporation of insights from non-anthropological disciplines has sometimes been depicted as flippant cherry-picking. Bowden, for example, has reproached him for relying on ‘an anthropologically uninformed essay by the phi- losopher Wollheim’ (2004: 315; italics added) in his discussion on style, implying that this in itself detracts from his argument. Correspondingly, Gell’s willingness to put Hindu idols, Marquesan tattoos and Marcel Duchamp’s artworks next to each other as homologues (Gell 1992) has understandably been construed as showing an audacious disregard for that holy grail of anthropology and its cognate disciplines – context (Strathern 1995: 160). Both Layton and Morphy, for instance, point out that his strategy of ‘imagining oneself in the position of a member of another culture’ (Layton 2003: 457) and hence claiming to know what they think when considering an art object, ‘brackets off – almost provides shutters to . . . the context of viewing’ (Morphy 2009: 7). The implication, for contemporary readers at least, is clear: that an anthropol- ogy of art, and indeed any sort of anthropology, must be premised on ‘how the objects [or other phenomena] are understood in the way they are and how that relates to the ways in which they are used in context and in turn how that contributes to ongoing socio-cultural processes’ (Morphy 2009: 9). In other words, any anthropology that has the temer- ity to posit a mental unity to all of humanity, irrespective of context, is highly suspicious.
- 31. Adventures in the Art Nexus 17 Such responses arguably reflect a widespread, deeply ingrained instinct to protect the particular – those thematic and theoretical ‘small places’ (Eriksen 1995) that are academic specialists’ own backyards – against the dangers inherent in generalization. While legitimate, these criticisms highlight the tensions between different modes of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences today. The questions they raise are funda- mentally methodological: is there a place today for ‘grand’ theories, or at least theories that can transcend the particularities of context? Are ‘big’ thought experiments of equal scholarly merit to thickly described case studies and analyses? Is there a danger, conversely, of descending into a paralysing ‘hyper-particularism’ (Keane 2008: S115) that eschews any sort of comparison? On these points, it is equally instructive to look at those responses to Art and Agency which seek to extend its analytical and conceptual pos- sibilities to larger disciplinary (sub)fields. While Gell’s indifference to contextual histories, politics, transformations, contradictions and ‘messes of real life’ (Chua 2009: 48), and his tendency to operate ‘ethnographi- cally within closed contexts’ (Arnaut 2001: 206) has been widely com- mented upon (e.g. Graburn and Glass 2004: 113; Lipset 2005: 111; Morphy 2009: 17; Thomas 2001: 9), a number of writers have actually seen this as a strength of his theory. Rampley, for example, points out that it is precisely Art and Agency’s focus on ‘micro-social interactions’ that enables it to ‘illuminate various issues in art practice and theory in Western societies’ (2005: 543) which might otherwise be obscured by a focus on art as a social institution. Similarly, Tanner and Osborne reflect that Gell’s ‘formulae and diagrams offer what is potentially an extremely valuable tool for historical and comparative analysis’ in ‘allow[ing] one to focus on fundamental underlying relational structures’ (2007: 21) – even if, they hazard, he eventually found that formal diagrammatic analysis could not capture the shifting, unfolding nature of agency (ibid.: 22). In a different vein, Hoskins argues that Gell’s work is a useful means of stud- ying ‘cross-cultural visuality’ – the ‘efficacy of an object’s appearance’ in potentially any context (2006: 76). Nicholas Thomas pushes this further by suggesting that even if Art and Agency is ‘largely unconcerned with the political manipulation of art in a more concrete sense’ (2001: 9), it is also plausible that ‘[t]he political may be enriched by an anthropology “beyond aesthetics”’ (2001: 11). For these writers, Art and Agency stands less as a behemoth to be taken down a peg than as a catalyst to further exploration, innovation and, most intriguingly, cross-disciplinary engagement. It is this invitation which we, and the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume, have endeavoured to take up.
- 32. 18 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott Protentions and Retentions This volume is intended to be both forward-looking and retrospective. Throughout the chapters, contributors offer personal reflections on their own reception of the book, of the agency they abducted from it, and its effect on their own work and thinking. Reference is frequently made too to the interaction of the multiple elements of Gell’s oeuvre: to the distrib- uted object that is Art and Agency, to his own publications and drawings, to artworks upon which he drew, and to the responses of his readers in the years since his death. Such temporal and spatial connections were taken up by Gell himself in a paper – written in the 1980s and published here for the first time – that prefigures his later arguments. Consequently, while familiar questions of ‘art’, material agency and the comparative method crop up frequently in the following chapters, they are joined by new reflections on relatively under-explored themes in Art and Agency, such as style, creativity, temporality and cognition. Susanne Küchler’s opening contribution offers a series of insights not only on Art and Agency’s impact over the last decade, but also on its status as ‘pivotal to an anthropology that is bracing itself for the twenty- first century’. Like the other contributors, she follows Gell’s lead in cross- ing boundaries – most obviously and dramatically that between the social world and cognitive and material realms, a gradual engagement which has been prompted by exposure to developments in mathematics, computing technology and neuroscience. Taking as her examples artefacts such as the skeuomorph and the New Ireland malanggan, which themselves play across material and cognitive boundaries, she identifies in Art and Agency a hidden logic of ‘material translation’, of affinity and transmission, which brings together body, mind and world. While reviving the ‘big questions and big answers’ characteristic of an earlier tradition of classical ethnol- ogy, Gell’s theory also ‘signals the onset of an intellectual epoch’ char- acterized by a ‘renewed sensitivity’ towards the nature of the interaction between ‘thought and thing’. The idea of drawing on the past to move forward is also proposed by Chris Gosden. Gosden suggests that a renewed emphasis on ‘material things and the realisation that things can help shape people’ can help to rehabilitate the historically dominant but theoretically impoverished typological approach within archaeology, and lend ‘this huge descriptive enterprise new point and purpose’. His application of Gell’s theory to the metalwork of Bronze Age Britain explores the relationship between technological and social change in a disciplinary context where a material- centred methodology is essential. In his chapter, Gosden embellishes and advances Gell’s theories of the interaction between the human mind and non-human artefacts, reconciling his emphasis on technologies of
- 33. Adventures in the Art Nexus 19 enchantment or wonder with Richard Seaford’s study of the emergence of money in classical Greek society. Both approaches, he argues, suggest that ‘artefacts en masse are part of our joint intelligence, helping make sense of the world and the people in it in particular ways’. For Jeremy Tanner, artefacts do not simply help humans to make sense of the world, but also enable them to act on it – both in this life and the next. His chapter focuses on two monumental royal tombs from the ancient past: the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and the sprawling under- ground palace of the First Emperor of China. He suggests that Gell’s art nexus offers a useful means of transcending the dichotomous approaches to comparison hitherto prevalent in the field of comparative art: attempts to define cross-cultural aesthetics on the one hand, and an over-objective, socio-archaeological tracing of transformations in style and monumental- ity on the other. Tanner’s solution is to draw a comparison through the study of ‘art’s specific agency’ as it is manifested through the ‘specific material properties of images and their affordances’. By tracing the differ- ent forms and directions of agency exerted by the naturalistic, cut-marble sculptures adorning the outside of the Mausoleum and the rows of ter- racotta warriors filling the interior of Qin Shihuangdi’s tomb, he also reveals how each ruler hoped to project his agentive personhood into the future, beyond his biological death. In this sense, the tombs were inher- ently temporal artefacts, reaching simultaneously backwards and forwards in both biographical and real time. Temporality and change are dealt with more explicitly in Gell’s own study of the oeuvre of Marcel Duchamp, and in the contributions by Simon Dell and Georgina Born. Written by Gell in 1985, ‘The Network of Standard Stoppages’ approaches Duchamp through contemporane- ous philosophical works by William James, Henri Bergson and Edmund Husserl, in an effort to tackle the representation of duration and the problem of continuity in the visual arts. Commenting on the piece from an art historical perspective, Dell notes that Gell’s engagement with Duchamp can be seen as generative both of a particular version of Duchamp and his oeuvre, but also of a particular version of Gell – or more specifically, of Gell’s articulation of the ‘extended mind’ in Art and Agency over ten years later. The relationship between Gell’s two studies is also examined by Born, who sets out to resolve four conceptual problems with Art and Agency’s theoretical formulation: those relating to scale, time, social mediation and ontology. Curiously, she argues, solutions to some of them appear to be offered in ‘The Network of Standard Stoppages’. Taking her cue from this earlier piece as well as her own explorations of Bergson and Husserl, Born investigates the significance of ‘multiple temporalities’ in the ‘analy- sis of cultural production’. Framing her project is a forceful critique of
- 34. 20 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott the limitations of Gell’s approach – in particular his ‘Durkheimian lean- ings’, his ‘resilient, if ambivalent humanism’ that stops short of engaging with the ‘thing-ly’ properties of objects and the socio-cultural ontolo- gies in which they are produced. Looking at the ‘relay of social and material mediation’ in three distinctive musical ontologies from the nine- teenth century to the present, her chapter ‘expand[s] considerably on the account of art’s social mediation proffered by Gell’. Translating Gell’s approach into a new arena is similarly productive for Warren Boutcher, who contributes a richly evocative analysis of the agency of the book, writing and literature. Taking us into a realm where materiality and the visual have often appeared to play different roles, Boutcher sidesteps Gell’s apparent refusal to discuss literary theory, and explores literature as a technology that magically extends the operations of human faculties such as memory, and books and other literary artefacts as indexes of social relations. His argument that ‘the magic of letters, handwriting and the manuscript or printed codex’ which characterize medieval attitudes to the book have their echo in recent and even con- temporary readers’ engagement with the printed word, suggests how the interaction between artwork and recipient must be considered across great distances, both spatially and temporally. Eric Hirsch extends the thread of comparison that has run through- out this volume by pulling together anthropological studies of Australian Aboriginal ritual painting and contemporary ritual performances in Papua New Guinea, and art historical studies of Western painting in an investiga- tion of how ‘artworks’ of different kinds can be understood as having their own ‘temporal presence’ in addition to existing, as Gell argues, in time. Drawing on Gell’s exploration of the extended mind and on Roy Wagner’s notion of ‘epoch’ – that time which stands for itself, or is always ‘now’ – Hirsch argues that artworks are fundamentally performances that exist within, but also generate, their own time. His emphasis on time’s presence reaffirms the importance of aesthetics and meaning in a manner which complements Gell’s stress on art as a performance and field of action. Just as Art and Agency cuts controversially back and forth across space and time, each contributor to this volume reaches across disciplinary, cultural, methodological and temporal boundaries. The 2008 Cambridge symposium concluded with a reception in the gallery of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) – a space in which artefacts from across the world are assembled together. Thinking and talking about Gell and his eclectic approach made a particular kind of sense amidst a collection which, for over a century, had been fuelled by the relentless acquisition, juxtaposition and comparison of artefacts from around the world and throughout human history by generations of archaeologists and anthropologists.
- 35. Adventures in the Art Nexus 21 This is a point which is picked up by Nicholas Thomas in his epilogue to this volume. In it, he reflects on how museum collections consti- tute exceptionally fertile fields of research into the interactions between human and non-human agents. The galleries, but also the behind-the- scenes workrooms and stores in which artefacts come into contact with people and with each other can productively be seen as manifestations of the ‘nexus’ of social relations around an ‘art-object’ – even as distributed objects in the same way as the artist’s oeuvre or the Maori meeting house. Sometimes such synergies are more evident than others, but galleries such as those of the MAA or the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford exemplify the productivity of juxtapositions that can be surprising, even controver- sial (Herle et al. 2009). Is it time then, asks Thomas in conclusion, for those who work with and write about objects to ‘make the facts of their acting, the diversity of their characters, and the magic of their theatre visible – and questionable’? * * * If some of this introduction, and the book as a whole, reads like a celebra- tion of a heroic figure in the recent history of anthropology, this is by no means our intention. Our aim has simply been to tackle head-on one of the most intriguing and controversial contributions to anthropology and its cognate disciplines in recent years, with the goal of fostering new debate, insights and innovations germane not only to the anthropology of art, but to the study of human life and sociality in general. Like one of Gell’s art objects, this volume is thus both a protention and a retention: a navigation through aspects of one person’s distributed oeuvre which extends it beyond its physical and temporal boundaries, to what we hope will be good, or at least thought-provoking, effect. Notes 1. The arena which Gell highlighted as so fundamental to academic theory and practice (1999: 1–9), despite the apparent exclusion of the performative from his framework in Art and Agency, in favour of the visual (1998: 1). 2. Gell’s example is Marcel Duchamp, whose oeuvre he had begun to explore in a 1985 article, published for the first time in this volume. The influence of Duchamp’s work on Gell’s thinking, in return, is charted by Simon Dell in his commentary. 3. See Küchler, this volume, for an insightful comparison of Gell and Latour. 4 As Webb Keane (personal communication) has pointed out, however, what Gell really dismisses is hermeneutics as an analytical approach. 5. For other exercises in the rehabilitation of the comparative method, see: Strathern 1992; Bloch 2005; Herle, Elliott and Empson 2009. Also see Küchler, this volume.
- 36. 22 Liana Chua and Mark Elliott 6. Indeed, Frances Larson (2007) has recently written an illuminating article juxta- posing Gell’s comparative method against that of Henry Balfour, first curator of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (1890–1939). References Appadurai, A. (ed.). 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arnaut, K. 2001. ‘A Pragmatic Impulse in the Anthropology of Art? Gell and Semiotics’, Journal des Africanistes 71(2): 191–208. Barringer, T. and T. Flynn (eds). 1998. Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum. London and New York: Routledge. Bloch, M. 2005. ‘Where Did Anthropology Go? Or the Need for “Human Nature”’, in M. Bloch (ed.), Essays on Cultural Transmission. Oxford: Berg, pp. 1–20. Born, G. 2005. ‘On Musical Mediation: Ontology, Technology and Creativity’, Twentieth-Century Music 2: 7–36. Bowden, R. 2004. ‘A Critique of Alfred Gell on Art and Agency’, Oceania 74(4): 309–24. Brown, B. 2001. ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry 28(1): 1–22. Chua, L. 2009. ‘What’s in a (Big) Name? The Art and Agency of a Bornean Photographic Collection’, Anthropological Forum 19(1): 33–52. Daston, L. 2000. Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Davis, W. 2007. ‘Abducting the Agency of Art’, in R. Osborne and J. Tanner (eds), Art’s Agency and Art History. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 199–219. Douglas, M. and B. Isherwood. 1979. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. New York: Basic Books. Engelke, M. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Eriksen T.H. 1995. Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. Farrer, D. 2008. ‘The Healing Arts of the Malay Mystic’, Visual Anthropology Review 24(1): 29–46. Gell, A. 1992. ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, in J. Coote and A. Shelton (eds.), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics. Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 40–66. ———. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1999. The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams. London: Athlone. Gosden, C. and C. Knowles (eds). 2001. Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and Colonial Change. Oxford and New York: Berg. Graburn, N.H.H. and A. Glass. 2004. ‘Introduction’, Journal of Material Culture 9(2): 107–14. Haraway, D. 1991. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, pp. 149–81. Harrison, R. 2006. ‘An Artefact of Colonial Desire? Kimberley Points and the Technologies of Enchantment’, Current Anthropology 47(1): 63–88.
- 37. Adventures in the Art Nexus 23 Henare, A., M. Holbraad and S. Wastell. 2007. ‘Introduction’, in A. Henare, M. Holbraad and S. Wastell (eds), Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge, pp. 1–31. Herle, A., M. Elliott and R. Empson (eds). 2009. Assembling Bodies: Art, Science and Imagination. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Hoskins, J. 1998. Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 2006. ‘Agency, Biography and Objects’, in C. Tilley, W. Keane, S. Küchler, M. Rowlands and P. Spyer (eds), Handbook of Material Culture. London: Sage, pp. 74–84. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Keane, W. 1997. Signs of Recognition: Power and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. ———. 2008. ‘The Evidence of the Senses and the Materiality of Religion’, in The Objects of Evidence: Anthropological Approaches to the Production of Knowledge. Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute: S110–27. Kendall, L., T.T.T. Vũ and T.T.H. Nguyên. 2008. ‘Three Goddesses in and out of Their Shrine’, Asian Ethnology 67(2): 219–36. ———. 2010. ‘Beautiful and Efficacious Statues: Magic, Commodities, Agency and the Production of Sacred Objects in Popular Religion in Vietnam’, Material Religion 6(1): 60–85. Knappett, C. 2002. ‘Photographs, Skeuomorphs and Marionettes: Some Thoughts on Mind, Agency and Object’, Journal of Material Culture 7(1): 97–117. ———. 2005. Thinking Through Material Culture: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Larson, F. 2007. ‘Anthropology as Comparative Anatomy? Reflecting on the Study of Material Culture during the Late 1800s and Late 1900s’, Journal of Material Culture 12(1): 89–112. Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. ———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Layton, R. 2003. ‘Art and Agency: A Reassessment’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 9: 447–64. Leach, J. 2007. ‘Differentiation and Encompassment: A Critique of Alfred Gell’s Theory of the Abduction of Creativity’, in A. Henare, M. Holbraad and S. Wastell (eds), Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge, pp. 167–88. Lipset, D. 2005. ‘Dead Canoes: The Fate of Agency in Twentieth-Century Murik Art’, Social Analysis 49(1): 109–40. Mauss, M. (1921) 2000. The Gift: Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls. London: Norton. ———. 1936. ‘Les Techniques du Corps’, in Sociologie et Anthropologie. Paris: PUF, pp. 362–86.
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- 39. CHAPTER 1 THREADS OF THOUGHT Reflections on Art and Agency Susanne Küchler There can be no doubt that Art and Agency has paved a new direction for anthropological theory by challenging the assumed primacy of the social over the material and cultural. The book presents us with the framework for a theory of the work things do as exponents of thought and as cata- lysts for imagination and intuition. Rather than merely mirroring how to ‘be in relation’, Alfred Gell shows how things make thinking about thinking possible and shape the way we see connections in the world spontaneously and effortlessly. In a move that reminds us of Alfred Gell’s work as ethnographer of Melanesia, where all things, even persons, are ‘made’, not ‘born’, it is the manufactured artefact that is foregrounded in Art and Agency. All made things partake of intentional and systematizing thought, and potentially serve as vehicles of knowledge, as threads of thought that bind things and people via things to one another. Associative thought and matters of attachment are welded together here in ways that allow the once peripheral subject of art to emerge as the crux of an anthropological theory that remains concerned with the nature of biographical relations. Yet beyond its overt concern with thought and thing, there is a perhaps even more fundamental idea to be found in the book that makes Art and Agency pivotal to an anthropology that is bracing itself for the twenty- first century. Returning to an earlier tradition of classical ethnology in which big questions and big answers were preferred over regional eth- nographies, Art and Agency prompts us to consider the long-disbanded concept of mankind and the nature of diversity without requiring us to create or invoke a hierarchical order (Meyer 2003). As we are led to discover the nature of relations in the inter-artefactual domain and the intuitive logic guiding our recognition of the relational nature of actions in the world, we realize that anthropology may again have something to
- 40. 26 Susanne Küchler contribute to big questions that range from consciousness to the diversity of civilization. Art and Agency, in fact, signals the onset of an intellectual epoch, one which mirrors in its undoing the upheaval which shook European episte- mological and scientific tradition in the late eighteenth century (Lepenies 1978). Then, abstract modelling of empirical data gained through obser- vation and the description of the world in the concrete based on experi- ence became separated in the different institutions of science and the arts. At around the same time, chemistry and poetry, both adept at capturing the connectivity of mind and world at the pre-hermeneutic stage, moved to the fringes of science and the humanities. In the future presaged by Art and Agency, however, the gulf between ‘the horizon of expectation’ and ‘space of experience’, which since the eighteenth century has been a symptom of modernity (Koselleck 2004), is fused together in a magical act of synthesis in which the process of giving form to matter unleashes an intuited apprehension of ‘being in relation’. Where thought and thing stood side by side for centuries, Art and Agency raises the spectre of a renewed sensitivity towards the nature of their interaction and its signifi- cance in challenging our understanding of what is social about the form given to thought in invention and innovation. Reaching beyond our once so neatly domesticated relations with the material world, in which visual knowing was locked into relations of prop- erty and effect (Foucault 1994), Gell draws our attention to a long-lost sense for a material aesthetic which works unmoored from the trappings of markets and institutions in a creative lacunae untrammelled by brand- ing (Stafford 2007). We are, perhaps without realizing it, introduced into the conception of a world captured long ago by the seventeenth-century German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whose work on image systems and thought was recalled recently by the art historian Horst Bredekamp (2004) in his book on Leibniz’s ‘window-less monad’, whose internal, relational and transformative logic, one likened to a knotted and folded homunculus, unleashes an energy that surfaces in music, art and mathematics. It is Gell’s genius to have realized for us the relevance of an anthropological theory of art to contemporary sensitivities, by recovering the way images serve as the thread of thought, entangling expectation with experience in ways that root agency not in action, but in imagination. On Algorithm, Imaging and Intuition There are many intellectual influences on Art and Agency, some extending outward from the remit of anthropology to mathematics, others taking us back to founding ideas of anthropology. None, however, could be
- 41. Threads of Thought: Reflections on Art and Agency 27 more difficult to trace and yet be more important to unravel the complex intentions behind the book than ideas referenced in what is described obliquely in Art and Agency as the ‘least difference principle’ (Gell 1998: 218). Writing about Marquesan artefacts and addressing the question of the coherence of a corpus of artefacts, Gell identifies constraints that act at the formal level, ‘in the field of possible and legitimate motivic trans- formations’, allowing visual style to be seen as ‘an autonomous domain in the sense that it is only definable in terms of the relationships between artefacts and other artefacts’ (ibid.: 215–16). The apparent ease with which we recognize the homogeneity and distinctiveness of Marquesan artefacts, without knowing anything about the role these artefacts play in culture or their prevailing interpretation, is reasoned to lie in a structural principle ‘involving the least modification of neighbouring motifs consist- ent with the establishment of a distinction between them’ (ibid.: 218). This structural ‘least difference’ principle has hardly been given atten- tion in subsequent readings of Art and Agency, and yet it is here, I want to argue, that we can find a clue to ideas that inspire the reception of the book. The background to the concern with ‘least difference’ points, perhaps unsurprisingly, to a field well known to have had a lasting impact on Gell’s thinking, namely language, and to a trajectory of anthropo- logical thought that can be extended backwards as well as forwards in time, referring to ideas that Gell sensed would resurface in science, for reasons and with implications very different to their original conception (Gell 1996). Key to the ‘least difference principle’ are motivic transformations, described in Art and Agency as consisting of acts of scaling, proportion- ing and multiplication. Motifs allow for the multiplicity and manifold relations between artefacts to stand out, providing the eye with a special thing-like tool for thinking. As specially ‘designed’ signs, motifs and their systemic transformation allow us to see relations between things, to trace connections and thus to think about thinking. Motifs support associative thinking and thus provide the tooling for thought that is intuitive and yet also enchained, thereby anchoring thought in artefacts in ways that go beyond their original purpose (cf. Freedberg 1991). Of importance to Marquesan art is therefore not the individual artwork or motif, but a manifold, whose capacity to combine generative agency with instantaneous recognition reminds one of the observation made long ago by Franz Boas in relation to the homology of phonetic systems (Boas 1966; see also Chafe 2000). Expounding on the importance of not studying American Indian languages from single recordings, but by placing recordings in relation to other recordings made with different people, Boas made the astonishing observation (for the time) that the difference we note among sounds ‘is an effect of perception through a
- 42. 28 Susanne Küchler medium of a foreign system of phonetics’, while the phonetic system of each language is limited and fixed (Boas 1966: 14). His further elabo- rations on the mechanical production of sounds show variations to be relational, with single sounds to be part of a sound complex (ibid.: 19). The ‘limited variability and the limited number of sound clusters’ that enable ‘the automatic and rapid use of articulations’ (ibid.: 21) remind us of much earlier thoughts on language brought forward by the eighteenth-century German historian and philosopher Gottfried Herder (Herder 2002; Moran and Gode 1986). It is to Herder’s classic writings on ‘Plastik’ that we can trace back the idea, expounded in Boas’s work on Primitive Art, that the algorithm underlying sound production may be taken across different material media in a process of translation, to create in its wake a synergy of cognition and emotion (Boas 1927). This translation of the algorithm underlying sound production in a particular language to actions and movements of the body was seen by Boas to be the result of the formation of ‘virtuosity’, a notion singled out much later by Fred Myers in his analysis of Australian Aboriginal acrylic paint- ing style (Myers 2003). Myers interpreted virtuosity in relation to the distinct geometry underlying the generative production of imagery. Here the algorithm at work is found to govern spatial thinking and pattern making, an argument also developed by Louise Hamby and Diana Young in relation to the patterns on Australian Aboriginal women’s string art, which appear to be associated directly with dialects spoken by distinct Aboriginal groups in Australia (Hamby and Young 2001). Perhaps the most explicit and most succinct analysis of material translation and cul- tural production being informed by the algorithm of sound production was made by Marie Adams in her work on South-East Asian materials processing, tracing algorithmic connections from the pounding of rice to the beating of drums, to the fermenting of plant substance and to the treatment of the dead (Adams 1977). These ethnographic observations have been supplanted more recently by neuroscience, offering, on the one hand, an explanation grounded in the co-presence of the concept of numbers and of hand movement in the hippocampus responsible for remembering, and on the other hand, an action-related explanation made possible by the discovery of mirror neurons (Butterworth 1999; Gallese 2001). The ‘least difference’ principle has thus taken us backwards and for- wards in time across an ethnographic and historical terrain. This terrain has largely remained oblique to anthropological theory making, perhaps because its description requires, as recognized famously by Claude Lévi- Strauss, ‘a proliferation of concepts and a technical language that goes with a constant attention to the properties of the world, alert to the distinctions that can be discerned between them’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966:
- 43. Threads of Thought: Reflections on Art and Agency 29 2). The logic of the concrete on which the ‘least difference’ principle is founded was called by Lévi-Strauss ‘the most neglected aspect of the thought of people we call “primitive”’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 2). Whereas he described the logic based on the objectification of knowledge as a ‘counterfeit’ science, the Melanesianist Aletta Biersack argued in her work on Paiela body-counting for the acute observation of algorithms and their transformative patterns to be a ‘science and among sciences’ (Biersack 1982: 813). Whether anthropologists ever really cared to think much about such allusions to science is a matter for debate. What is clear, however, is that anthropologists ceased to be able to respond to the rigours demanded by the attention to the concrete around the time of Biersack’s research in New Guinea, when language was no longer considered an operative modus of explanatory models of culture making. No longer trained in linguistic theory, ethnographers soon became desensitized to the concept of the manifold, its basis in mathematical thinking and its intersubjec- tively shared nature. Having lost their theoretical validity, methods such as drawing or diagramming, that once were the whole mark of replicating the science of the concrete, fell out of the remit of teaching. Questions of affinity, once tied to the tracing of the way attachments are secured and predicted in the world in the broad field of magic, became briefly a sub- field of kinship, only soon to be displaced by a more generalized concern with questions of distinction. Looking back, one realizes the speed at which anthropology forgot one of its most coveted ideas in the midst of developments to the con- trary. There was computing, which took off in a commercial way in the 1980s, utilizing the same ideas of algorithm and the transforma- tional logic of manifolds to develop the technical language of computer programmes. Few anthropologists ever trained in computing, yet they remained enchanted by their new tool and refrained from asking the questions of a philistine that could have reawakened interest in a subject that was rapidly being sidelined as ‘ethno-mathematics’ (Ascher 1978; 1991). The notable exception to this trend is Ron Eglash, who applied his computing skills to African art with astonishing results, while perhaps not drawing out the theoretical conclusions in ways that could have made inroads into mainstream anthropology (Eglash 1999). While anthropol- ogy turned its back on science, new biology and new physics began to be established around ideas that were strikingly akin to the relational para- digm at work in early anthropology. Aided by the increasingly powerful capacity of computing, a notion of self-organization of systems emerged as the dominant working hypothesis in science. Alfred Gell has remained almost alone among anthropologists in rec- ognizing the potential of artefacts to display sequential processes and
- 44. 30 Susanne Küchler transformation in ways that allow for a rethinking of objectification. The notable exception is Bruno Latour (1990, 1994, 2005), whose ‘actor- network’ theory also proceeds from the question of assemblage and the logic of the manifold inherent in acts of assembling. By aligning the material strictly with the cognitive rather than with the social, he allows for assemblage in the domain of the social to be approached from the per- spective of the intervention of other kinds of assemblages, most notably of those made to appear in the domain of laboratory science, where ‘non- human’ agents assert their associative capacity. Like Gell, Latour stresses the analogous constitution of ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’, which ‘appear to be redistributed among the networks and to escape from them only fuzzily as if in dotted lines’ (Latour 1993: 103); and like Gell, who postulates the need for a single encompass- ing anthropological theory, Latour uses the closure of the separation of Nature and Culture common to science-based and premodern societies to argue for what he calls a ‘symmetrical’ anthropology that abolishes the need for dichotomy (ibid.: 103). Yet where Latour remains concerned with how we build communities of natures and societies in ways that come to inform one another, occupying a retrospective and bird’s eye perspective to track the intersecting of networks of human and non- human actors, Alfred Gell draws up close to recover for us the role of the artificial or ‘manufactured’, to grant us a ‘prospective’ perspective from which to expose the constitution of the social in the making. This move harbours an important idea, albeit one that is not fully developed in Art and Agency, but whose tenuous presence in the text promises to offer a very different conclusion about the nature of what Latour calls the ‘symmetrical’ relation between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Where Latour argues that ‘we have never been modern’, as beneath the dichotomy between nature and culture imposed by politics the lines are as fuzzy as among the peoples that tend to be described by ethnogra- phers, Gell recognizes the challenge posed by modernist artists who drew attention to the relation between art and systematic thought in a manner that was sensitive to ethnographic artefacts with which they surrounded themselves in their studios. Art and Agency puts us on the path to com- plicating the picture of a symmetrical relation as we begin to discover that it may be grounded not in the nature of social relations, but in the nature of image-based thought capable of systematicity and innovation. In fact, one might go a step further and argue that Art and Agency draws our attention to the analogical relation between discovery of the manifold in early ethnographic collections and the science of botany, both expressions of the pinnacle of Enlightenment culture and science. Following this further, one realizes that one is challenged to entertain a rather intriguing thought, namely of a symmetry between the role of
- 45. Threads of Thought: Reflections on Art and Agency 31 multiplicity in the Marquesan system of images and the role of the mani- fold in science and design (cf. Clothier 2008). We are thus led to conclude not that ‘we have never been modern’, but that what we call modern is in fact not our own invention. Where Latour invokes the relevance of eth- nography to the analysis of modern science and culture on grounds of the un-systematic, ‘fuzzy’ nature of social life, Gell provokes us to consider the relevance of ethnography to lie in the modernity of what Lévi-Strauss long ago called the ‘science of the concrete’. Zooming in close on Marquesan artefacts, Gell in fact adopts the per- spective of an eighteenth-century botanist who, through drawing and modelling, reflected on the connections that prevail among the compos- ite parts so as to understand what is prototypical and thus generative and reproductive about a plant. Drawing up close to enable us to notice con- straints upon composition, he invokes a comparison between Marquesan artefacts and the collections of artificial flowers in glass, wax and silk still preserved at the Botanical Gardens in Kew, or with the nineteenth-century botanical drawings, themselves composites drawn from several exemplars, so as to capture the characteristic aspects of the plant in ways that would allow botanists to represent not just a plant species, but an entire genus in a single image (Daston 2004: 226). If one takes this association between the prototype in Marquesan art and botany a step further one realizes that the ‘manufactured artefact’ is in fact not referring to the intervention of the hand or the machine, but to a manufacture guided by actions of thought that find their analogue in the tending of plants. We are asked to look at Marquesan artefacts in the same way as a botanist looks at plants, that is, as agents of metamorphosis whose systemic logic relates them all to one another as much as it distinguishes them from others. Encouraged to see transformation and its combinatorial algorithm as the definitive characteristic of an art form that makes explicit use of an imagistic combinatorial logic to archive, test, transmit and to enlarge knowledge, we cannot help but notice parallels with concerns in sev- enteenth-century Europe in which, in the tradition of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, art and science came together to provide the springboard for understanding and innovation (Bredekamp 2008: 109–10). This thought leads us on the one hand to consider the role of art in presenting us with the visible experience of relations held internally, a qualitative experience made possible by an intuition that is not based on calculation, while rendering intelligible what mere enumeration could not draw together. On the other hand, covert in Art and Agency, it leads us to reconsider the history of Pacific art, one that appears to us mainly through ethnographic collections, as a history shaped by a converging interest in images that figure as vehicles for thought, but also as a material history born out of such interest. The
- 46. 32 Susanne Küchler exploration of the Pacific, we know, was driven by the need for material resources to fuel the rising importance of chemistry in Europe. From botanical collecting to the trade in natural materials, this history of the European expansion into the Pacific has always ignored ethnographic collections, exploring them as by-products of interests that lay elsewhere. Art and Agency points us subtly to a way of rewriting this history, this time with Pacific art as the driving force of a mutual attraction. Material Aesthetics and the Future of Science At the time of the publication of Art and Agency, a number of theorists pursued the emergence of a ‘post-social’ regime of knowledge in which social relations and, most importantly, knowledge processes are taken over by objects – a notion that, arguably mistakenly, projects the idea of a sociality that once existed without objects but which now needs to be extended through ‘sociological imagination and vocabulary’ so as to encompass objects (Knorr-Cetina 1997: 2). Others, like Bruno Latour, argued that the materials which had begun to take over regimes of knowl- edge had in fact existed all the while in a kind of parallel universe of forward-looking experimentation, in university and other laboratories, each with its own specific culture and links to industry (Latour 1996). Gell contributed to this debate by forcing us to reconcile the workings of a material aesthetics that is capable of drawing together as assemblage what experience tells us to be distinct. He may have drawn here upon the work of the American anthropologist Gregory Bateson who once famously called ‘the bonus of understanding’ to be derived from a combi- nation of two different realms of data: one visible, the other invisible, and calibrated to provoke abductions that come to be formative of the way we think about these data thereafter (Bateson 1980: 76; see also Greenwood 2005: 95). Where Gell deviates from Latour is in postulating that the threads of thought that make regimes of knowledge and knowledge-transfer pos- sible are not derived from experimentation, but from acts of imagina- tion and visualization. The convergence of material aesthetics with the attribution of mind to things allows Gell to explain what Latour claims, yet cannot account for – namely that knowledge thus produced is not domesticated, and thus not readily possessed by corporate institutions, while binding persons to one another more effectively than contracts (Halbert 2005; Tenner 1996). The unleashing of a material aesthetic that serves at once as vehicle of knowledge and as agent of attachment is the subtext of Art and Agency, and signals the coming into the open of what was covertly active all along.
- 47. Threads of Thought: Reflections on Art and Agency 33 Art and Agency sensitizes us to the ending of the Enlightenment by sup- planting object-centred and subject-driven discourses with an image of a material mind, the workings of which are revealed by ethnography as effec- tivelyastheyaredisclosedbyartworks,byscientificinventionsandbydesign. The notion of a material aesthetic that attributes to things the capacity to act as exponents of thought, realized in robotics and intelligent fabrics, was still in its infancy when Art and Agency was first published (Clark 1997). Yet while scholars such as Francoise Lyotard (1991) and Bruno Latour (1996) drew from this development the inspiration to foresee a world liberated from the shackles of systems of classification based on hierarchical distinc- tions between human and non-human life, Art and Agency paved the way for us to ask questions about the nature of diversity beyond distinction, in a world where everything is connected in fluid and generative ways. Art and Agency has proved a difficult read, not because it lacked some polish here and there, but because it demands that we acknowledge the intellectual tradition on which our most trusted assumptions are founded, and simultaneously discount these assumptions, merely to replace them with a new resolution whose outlines become visible only after perceptive and close reading. Rooted seemingly firmly in the classical anthropological preoccupation with the ‘peculiar relations between persons and “things” which somehow “appear as” or duty as, persons’ (Gell 1998: 9), the ostensibly straightforward referential quality of the sign is complicated by a methodological insurgence which postulates the positioning of the thus fused material entity within an asymmetrical relation encompassing artist and recipient. Before we know it, the rug is pulled from under our feet as we progress to the second part of the book, opening with the chapter on Marquesan art. Whereas Gell initially calmed us down by allowing us to pursue the tracking of relations via distinctions made between things and things, and persons via things, we are suddenly dragged inside a bubble that could be likened to Leibniz’s windowless monad (cf. Bredekamp 2008). Here, tracking what appears to us to stand out does not help, as everything is by definition alike, distinguished merely as transformation upon one another, whose dynamic unfolding we need to know in order to attribute significance to what we see. At the time of the publication of Art and Agency, analogies with such self-constructive, generative systems came primarily from new biology and new physics, which had embraced the modelling of the non-linear behaviour of complex organisms. Ten years on, a new possible analogy has emerged in the form of libraries or archives of materials, most of them composites that were chemically ‘made to measure’ to serve a range of related functions (Ball 1997). The first such library opened in 1996, yet today there are uncounted numbers all seeking to manage an avalanche of self-similar materials designed in the lab, whose quantities have far
- 48. 34 Susanne Küchler outstripped the number of individual objects’ functions. Beyond distinc- tion, both archiving and selection have become troublesome, prompting the most experimental of libraries to work with artists to arrive at an understanding of the appropriate inter-artefactual relations that can be elicited from the materials at hand. For Gell, the concern with art resulted not from a concern with art per se, but with what art affords us to understand – that is, that the material world comes to us in forms that are intuitively cognizable. Several years on, we can see the value of Art and Agency in having validated ethnogra- phy to be vital to the investigation of ‘epistemic objects’ not in spite of, but because of, its proximity to art, both relying on the same technique of intuiting connectivity from the close observation of the things themselves. Art and Agency’s potential to engage with the literature on the mind, let alone science, has not yet been fully realized, at least not within anthro- pology (Knappett 2002). The reason for anthropology’s reluctance to read Art and Agency with science in mind lies firmly in the misreading provoked by the title-word ‘art’, itself the result of anthropology’s resist- ance to a material engagement with matters of the mind, an even more entrenched blindness to the multiple trajectories of science, and an abject anxiety complex around the dusty, inaccessible and intrepid nature of the ‘stuff’ that science itself had long found to matter hugely in theory build- ing. It is true that Art and Agency’s formulation of the three-dimensional model of index, artist and recipient as research tool has been heralded for its methodological capacity to uncover the way objects can work as nodes within networks that involve non-human entities as well as groups of human producers and of course consumers (Leach 2002; Geismar 2004), yet what kind of theoretical aspiration lies behind this tooling has been made less clear and is often misconstrued (Larson 2007). Alfred Gell certainly would have been bemused to see his fellow anthropologists fall into the trap he laid by enthralling the reader with images of art that suddenly and quite unexpectedly come to be mapped onto an anthropology of the mind. Like a mouse after its cheese, most of us go for what appears to be visibly there, the ‘art object’, and overlook what lies invisibly behind. In true Gellian style, it is through images and the imagistic construction of the text into coterminous layers turned into one that we can begin to intuit the outlines of a theory that has much wider and more forward-looking aspirations than the title seems at first to suggest. The provocative clue is Marcel Duchamp’s Network of Stoppages, whose threefold construction, into one indivisible surface which inter- laces the ‘map’ of the network, the line-sketch for a prototype (the Large Glass), and the version of Duchamp’s first major painting of Young Man and Girl in Spring painted beneath, forces a similar sudden recognition of what this book is setting out to do as the Umeda dancer in Gell’s first
- 49. Threads of Thought: Reflections on Art and Agency 35 book on the Metamorphosis of the Cassowary (1976), whose abductive capacity he signalled with his usual eloquence. The methodology advanced in Art and Agency has interestingly, though perhaps unsurprisingly, been profiled most successfully by art historians, for the simple reason of a misunderstanding of the text that resulted in the interpretation of Art and Agency as the theoretical rejection of the idea that visual and aesthetic experience is culturally coded and thus open to sociological as well as art historical analysis (Rampley 2005). Gell’s method of uncovering the indexical workings of the material entity – exposing the aesthetic workings of the mind, capable of trapping the minds of others and thus distributing personhood globally through a network of traces, objects and memories far beyond the seemingly fixed spatio-temporal coordinates of situated practice – is harnessed with increasing enthusiasm by those wanting to apply a method that is appropriate to coping with cultural difference within the remit of world art studies. The misunderstanding revolves around the notion of the aesthetic, which Gell is often mistakenly seen to critique, while in fact it is foun- dational to his theory of how culture (as a configuration of intersubjec- tive understandings) and style (as a configuration of stylistic attributes) come to form a synergic and dynamic whole (Gell 1998: 156). Rather than abolishing situated remembering and cultural practice, the cogni- tive stickiness of a material aesthetic raises the question of the complex interrelation of mind, body and world, to which the recent discovery of mirror neurons by neuroscience has drawn our attention (Gallese 2001; Metzinger 2009). Perhaps the most illuminating critical discussion of Art and Agency as an extenuated elaboration of Igor Kopytoff’s paper on ‘The Cultural Biography of Things’ (1986) is by Carl Knappett (2002), whose paper in the Journal of Material Culture sets out a sharp critique of what has become known as the projectionist fallacy, which assumed that agency merely cloaks things temporarily and externally. Drawing on Bruno Latour (1996), Graves-Brown (2000) and others, he extracts from Art and Agency the alternative perspective in which ‘mind, body and world are seen as co-dependent’ (Knappett 2002: 98–99). After Art and Agency, the agency of things arguably has been given the character of a mantra which we hope will become clearer if we only say it more frequently. Knappett’s paper has remained quite unique so far in that he begins to draw out an important line of argument rarely drawn attention to in other accounts of Art and Agency; this being that an artefact’s agency is derived from its capacity to resemble its prototype, either, so perhaps least commonly, in terms of form, or more frequently through a type of material translation called skeuomorphism, which enables one material to evoke the appearance of another. ‘Cognitive stickiness’ is thus subject
- 50. 36 Susanne Küchler to a techno-‘logical’ activity, which makes latent connections between things and people via things present and intuitively indicative of complex intentionality. The actions which art-like things allow us to reflect upon are shown not to mirror human action, but the action of the mind (cf. Morphy 2009). No doubt, Art and Agency articulates another phase of those many endings of the Enlightenment. The ending which Art and Agency marks by attributing agency to manufactured things, variously called in the book ‘artefacts’ or ‘material entities’, recalls the beauty assigned to things in late capitalism whose hold over the mind is as complete as their capac- ity to elicit acts of exchange. The story of Art and Agency continues to fascinate and enthral us as we realize the dawning of a new age in which not made things, but made materials, unleash processes of transformation whose many still-unknown effects may be no less dangerous or divisive than the industrial world we leave behind. Gell’s account of the agency of art gives salient recognition to what more recently has become known as a new experience of diversity based on elective affinity, making chemistry a moral language no different to the early nineteenth century when Goethe (2008) wrote a novel on this subject, a language no longer mastered through empirical observation alone, but through the visualization of the spatio-temporal logic of affinity in the table of substances (Kim 2003). Materials science is today the domain, once dominated by art, in which new fusions between thought and thing can be realized. Its rise describes the closure of the gulf between ‘the horizons of expectation’ and ‘space of experience’ whose legacy has shaped our existing notions of intellec- tual labours and constrained our institutional collaborations that must be reformed, if the new intellectual era is to be fully realized. Art and Agency may be just one of those key texts that mark the belated recognition of the material basis of mind, with yet to be realized consequences for the disciplines and institutions responsible for the study of mankind in the twenty-first century. References Adams, M. 1977. ‘Style in South-East Asian Materials Processing: Some Implications for Ritual and Art’, in H. Lechtman and R. Merrill (eds), Material Culture, Styles, Organisation and Dynamics of Technology. 1975 Proceedings of American Ethnological Society. St Paul, MN: West Publishing Company, pp. 21–52. Ascher, M. 1991. Ethnomathematics: A Multicultural View of Mathematical Ideas. New York: Chapman and Hall. Ascher, M. and R. Ascher. 1978. Code of the Quipu: Databook. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
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- 53. CHAPTER 2 TECHNOLOGIES OF ROUTINE AND OF ENCHANTMENT Chris Gosden Art and Agency can be seen as an exploration of the manner in which the qualities of people are brought out by objects and how objects are given power and salience by people. The key questions asked in the latter part of the book concern both the problem of order and of intelligibility: how are artefacts ordered through evolving styles, how do such styles link to the broader ordering of culture, and in what ways do both the ordering of material things and of culture provide the grounds for the intelligibil- ity of the world? Gell critically discusses Hanson’s (1983) work on Maori style, where Hanson makes a connection between the generally balanced symmetry of Maori carving and an ethic of balanced reciprocity found in social dealings more generally. All pattern will have some symmetrical features, Gell argues (1998: 160) because that is what pattern is – a play on symmetry. However, Gell does applaud the general direction of the argument – ‘I believe that the intuition that there is a linkage between the concept of style (as a configuration of stylistic attributes) and the concept of culture (as a configuration of intersubjective understandings) is well founded’ (ibid.: 156). Such a statement holds out an exciting prospect for any student of material culture, in the possibility that one can move from an analysis of the qualities of objects to the understandings people had of the world and of each other. Artefacts do not reflect intel- lectual schemes, but help to create and shape them. For the archaeolo- gist, dealing with scant historical records or with none, the possibility of moving from form and decoration to broader understandings of society is seductive and increasingly popular (e.g. Malafouris and Renfrew 2010). In Art and Agency Gell was not explicitly concerned with history, but felt that his analysis could potentially be extended to embrace historical change. What he did provide was a set of analytical approaches to style and form which can be usefully extended to historical periods. In what follows, I would like to explore work which takes a historical perspective
- 54. 40 Chris Gosden on material culture and especially that which tries to make a link between understandings of the world, social relations and material things. What Art and Agency can add to such work is a key question. In his book Money and the Early Greek Mind, Richard Seaford (2004) charts the development of classical Greek society, with individuals and money, from a more communal, aristocratic and gift-giving society of the Bronze Age. Money, or rather its emergence, is key to Seaford’s argu- ment. Money is a quantified measure of value operating on a scale which has no theoretical upper limit, it is generally acceptable within the area of its currency, helping to meet various forms of social obligation, but in an impersonal manner. Money depends also on systems of number and account; it requires extensive trust (ibid.: 16–20). Seaford sees money to be an important precondition for the emergence of a particularly indi- vidualized society, which created an ‘impersonal cosmology’ and forms of tragedy which focus ‘on the extreme isolation of the individual from the gods and from his own kin’ (ibid.: 316–17). This is a society in many ways similar to our own and quite different from previous Bronze Age forms in which the gods were directly interested in the world of people and people were much more imbricated in each other’s affairs. At the heart of Seaford’s argument is a link between forms of mate- rial culture, such as coins, which were multiple copies of the same thing and forms of personhood, where individuals lived in an impersonal cosmos. Homer brings to life an aristocratic, feuding and heroic world of reciprocity and redistribution, in which obligations to kin and to the gods outweighed a notion of self or self interest. It is also a world in which objects were individualized, having their own known biographies. ‘The silver mixing-bowl, for instance, made by the Sidonians, given to Thoas, then to Patroclus as ransom to Lycaon, then by Achilles as a prize in the funeral-games, is said to be the most beautiful in the world’ (Seaford 2004: 46–47). Exchanges were also varied, lacking standardized exchange equivalents or anything analogous to price. There is an inverse relationship between an earlier individuality of objects and commonal- ity of persons and a later serial reproduction of objects as against the rationalized individuality of people. Although different in many respects, the works of Seaford and Gell share in common the idea that artefacts en masse are part of our joint intelligence, helping to make sense of the world and the people in it in particular ways. In fact Seaford’s broadest point is that by creating a uni- versal notion of value and a link to substance in general, money opens up the possibility of generalized substance, of which individual things are detailed manifestations. Notions such as substance become key to philos- ophy from the pre-Socratics period onwards. The issue of substance is also important to current social sciences concerned with materials. Seaford’s
- 55. Random documents with unrelated content Scribd suggests to you:
- 56. thing. We sent them down, first backward, then forward, and either way the little fellows seemed to enjoy the sport as much as we; and it was not long before they would climb up on the root and, ducking their tiny heads, would go rolling down the toboggan slide, and in the end we actually had to tie them up to keep them from overdoing it.
- 57. Making friends Sometimes they would play like kittens. They would roll over and over, biting and wrestling, and we would laugh until our sides fairly ached. At other times they seemed to feel cranky and out of sorts,
- 58. and then they would claw and fight each other. These spells always occurred when they were tied to their stake and were pacing the circle in front of their cave. We continued to keep them fastened most of the time by their buckskin leads to the stake driven near their den, and they spent much of their time walking round and round in circles. They never however, by any chance, accompanied each other in the same direction, but invariably travelled different ways; and for the most part they rather ignored each other when they met on these journeys, or stopped to play in all friendliness. Perhaps they would pass without noticing each other a dozen times, when suddenly, as they met again, they would rise on their hind legs and look at each other with an expression of complete surprise, as who should say: “Where in all creation did you come from? Here I have been travelling this circle for half an hour, and never mistrusted there was another bear in this part of the country.” And then, as though determined to celebrate the lucky meeting, they would embrace and tumble about for a few minutes and then separate and, perhaps, pass each other a dozen times more with no notice taken. And then the little comedy would be re-enacted. But on days when their tempers were touchy these meetings were apt to be less playful. Instead of surprise they would then exhibit resentment at finding their imaginary solitude invaded; and after a few spiteful slaps with their little paws, they would clinch and bite and claw each other in earnest. Usually they would break away from these clinches quite suddenly and resume their tramp; only, however, to reopen hostilities at an early date. Ben, although the smaller of the two, always seemed to get the better of his brother in the boxing bouts and wrestling matches. He entered into each with an earnestness that seemed to put the larger cub to flight; and yet in spite of the fact that as they grew older their battles seemed to grow more fierce, we thought nothing of the matter, but looked on and laughed at the Lilliputian struggles. But one day when we returned to camp we found George dead in the little trail that circled the stake to which they were tied, while Ben in his rounds stepped
- 59. over the body of his dead brother at each turn. George’s face and nose were chewed beyond identification and he had been dead several hours. Ben had now no companions except ourselves and one of the dogs which I had brought along and whose name was Jim; but in spite of this, or because of it, he grew more friendly and playful each day. He would coax Jim to come and romp with him and they would chase each other about until the dog was tired out. Ben seemed to be tireless and would never quit playing until chained up, or until the badgered dog turned on him in earnest. Even then the bear used not to give up hope immediately. After the first really angry snap from Jim, Ben would stand off a few feet and look apologetic. Then, if nothing more happened, he would approach the dog with a kind of experimental briskness; only, however, to turn a back somersault in his haste to get out of the reach of Jim’s teeth. A few minutes later, after Jim had lain down and was apparently asleep, Ben would steal up quietly and, very gently, with just the tip of his paw, would touch his old playfellow to find out if he really meant that the romp was off. And it was the deep growl that always greeted this last appeal that seemed to settle the matter in Ben’s mind. He would then keep out of Jim’s way until the latter felt like having another play. Ben was very quick to learn and we only had to show him a few times to have him catch on to a new trick. He continued to enjoy cartwheeling down the old root, and one of the other things he took to with the most zest was a sort of juggling act with a ball. This trick, like the other, we discovered by accident, and then worked up into a more elaborate performance. We finally made him a large ball out of a length of rope, sewed it up in a gunny-sack to keep it from unwinding, and he would lie on his back and keep the thing spinning with his four feet by the hour. Early in July the weather finally became settled. The new snow had melted away, the old snow banks were fast disappearing, the little open park on the side of the mountain above our camp was green with young grass and literally carpeted with flowers. So one
- 60. morning we rounded up the ponies, saddled and packed them, put the cub into a grain sack, tied up the mouth, placed it on top of one of the packs, tied each of its four corners to one of the lash ropes that held the pack to the horse, and started into the unexplored Clearwater country in the heart of the Bitter Roots. The horse selected for Ben’s mount was a little tan-colored beast who gave very little trouble on the trail, and whom we called Buckskin. We never had to lead him and he would always follow without watching. He would, when he found good feed, loiter behind until the pack train was nearly out of sight; but then, with a loud neigh, he would come charging along, jumping logs and dashing through thick bushes until the train was again caught up with. The first day’s travel was a dangerous one for the bear on account of the many low-hanging limbs. We were obliged to keep a constant watch lest one of these catch the sack and either sweep it from the pack or crush Ben to death inside it. But with care and good luck we got through safely and, after seven hours of travel, reaching an open side hill with plenty of feed for the horses and a clear cold spring, we went into camp. While we were unpacking the horses an old trapper and prospector known as Old Jerry came along. He was one of the first men who made their way into that wilderness, and for many years he and his cabin on the Lockasaw Fork of the Clearwater were among the curiosities of the region. We had put Ben, still in his sack, on the ground while we got things settled for the night, and Old Jerry, seeing the sack moving, asked what we had in it. When he heard that it was a Black Bear cub he asked permission to turn it out and have a look at it and we told him to go ahead. After loosening the cord that closed the mouth, he took the sack by the two lower corners and gave it a shake, and out rolled Ben in his favorite toboganning posture of a fluffy ball. The cub seemed to think this a variation of the pine root game, and to the astonishment and delight of Old Jerry continued turning somersaults for ten or fifteen feet. Old Jerry is still alive, and to this day I never meet him that he does not speak of my performing cub.
- 61. The next day we cut a hole in the sack so that he could ride with his head out The next day we again put Ben in the sack, but this time we cut a hole in the side of it, so that he could ride with his head out. For a
- 62. while he was contented with this style of riding, but after some days he got to working on the sack until he was able to crawl through the hole. Then, as we found that he could keep his seat very nicely and would even, when his pony passed under a branch or leaning tree, dodge to one side of the pack and hang there until the danger was past, we adopted his amendment and from this time on never again put him in the sack when on the march. Instead, we arranged to give him a good flat pack to ride on. We put a roll of blankets on each side of the horse, close up to the horns of the pack saddle, and tied them in place. Then the space between was filled with small articles and a heavy canvas thrown over all and cinched in place. And on top of this Ben would pass the day. We tied his lead to the lash rope and he seemed perfectly content, and in fact appeared to enjoy the excitement of being jolted and shaken along through the timber and brush. It kept him on the jump to dodge the limbs and switches that were always threatening to unseat him, but in all of his four months’ riding through the mountains, I never saw him taken unawares. Nor was he ever thrown by a bucking horse. Sometimes he would get down from his seat on top of the pack and sit on the pony’s neck, holding by one paw to the front of the pack. Sometimes he would lie curled up as though asleep. But he was never caught off his guard, and his horse Buckskin seemed not to care how much he climbed about on its back. Ben soon came to know his own horse, and after Buckskin was packed of a morning would run to the pony’s side and bawl to be lifted to his place on the pack. And once there he spent several minutes each morning inspecting the canvas and the ropes of his pack. Several times during the summer we were obliged to transfer Ben to another mount, but we had to be mighty careful in our arrangements, as we learned to our cost the first time we tried the experiment. This was on a day when we had a difficult mountain to descend, and we thought we would lighten Buckskin’s load by putting Ben on another horse that was carrying less weight. We got him settled on Baldy, as we called the other cayuse, without any trouble, and started out in the usual order; but just as we were on a
- 63. particularly steep part of the hill, working our way down through a track of burned but still standing timber where the dry dirt and ashes were several inches deep and the dust and heat almost unbearable, there was a sudden commotion in the rear. We turned to see what was happening, and out of a cloud of dust and ashes Baldy bore frantically down upon us. His back was arched and with his head down between his fore-legs he was giving one of the most perfect exhibitions of the old-school style of bucking that any one ever saw. Now it is useless to try to catch a bucking horse on a steep mountain side. The only thing to be done was to get out of the road and wait until the frightened animal either lost its footing and rolled to the foot of the declivity or reached the bottom right side up and stopped of its own accord. So we jumped to one side. But, just as Ben and his maddened steed enveloped in a cloud of ash dust swept past the balance of the now frightened horses, the pack hit against a dead tree whose root had nearly rotted away and the result completed the confusion. For the force of the shock first dislodged a large section of loosely hanging bark which came down with much noise, striking the head packhorse squarely across the back; and this was almost instantly followed by the falling of the old tree itself, which came down with a crash of breaking limbs and dead branches, and sent up a cloud of dust that completely hid Ben and his cavorting mount as they tore down the mountain. This was too much for the leading pony, who already stood shivering with excitement, and turning sharp to the right he shot off around the side of the mountain. The other horses were quickly tied up, and while Spencer hurried after the runaway leader I took down through the burned timber after Baldy. Had the latter known how hard it had been to shake that same little bear from the limb of the old tree, he never would have spent so much energy in trying to buck him off the top of the pack. Ben had not looked in the least troubled as he was hurried past us, but had apparently felt himself complete master of the situation. He had, however, almost instantly disappeared from view, and soon
- 64. even the sound of the bounding pony and the breaking of the dead branches as the pack hit them was no longer to be heard. The only things that marked their course were the deep imprints of the pony’s feet and the dust cloud that was settling down among the dead and blackened timber. Hurrying along this easily followed trail I at last reached the bottom of the gorge and found the tracks still leading up the opposite slope. But the horse had soon tired of the strenuous work of the steep ascent, and after a couple of hundred yards he had come to a standstill in a thick clump of trees and underbrush that had escaped the fire. Ben was still sitting in his place as unconcerned as though nothing had happened, but was liberally covered with ashes and did not seem to be in the best of humors. The pack did not appear to have slipped any and so I undid the lead rope and started back toward where the pack train had been left. But when only a few yards on the way the pony suddenly bolted ahead, nearly knocking me down as he tried to get past. I brought him to a halt with a few sharp yanks on the rope, and then kept a careful eye to the rear to find out what it was that was startling him. I did not suspect Ben because none of the horses had ever shown the least fear of him, had always allowed him to run about them as they did the dogs, and no one of them had ever even kicked at him. Nevertheless I had noticed that the cub seemed grumpy when we put him on Baldy, and remembered that at first he had bawled and tried to get down. So I kept my eye on him. And the first thing I knew I saw him push out his upper lip, as all bears do when mad and out of humor, reach out stealthily one of his hind legs, and with a sharp stroke drive his catlike claws into Baldy’s rump. So here was the cause of all the trouble. Ben, objecting to the change of programme, had been taking it out on the horse. I at once tied him up so short that he could not reach the horse from the pack, and, although he was in a huff all that day, we had no further trouble with him. Only twice after this, however, did we mount him on any other horse but his own Buckskin. Each day’s travel now brought us nearer to the main range, and one day we climbed the last ridge and camped on the border of one
- 65. of the beautiful summit meadows where grow the camas, the shooting-star, the dog-tooth violet, the spring beauty, and other plants that the grizzlies love. The snow, by now, had disappeared, except the immense banks lying in the deep ravines on the north side of the upper peaks; the marshes were literally cut up by the tracks of deer, elk, and moose; while freshly dug holes and the enormous tracks of grizzlies told us plainly that we had reached the happy hunting ground. And now I began to learn from Ben much about the wonderful instincts of animals. Ben had never, before we captured him, had a mouthful of any food except his mother’s milk. Not only had the family just left the winter den in which the little cubs had been born, but the earth at that time, and for long after, had been covered deep with snow. So that there was nothing for even a grown bear to eat except some of the scant grasses that our horses found along the little open places on the sides of the hills, or the juices and soft slimy substances to be found beneath the bark of the mountain spruce trees in the spring and early summer. But now, while camped near this mountain meadow, Ben would pull at his leash and even bawl to get loose, and I soon took to letting him go and to following him about to learn what it was that he wished to do. I was amazed to find that he knew every root and plant that the oldest bears knew of and fed upon in that particular range of mountains. He would work around by the hour, paying not the least attention to my presence; eat a bit of grass here, dig for a root there, and never once make a mistake. When he got something that I did not recognize, I would take it away from him and examine it to see what it was, and in this way I learned many kinds of roots that the bears feed on in their wild state. I have seen Ben dig a foot down into the ground and unearth a bulb that had not yet started to send out its shoot. Later, when the time came for the sarvis berries and huckleberries to ripen, he would go about pulling down bushes, searching for berries. And not once in the whole summer did I ever see him pull down a bush that was not a berry bush. This was the more remarkable because he would occasionally examine berry bushes on which there happened to be no berries at the time.
- 66. At our next camp we killed a small moose for meat, and the hide was used during the remainder of the trip as a cover for one of the packs. After a few days in the sun it dried as hard as a board and of course took the shape of the pack over which it had been used. And this skin box now became Ben’s home when in camp. It was placed on the ground, Ben’s picket pin driven near it, and he soon learned to raise up one edge and crawl inside. It was funny, when he had done some mischief in camp and we stamped our feet and took after him, to see him fly to the protection of his skin teepee, and raise the edge with one paw so quickly that there was no apparent pause in his flight. Then, safe inside, we would hear him strike the ground with his forefoot and utter angry “whoofs,” daring us to come any nearer. After a few minutes the edge of the hide would be lifted a few inches and a little gray nose would peep out to see if the coast was clear. If no notice was taken of him he would come back into camp, only to get into trouble again and be once more shooed back to cover. Ben took great pride in this home of his and was an exemplary housekeeper, for no insect was ever permitted to dwell in the coarse hair. At first, when the hide was green, the flies would crowd into the hair and “blow,” or deposit their eggs. These Ben never allowed to hatch. As soon as he was off his pony he would get to work on his house, and with much sniffing and clawing, would dig out and eat every egg to be found. And not one ever escaped his keen little nose. Many times in the night we would hear him sniffing and snuffing away, searching out the fly-blows. He grew to be more of a pet each day and he still juggled his ball of rope. Indeed, he got to be a great expert at this trick. He knew his own frying-pan from the others, and would set up a hungry bawl as soon as it was brought out. His food in camp was still flour and water, a little sugar, and condensed milk. This we fed him for more than a month, after which we cut out the milk and gave him just flour and water with a pinch of sugar. He did not care about meat and would eat his frying-pan food, or bread, in preference to deer or moose meat. Sometimes, when we killed a grizzly, we would bring in
- 67. some of the meat and cook it for the dogs. This was the only meat that Ben would touch and very little of that. But although he occasionally consented to dine on bear meat, he showed unmistakable signs of temper whenever a new bear-skin was added to our growing pile of pelts. On these occasions, even before the hide was brought to camp, we would find him on our return in a towering rage. No amount of coaxing would induce him to take a romp. Not even for his only four-footed friend, Jim, would he come out of his huff. He would retreat beneath his moose-skin house, and we could hear him strike the ground, champ his jaws, and utter his blowing “whoofs.” I was never able to make out whether he resented or was made fearful by the killing of his kind, or whether it was the smell of the grizzlies, of which the Black Bear is more or less afraid, that affected him. He still remembered his mother, and on every occasion when he could get to our pile of bear hides he would dig out her skin—the only Black Bear skin in the lot—sniff it all over, and lie on it until dragged away. Indeed he seemed to mourn so much over it, even whimpering and howling every time the wind was in the right direction for him to smell it, that we finally had to keep this hide away from camp. One day a little later on, as we were working our way toward the Montana side of the mountains, we arrived after a hard day’s work at the bank of a large stream flowing into the middle fork of the Clearwater River. As the stream to be forded was a swift and dangerous one, and as we had as high a mountain to climb on the other side as the one we had come down, we decided to go into camp and wait till morning to find a practicable ford. In this deep canyon there was no feed for the horses, and not even enough level ground on which to set up our tent. So the horses were tied up to the trees, supper was cooked and eaten, Ben’s “coop,” as we called his skin house, was placed under a tree, and then each of us rolled up in his blankets and was soon lulled to sleep by the roar of the water over the boulders that lined the river’s bed.
- 68. Ready for the start We were up and ready for the start before it was fairly light in the deep canyon, and, on account of the dangerous work ahead of us, both in fording the river and in climbing the opposite mountain, we determined to put Ben on a pony that could be led. We were careful, however, to tie him up short enough to prevent any repetition of his former antics. I then mounted my riding horse, a good sure-footed one, and, with the lead rope of Ben’s horse in my hand, started for the other shore. The first two-thirds of the ford was not bad, but the last portion was deep and swift, the footing bad, and the going dangerous. However, by heading my horse diagonally down-stream, and thus going with the current, we succeeded in making the opposite bank in safety and waited for Spencer and Jack to follow. They got along equally well until near the bank on which I stood, when Spencer’s horse slipped on one of the smooth rocks and pitched his rider over his head into the swirling water. With a pole which I had cut in case it should be needed I managed to pull the
- 69. water-soaked fellow out of the current, however, and when we had seen once more to the security of the packs we started on the steep climb ahead of us. There was not so much as an old game trail to mark our way, and the hill was so steep that we could only make headway by what are known as “switchbacks.” Our one desire now was to get up to where we could find grass for the horses, and a place level enough to pitch a tent and to unpack and give the ponies a few days in which to rest up. The horse on which Ben had been mounted for the day was called Riley, and, as I have already said, we had selected him for his steady-going qualities and his reliability in leading. But just as we reached a particularly steep place about half-way up the mountain, Riley suddenly stopped and threw his weight back on the lead rope, which was lapped around the horn of my riding saddle, in such a way that the rope parted, the horse lost his balance, and falling backward landed, all four feet in the air, in a hole that had been left by an upturned root. We at once tied up the rest of the horses to prevent them from straying, and, cutting the cinch rope to Riley’s pack, rolled him over and got him to his feet again. We then led him to as level a spot as we could find and once more cinched on the saddle, and, while Spencer brought the various articles that made up the pack, I repacked the horse. All this time nobody had thought of Ben. In the excitement of rescuing the fallen horse he had been completely forgotten, and when Spencer lifted the pack cover, which was the last article of the reversed pack, he called out in consternation, “Here’s Ben, smashed as flat as a shingle.” When we rushed to examine him we found that he still breathed, but that was about all; and after I got the horse packed I wrapped him in my coat, placed him in a sack, and hanging this to the horn of my riding saddle, proceeded up the hill. In the course of a couple of hours we reached another of those ideal camping spots, a summit marsh, and here we unpacked the horses, turned them loose, set up our tent, and then looked Ben over to see if any bones were broken. His breathing seemed a little stronger, so I put him in the sun at the foot of a large tree and in a
- 70. few minutes he staggered to his feet. We always carried a can-full of sour dough to make bread with, and Ben was extravagantly fond of this repulsive mixture which he considered a dainty. I now offered him a spoonful of it, and as soon as the smell reached his nostrils he spruced up and began to lap it from the spoon; and from that time on his recovery was rapid. The next day he was as playful as ever and seemed none the worse for his close call. Spencer had a great way, when we were about camp and Ben was not looking, of suddenly scuffling his feet on the ground and going “Whoof-whoof!” to frighten the cub. This would either send Ben flying up a tree or start him in a mad rush for his moose-skin house before he realized what the noise was. But one evening after this trick had been sprung on the cub several times, we came into camp well after dark, tired, hungry, and not thinking of Ben; and as Spencer passed a large tree there was a sudden and loud scuffling on the ground at his very heels and a couple of genuine “whoof- whoofs” that no one who had ever heard a bear could mistake. Spencer made a wild leap to one side and was well started on a second before he thought of Ben and realized that his pupil had learned a new trick and had incidentally evened things up with his master. The acuteness of Ben’s senses was almost beyond belief. Nothing ever succeeded in approaching our camp without his knowing it; and this not only before we could hear a sound ourselves, but before we could have expected even his sharp ears or sensitive nostrils to detect anything. He would stand on his hind feet and listen, or get behind a tree and peer out with one eye, and at such times nothing would distract his attention from the approaching object. Moreover whenever he had one of these spells of suspicion something invariably appeared. It might prove to be a moose or a deer or an elk, but something would always finally walk out into view. He was far and away the best look-out that I ever saw. We used to amuse ourselves by trying to surprise him on our return to camp; but, come in as quietly as we might, and up the wind at that, we would always find him standing behind a tree, peering around its trunk with just
- 71. one eye exposed, ready to climb in case the danger proved sufficient to warrant it. One day after we had crossed the divide of the Bitter Root range into Montana, where we had gone to replenish our food supply before starting on our return trip, we camped in a canyon through which flowed an excellent trout stream. We were still miles from any settlement and had no idea that there was another human being in the same county. I was lying in the shade of a large tree with Ben, as his habit was, lying beside me with his head on my breast, to all appearance fast asleep. Suddenly he roused, stood up on his hind legs, and looked up the canyon. I also looked but, seeing nothing, pulled the bear down beside me again. For a while he was quiet, but soon stood up again and gazed uneasily up the creek. As nothing appeared I again made him lie down; but there was plainly something on his mind, and at last, after nearly half an hour of these tactics, he jumped to his feet, pushed out his upper lip, and began the blowing sound that he always made when something did not suit him. And there, more than two hundred yards away and wading in the middle of the creek, was a man, fishing. In some way Ben had been aware of his approach long before he had rounded the turn that brought him into sight of our camp. We remained in Montana long enough to visit the town of Missoula, lay in a supply of provisions, ship our bear-skins, buy a small dog-chain and collar for Ben, who was getting too large for his buck-skin thong, and rest the horses. Then, O’Brien having determined to try his fortune in the mining camps, Spencer and I turned our faces to the West and started back over the same three hundred miles of trackless mountains. It was well into September when, after many happenings but no serious misadventures, we arrived at a small town on a branch of the Northern Pacific Railway one hundred and twenty-five miles from Spokane; and here we decided to ship not only our new store of furs, but our camp outfit as well. From here on our way lay through open farm lands, and we could find bed and board with the ranchers as we travelled.
- 72. Ben tries on his new chain and collar Ben was still the same jolly fellow, but now grown so large that by standing on his hind feet he could catch his claws in the hair cinch of the saddle and relieve us of the trouble of lifting him to the back of his mount. He and Jim remained the best of friends. Spencer continued to teach the cub new tricks. Ben could now juggle not only the ball, but any other object that was not too heavy for his strength, and he spent many hours at the pastime. While we were packing the baggage Ben attracted the attention of the entire population. The children, being told that he was gentle, brought him ripe plums and candies and he was constantly stuffed as full as he could hold, and not unnaturally took a great fancy to the kids. They were always ready to play with him, moreover, and his entire time at this place was divided between eating and wrestling with the youngsters. And when we left Ben received an ovation from the whole community.
- 73. Ben and Buckskin caused no end of sensations in passing through the country. We often came across loose horses feeding along the highway, and these nearly always wished to make our acquaintance. They would follow Spencer and myself for a while, and then turn back to see if the pony loitering in the rear was not more friendly. And Buck on these occasions would hurry ahead, more than anxious to meet them. But they never waited for an introduction. With loud snorts and tails in the air they either shot away across the open fields or tore madly past us up the turnpike, while Buckskin stood looking after them in puzzled disappointment. One day, just as we were rounding a turn in the road, we met a farmer and his wife driving a two-horse buggy. Buckskin had just come loping up and was only a few yards behind us, and the sight of a bear riding a horse so pleased the farmer that he paid little attention to his horses, who almost went crazy with fright. Buck looked at the dancing team in amazement, and Ben was as much interested as any one. But the woman, in the very beginning, took sides with the farm team, and sat with terrified eyes clutching her husband’s arm and yelling for him to be careful. Finally her fright and cries got on his nerves, and he stopped laughing long enough to shout “Will you shut up?” in a voice that effectually broke up the meeting. One night we asked for lodging at a farm run by an old lady. As I knocked at the door of the house and proffered our request she at once gave her consent, and directed us to the rear of the stable, where we would find hay for our horses and where we could spread our blankets for the night. Next morning we paid our bill, and as we left the yard the old lady, who was at the door to see us off, called out to know if all five of those horses were ours. I told her that they were and asked what she meant, and she said that she had only charged us for feed for three. She had, she explained, been so taken up with looking at that fool bear riding a horse that two of the horses had escaped her notice.
- 74. At last we reached Spokane and Ben’s horseback riding came to an end. He had covered more than a thousand miles of mountain and valley and ridden for nearly four months. I fitted up a woodshed for him with a door opening into a small court, where an old partly rotted log was put to remind him of the forest. He soon became a great favorite, and as no one was allowed to tease him he continued to be friendly and gentle. This shed in which Ben lived had the earth for a floor, and adjoining it there was a carriage-house with a floor some ten or twelve inches above the ground. One day soon after Ben was placed in the shed I came home and found a large pile of fresh earth and a hole leading down under the carriage-house. I could hear Ben digging and puffing at the bottom of it, and when I called he came out, his silky black coat covered with dirt. I had never seen him dig before, unless it was for a root, or the time I had buried him alive to hush his crying in the little cave in the Bitter Roots; and it was several days before I understood what he was about. Then it came to me that he was building himself a winter home. I have learned since that bears in captivity by no means always show a desire to hibernate; but Ben had the instinct thoroughly developed. And instinct it was, pure and simple, for he had never seen a bear’s den except the one that he left as a tiny cub on the day that his mother was killed. He evidently regarded the work as a most serious and important undertaking, and I watched his labors with much interest. He devoted several hours each day to shaping his cave and at times would break suddenly away in the very middle of a romp and hurry to his digging. If I caught him by his short tail and dragged him out of the hole, he would rush back to his work as soon as released. I even enlarged the entrance so that I could crawl in and watch him work, and on one or two occasions I undertook to help him. But, while he would not resent this, my work did not seem to please him, as he moved the dirt which I had dug and resettled it to suit himself. He piled loose earth up under the floor of the carriage-house and pushed and jammed it tight up against the boards until there was not a crack or space left through which a draught could reach him.
- 75. The hole itself he made about four feet in diameter and about three feet deep; and when this part of the work was finished he turned his attention to furnishing his home. He found some cast-off clothing in the alley near his shed and dragged it into his den under the carriage-house. After arranging this first instalment he hurried out to look for more, and for several evenings the furnishing of the sleeping apartment occupied the major part of his time. Once he came back dragging a fine cashmere shawl that he pulled off a clothesline where one of the neighbors had hung it to air! Not until the floor of his den was several inches deep in rags did he give up foraging and once more return to his usual habits. And then, one morning, when I went to the shed for kindling, there was no Ben to greet me. The ground was buried several inches deep in snow and quite a drift had sifted through the crack under the door; and I saw by following Ben’s chain that it led down under the carriage-house, and knew that he was now enjoying the comforts that he had made ready a month before. As long as the severe weather lasted Ben remained in his cave. But there was nothing either mysterious or curious about his condition. Sometimes, in the coldest weather, I would call him out and he never failed to come. It usually took three calls to bring him however. At my first cry of “Ben!” there would be no sound; then, at a louder “Ben!” there would be a shaking of the chain, then quiet again; but at the third peremptory call there would be a few puffs and snorts and out he would come, fairly steaming from the warmth of his house. I often tried to get him to eat at such times, but he would only smell of the food; then he would stand up on his hind feet with his forepaws against my shoulders, lap my face and hands with his tongue, and crawl back to his nest. Several times I crept down into his den to find out how he slept. He was curled up much as a dog would be and seemed simply to be having a good nap. The amount of heat that his body gave out was astonishing. I have thrust my hand under him as he slept and it actually felt hot. The steam, too, that came up through the cracks of the floor of the carriage-house not only
- 76. covered the carriage with frost but coated the whole inside of the room. For more than a year, or until he got so large and rough that he broke the rockers from several chairs that he upset in his mad gallops around the rooms, he was allowed the privilege of the house. He used to stand up and touch the keys of the piano gently, then draw back and listen as long as the vibration lasted. He was fond, too, of being dragged about on his back by a rope that he held fast in his teeth. He never tired of this sport and would get his rope and pester you until you gave him a drag to get rid of him. He had several playthings with which he would amuse himself for hours, and one of these was a block of wood that had replaced the rope ball that he had been used to juggle on his trip through the Bitter Roots. Another was ten or twelve feet of old garden hose. This he would seize in his teeth by the middle and shake it as a dog would shake a snake until the ends fairly snapped. Once, when he had hold of the hose, I put my mouth to one end and called through it. He was all attention at once and when I called again he took the opposite end in his paws, seated himself squarely on the ground, and held one eye to the opening to see where the sound came from. This sitting down to things was characteristic of him. He would never do anything that he could sit down to until he had deliberately settled himself in that comfortable position. A mirror was a great puzzle to him and he never fully solved the riddle of where the other bear kept himself. He would stand in front and look at his reflection, then try to touch it with his paw. Finding the glass in the road, he would tip the mirror forward and look behind it; then start in and walk several times around it, trying to catch up with the illusive bear. But Ben’s desire to catch the looking-glass bear was as nothing to his determination to catch the kitchen cat. This was his supreme ambition, and, although he never realized it, there was one occasion on which he came within sight of success. When he was a small cub and admitted familiarly to the house he had often chased the cat around the kitchen until everything had been upset except the stove; or until the cat, watching her chance, had escaped to the
- 77. woodshed to go into hiding for an hour to get her nerves quieted down. But his final banishment from the house had established a forced truce between them. He was not allowed in her territory, and she took care not to trespass on his. One day, however, when Ben was nearly two years old, he was, for some reason or other, allowed to come into the kitchen for a few moments. And as he entered the room he spied the cat. Instantly his forgotten dreams returned; and when pussy, her tail fluffed up to four times its rightful size, took refuge in the kitchen pantry, Ben very deliberately crossed the kitchen and blocked the pantry door. For a few seconds the two glared at each other and then, with a spit and a yowl, the cat made a mad dash around the pantry shelves and, amid the din of falling stew pans, vaulted clear over the bear’s head and crouched by the wood box behind the stove. Now Ben, when a small cub, had been used to going under that stove, and he saw no reason for not taking the same old route. His head went under all right, but for an instant the massive shoulders stuck. Then the powerful hind feet were gathered under him, there was a ripping of linoleum as the sharp nails tore through it, the hind legs straightened out, and the stove went over with a mighty crash. A dozen feet of stove pipe came tumbling down, the room was filled with smoke, and from underneath the wreck a frightened cat leaped through the door closely followed by a disappointed bear. This was Ben’s last visit inside the house. As he grew older and larger, he remained as kindly and good- natured as ever. He would still tumble about with Jim, although the dog could now stand very little of this kind of play; for Ben did not know how strong and rough he was. When, in playing with the boys in back lots, he got warmed up, he would go flying over to a barrel kept full of water for the horses and, climbing upon the rim, would let his hinder parts down into the cool water, turn round up to his chin for a few minutes, and then climb out and take after one of the spectators. When he caught up with any one he would never touch them, but would at once turn and expect them to chase him. Then, when about to be caught, he would go snorting up a telegraph pole.
- 78. I frequently took him walking in the town, but always on a chain to keep him from chasing everybody. On these occasions if he heard any unfamiliar noise he would clutch the chain close up to his collar and sit down. After listening awhile, if he decided that it was safe to proceed, he would drop the chain and our walk would continue. But if the sound didn’t please him he would start for his woodshed on the jump, and after he got to weigh a hundred pounds or more I invariably went with him—if I hung onto the chain. A stop for a drink of water He still juggled his block, but now he had a new one that was more suited to his size and strength, a piece of log a foot or more in diameter and sixteen to eighteen inches in length. This stick he kept for a couple of years and juggled so much that his claws wore hollows in the ends of it.
- 79. When Ben was four years old business compelled me to move to the town of Missoula, Montana. I could not bear to part with my pet, so shipped him by express to the town he had visited on horseback as a tiny cub. Now, however, the express company charged me for transportation on three hundred and thirty-two pounds of bear meat. It was fall when we moved to Missoula, and Ben was given a small room in one end of a woodshed and, as he had no cave to sleep in, I had the room filled with shavings. Ben’s arrival was quite an event and roused much interest among the younger element of the town; which at first was shown by about forty boys attacking him with sticks and anything that they could hurl at him or punch him with. I showed them, however, how gentle and playful he was; got some of the boys to wrestle with him; told them that if they continued this rough treatment to which Ben was not used I would be compelled to lock him up; and, having had some experience with boys as well as with bears, forbore to tell them what I proposed to do to those who did not listen to me. This explanation and Ben’s evident readiness to make friends quite changed the general attitude toward him, but there were a few who refused to see things from my point of view. There was a man in Missoula at that time, Urlin by name, who was, or thought he was, the whole show. He was a sort of incipient “boss”; was at the head of the city council, and took it upon himself to see that things in general were run according to his ideas. He had two red-headed sons who aspired to occupy a similar position among the boys, and these had been the ringleaders of the mob that had attacked Ben, and were among the few who either could not or would not abandon the tactics of teasing and persecution. So, as there was no lock on Ben’s shed, but only a wooden button, and as it was already late in the fall, I nailed this fast and left the bear in his bed of shavings. That same afternoon, happening to look out of the window of the shop in which I was working, I saw people hurrying down the street and went to the door to find out what the excitement was about. Two blocks away, in front of my house, a mob was gathering, and I hurried home to find most of the women of the neighborhood wringing their hands and calling down all kinds of curses on my head.
- 80. At first I could make neither head nor tail of the clamor, but finally gathered that that bloodthirsty, savage, and unspeakable bear of mine had killed a boy; and upon asking to see the victim was told that the remains had been taken to a neighbor’s house and a doctor summoned. This was scarcely pleasant news and not calculated to make me popular in my new home; but, knowing that whatever had happened Ben had not taken the offensive without ample cause, I unchained him and put him into the cellar of my house, well out of harm’s way, before looking further into the matter. Then I went over to the temporary morgue and found the corpse (needless to say it was one of the Urlin boys) sitting up on the kitchen floor holding a sort of an impromptu reception and, with the exception of Ben, the least excited of any one concerned. I could not help admiring the youngster’s pluck, for he was an awful sight. From his feet to his knees his legs were lacerated and his clothing torn into shreds; and the top of his head—redder by far than ever nature had intended— was a bloody horror. As soon as I laid eyes on him I guessed what had happened. It developed that the two Urlin boys had broken open the door of the shed and gone in to wrestle with the bear. Ben was willing, as he always was, and a lively match was soon on; whereupon, seeing that the bear did not harm the two already in the room, another of the boys joined the scuffle. Then one of them got on the bear’s back. This was a new one on Ben, but he took kindly to the idea and was soon galloping around the little room with his rider. Then another boy climbed on and Ben carried the two of them at the same mad pace. Then the third boy got aboard and round they all went, much to the delight of themselves and their cheering audience in the doorway. But even Ben’s muscles of steel had their limit of endurance, and after a few circles of the room with the three riders he suddenly stopped and rolled over on his back. And now an amazing thing happened. Of the three boys, suddenly tumbled helter-skelter from their seats, one happened to fall upon the upturned paws of the bear; and Ben, who for years had juggled rope balls, cord sticks, and miniature logs, instantly undertook to give an
- 81. exhibition with his new implement. Gathering the badly frightened boy into position, the bear set him whirling. His clothing from his shoe tops to his knees was soon ripped to shreds and his legs torn and bleeding; his scalp was lacerated by the sharp claws until the blood flew in showers; his cries rose to shrieks and sank again to moans; but the bear, unmoved, kept up the perfect rhythm of his strokes. Finally the terrified lookers-on in the doorway, realizing that something had to be done if their leader was not to be twirled to death before their eyes, tore a rail from the fence and with a few pokes in Ben’s side induced him to drop the boy, who was then dragged out apparently more dead than alive. Dr. Buckley, of the Northern Pacific Railway Hospital, carried young Urlin to his office, shaved his head, took seventy-six stitches in his scalp, and put rolls of surgical plaster on his shins. So square and true had Ben juggled him that not a scratch was found on his face or on any part of his body between the top of his head and his knees. He eventually came out of the hospital no worse for his ordeal, but I doubt if he ever again undertook to ride a bear. For a while there was much curiosity in town as to what old man Urlin would do in the matter, and many prophecies and warnings reached me. But for some days I heard nothing from him. Then he called on me and asked, very politely, if I had killed the bear. When I told him that Ben was well and would in all natural probability live for twenty years or so, the old fellow threw diplomacy to the winds and fumed and threatened like a madman. But he calmed down in the end; especially after he was informed by his lawyers that, as his boys had forcibly broken into my shed, it was he himself that could be called to legal account. And so the matter was dropped. But Ben was now grown so large that none but myself cared to wait on him; and when, the next spring, I found that I was going to be away in the mountains all summer, I began looking about for some way of getting him a good home. Nothing in the world would have induced me to have him killed, and I did not like to turn him loose in the hills for some trapper to catch or poison. Moreover I
- 82. doubted his ability, after so sheltered a life, to shift for himself in the wilderness. But this was a problem in which the “don’t’s” were more easily discovered than the “do’s.” Weeks slipped by, I was leaving in a short time, no solution had offered, and I was at my wits’ end. And then a travelling circus came to town. I sought out the manager, told him Ben’s story, obtained his promise of kind treatment and good care for my pet and, with genuine heartache, presented the fine animal to him. That was sixteen years ago and I have never heard of Ben since. I often wonder if he’s still alive and if he’d know me. But of the last I have not a single doubt.
- 84. THE BLACK BEAR Its Distribution and Habits
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