Laurel Kendall speaks about the challenges and rewards of her role as curator
of the Asian collection at the American Museum of Natural History, and Faculty
at Columbia University. John and Urmila visited her in her office at the AMNH
and were offered a tour of the collections, some aspects of which are
highlighted in the interview. In this interview, Laurel conveys the excitement
of working in a unique space between the material expressions of cultural
heritage and their value for diverse peoples. (Published 3 June 2015.)
1. What
does your job consist of as the curator of the Asian collection at the AMNH?
Every day is different. The primary responsibility of an AMNH curator
is to produce good research and to publish in both quality and quantity.
A curator also has oversight for a collection—in my case all of Asia—which
includes fielding research requests, anticipating issues, and judiciously
collecting. As a body, combined with other interested parties, AMNH
anthropology curators review loan requests and accessions, and issues of
cultural patrimony. As projects arise, we work with colleagues in the
Exhibitions and Education departments on presenting the public face of the
museum. We are also encouraged to teach. I do this at Columbia where the AMNH
collaboration is a long tradition. We are also expected to contribute to
our professions. I am currently the Vice President of the Association for Asian Studies and will become President of AAS in 2016.
2.
Could you give us a summary of the history of the Museum
and the Asia collection?
It could be argued that American anthropology began at the AMNH with the
work of Franz Boas. His most famous student, Margaret Mead, spent her
career at AMNH. Boas turned his sights to Asia when he conceptualized the
Jesup North Pacific Expedition as an effort to document the lifeways of
peoples on both sides of the Bering Strait. He followed this by initiating
the Jacob Schiff Expedition which sent Berthold Laufer to China to
document a technologically sophisticated non-western society. Boas
imagined an Asian Studies hub in New York, a triangulation of effort between
AMNH, Columbia University, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although
this grand scheme floundered when Boas left AMNH for Columbia University, many
distinguished anthropologists subsequently collected in Asia for AMNH. Harold
Conklin in the Philippines, Margaret Mead in Bali, Christoph Von
Fürer-Haimendorf in Northeastern India, and Louis Dupree in Afghanistan to name
just a few. Some of this material is exhibited in our (now very dated) ‘Hall
of Asian Peoples’, curated by Walter Fairservis and opened in 1980.
Almost all of the collection is available
digitally.
3.
Has the field of Museum Studies changed over your
career?
Within the museum, the most significant change is the many ways in which
the people, who were formerly the subjects of our work, have become partners in
our enterprise as native scholars, cultural activists, and museum
professionals. In the academy, the most significant change is the growth
of Museum Studies, with graduate and undergraduate programs springing up
all over like mushrooms after the rain. This has meant the development
not only of a critical awareness of the content of museum exhibits but an
awareness of how museums work and the politics and practical mechanics of
maintaining and exhibiting collections.
4.
The socio-cultural and political context of the
collection has changed so much since its inception and the world we live in is
so different. In what ways is the Asian Collection being made relevant to
today's visitors?
Asian visitors respond to exhibits in the Hall of Asian Peoples in two
ways, “We’re not like that anymore.” and “My grandmother used to have one just
like that!” The value of our collections is as time capsules. They do not
‘stand for’ such vast and ultimately chimerical entities as China or India but
are fragments from particular lives in particular circumstances. Since
our artefacts and images also have to be informative the challenge is to
suggest those lives and times with a sensory and verbal economy akin to that of
a haiku poet in a contextualization
as suggestive as that of a Chinese painter who conveys mountains and rivers
with a wash of ink. It is both an art and a science.
5.
Could you tell us a little bit about your research?
My first project involved female shamans in South Korea. My
question was: As women in a male-dominant Confucian society, how did they get
away with it? My first book, Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits, described the complementarity of women’s
rituals with better-studied male rites. I then looked at weddings, and
related events and exchanges as a window on changing notions of gender, work,
and family. Change also informed my Shamans, Nostalgias and the IMF, a look at how the shamans I had studied two decades earlier, and
their clients, gods, and ancestors, had been affected by South Korea’s rapid
urbanization, industrialization, and newfound prosperity. I also had an
opportunity to work in Vietnam on the question of how contemporary markets and
rationalized production processes were affecting the efficacy of sacred objects
in the eyes of those who used them. This was followed by work on Vietnamese
Catholic statues and how they found their way into secular markets. I
became interested in the question of sacred things and contemporary markets
more generally, and took these questions back to South Korea. Jongsung
Yang, Yul Soo Yoon, and I have explored how Korean shaman paintings came to be
collected as art, what they mean to shamans in the first instance, and how the
production of these paintings changed in the 20th century. Our
book, God Pictures in Korean Contexts (University of Hawaii
Press) will appear this fall.
