The Limits of Multiculturalism: Interrogating the Origins of American Anthropology

276 Pages·1999·13.79 MB·English

by  Scott Michaelsen

THE LIMITS
DF
MULTICULTURALISM
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THE LIMITS
OF
M U LTI C U LTU RALI S M
INTERROGATING THE ORIGINS
OF AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY
SCOTT MICHAELSEN
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
MINNEAPOLIS
LONDON
A version of chapter 1 was published as "Re-Sketching Anglo-Amerindian Identity Politics," in
Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, ed. Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 221-52; reprinted by permission. A version
of chapter 3 was published as "Ely S. Parker and Amerindian Voices in Ethnography," American
Literary History 8, no. 4 (winter 1996): 615-38; reprinted by permission of Oxford University
Press. A much shorter version of the prolegomenon was published as "The Grounds and Limits
of Multiculturalism," The Centennial Review 42, no. 3 (fall 1998): 649-66; reprinted by
permission of The Centennial Review.
Excerpts from the Ely S. Parker Papers appear courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.
Excerpts from the Lewis Henry Morgan Papers appear courtesy of the Department of Rare
Books and Special Collections, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester, Rochester,
New York.
Copyright 1999 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
Prolegomenon 1
Groundwork: The Limits of Multiculturalism
1. Positions, Ex-Positions, Dis-Positions 33
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Jane Johnston, David Cusick
2. Destructuring Whiteness: Color, Animality, Hierarchy 59
William Apess, James Fenimore Cooper, Lewis Henry Morgan
3. Amerindian Voice(s) in Ethnography 84
Ely S. Parker, Lewis Henry Morgan
4. Methodists and Method: Conversion and Representation 107
Peter Jones, George Copway, James Fenimore Cooper, Maungwudaus
5. Borders of Anthropology, History, and Science 1 39
John Rollin Ridge, Samuel Morton, William Hickling Prescott
Coda 164
Anthropology and Archaeo-logicality
John Lloyd Stephens, Benjamin Moore Norman
Notes 1B9
References 221
Index 239
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been completed without the generous assistance of a
year-long fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (1995-
96), a summer award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1994),
two faculty development grants from the University of Texas at El Paso (1993-
95), and an award from the UTEP University Research Institute for travel to
archives (1992-93). I wish to single out UTEP's Dean of Liberal Arts, Carl
Jackson, for his constant support of my work.
Permission to quote from Ely S. Parker's papers was granted by the Uni-
versity of Rochester Library and the American Philosophical Society Library
in Philadelphia. I am especially indebted to help from Karl Kabelac, manu-
script librarian for special collections at University of Rochester Library, dur-
ing my visit to the Lewis Henry Morgan Papers.
My greatest help as I began this project came from Neil Schmitz. Without
his encouragement, enthusiasm, and advice these last several years, this book
would not have been written. Over the years, other important friends of the
project include, alphabetically, Chuck Ambler, Alan Axelrad, Alejandro Lugo,
Peter Messent, Barry O'Connell, Ileana Rodriguez, Frank Rothschild, Benjamin
Alire Saenz, Pat Seed, Scott Shershow, Elisabeth Tooker, and John Mc Williams.
I thank each of them for different kinds of support and help at crucial mo-
ments. My long, weekly conversations with Scott, in particular, have been of
enormous importance to the development of this project's argument. Also,
Kenneth Haltman and Steve Rachman lent emergency aid toward researching
the cover image.
My editor at the University of Minnesota Press, William Murphy, has been
as helpful and useful as anyone might dare hope. William has made smooth the
VII
VIM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
complex path to publication, and the book owes him much thanks. And Kathy
Delfosse's superb editing of the manuscript has produced a fundamentally
better book.
I want to single out David E. Johnson, my coeditor and collaborator on Bor-
der Theory, for special mention. David read the entire manuscript and improved
it enormously, and my collaborations with him have resulted in a book manu-
script in which elements of his thought and influence are stitched throughout.
Finally, my gratitude to my partner and general co-conspirator, Theresa
Melendez; "always" knows no bounds.
INTRODUCTION
No, it [anthropology] is not surrealism. It is the realism of the com-
monsense world.
— STEPHEN A. TYLER, THE UNSPEAKABLE ( 1 987)
If The Limits of Multiculturalism begins anywhere, it begins with the com-
monplace in cultural studies that "we" are still too much like ourselves, that
"we" have a need or a duty to hear the voices of those "other" than ourselves
who share this world with "us." The presumption is that the West's white male
has played out his chances, reached his disastrous-to-dull limit, whether con-
ceptualized as modernity or rationality in general, or, in somewhat more pe-
tite formulations, as instrumental reason or agglomerating capitalism. Attempts
to cross this limit, for some time now, have been made in an array of disci-
plines: postmodern anthropologists construct new methodologies and tech-
nologies in order to represent the word of the other and in order to engage in
full dialogue with the other. Historians write from the "bottom up" in order to
give voice to those typically excluded from master narratives. Literature schol-
ars are expanding the canon so that the works of others share space with the
"classics" in a multicultural classroom. In the process, broad claims are fre-
quently made about culture—about the nature of culture, about what makes
cultures different from one another, about the alternative-to-resistant-to-liber-
ating contents of those differences.
The Limits of Multiculturalism is a general attempt to take up these burdens
once again, beginning from a recognition that the attempt to locate, define,
and preserve things different from "ourselves" has led to a terrible impasse. This
impasse, described in great detail in the prolegomenon that follows this intro-
duction, is of such a magnitude that the entire epistemological and political
project of cultural studies is collapsing. Briefly, everything presumably wrong
about "us" has been redeployed in modern cultural analysis of the "other" with
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