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Equatoria
A postmodern romp through the rain forest, Equatoria is both travelogue and cultural critique. On the right-hand pages the Prices chronicle their 1990 artifact-collecting expedition up the rivers of French Guiana, and on the left, stage an accompanying sideshow that enlists the help of Jonathan Swift, Joseph Conrad, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alex Haley, James Clifford, Eric Hobsbawm, Germaine Greer, and even the noted anthropologist James Goodfellow (who asks for more sex). Also included are quotes from the nurses, doctors, tourists, convicts and countless others who live in this French penal colony turned space center in tropical South America.
Charged with acquiring objects for a new museum, the Prices kept a log of their day-to-day adventures and misadventures, constantly confronting their ambivalence about the act of collecting, the very possibility of exhibiting cultures, and the future of anthropology. By the time their expedition arrived in the villages of the Aluku Maroons, these African-American descendants of rebel slaves had become as comfortable in blue jeans and frilly mail-order dresses flown in from Paris as in breechcloths and trade cotton wrapskirts. What would they think of exporting material chunks of their artistic heritage to a glossy modern building in a suburb of Cayenne?
Probing the nature of museums, collecting, and power relations between "us" and "them," the authors raise many troubling questions. Anyone concerned about cultural preservation, museums, "primitive" art, anthropology, indigenous rights, and the legacies of colonialism will be challenged by this playful, but eminently serious work.
Charged with acquiring objects for a new museum, the Prices kept a log of their day-to-day adventures and misadventures, constantly confronting their ambivalence about the act of collecting, the very possibility of exhibiting cultures, and the future of anthropology. By the time their expedition arrived in the villages of the Aluku Maroons, these African-American descendants of rebel slaves had become as comfortable in blue jeans and frilly mail-order dresses flown in from Paris as in breechcloths and trade cotton wrapskirts. What would they think of exporting material chunks of their artistic heritage to a glossy modern building in a suburb of Cayenne?
Probing the nature of museums, collecting, and power relations between "us" and "them," the authors raise many troubling questions. Anyone concerned about cultural preservation, museums, "primitive" art, anthropology, indigenous rights, and the legacies of colonialism will be challenged by this playful, but eminently serious work.
- GenresAnthropology
295 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1992
6 people want to read
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June 7, 2023
“…I think I’m gonna write another book”
In “Translated Woman” an anthropology book about Mexico by Ruth Behar, she castigates herself for various acts (like bringing a car to her Mexican site) that revealed her to be more of “a gringa” than she would have liked to be. She felt guilty. This astonished me. Why did she still do it? If you thought it was wrong, why did you continue? It wasn’t a matter of allowing yourself to eat too many candy bars! It was serious for your work. I’m referring to that book, which I otherwise thought was very good, because the Prices also had misgivings about roaming about French Guiana (Guyane Française) in 1990 collecting objects to put in a new museum being developed in Cayenne, the capital. They had to put a monetary value on them and remove them from the culture that created them. But they still did it, then wrote their unease into the book. They were undoubted experts on the Maroon peoples of Suriname and Guyane, the descendants of African slaves who escaped into the jungles starting in the late 1600s up to the end of slavery. These people fought off repeated attempts to capture or wipe them out, developing a unique lifestyle and artwork. Richard Price had already written several well-received books on them I think….because I had not read any….but bought this one long ago, thinking it would be one of them.
But I am quite disappointed. It is a book squeezed out with a certain style but not much depth at all. It’s basically a self-centered travel book. You will learn neither history nor culture nor get any anthropological insights into the culture of the Saramaka, Njuka, Aluku and other Maroon peoples of the region. It also has the quite annoying feature of having the text on every other page with quotes from a multiplicity of authors or sketches of the collected objects on the other. The two maps are not very professional either. The text is a day by day, blow by blow account of their expedition in modern French Guyane to acquire objects as I’ve mentioned. Problems of delays, insects, things not working, people not showing up, getting supplies, and also problems of their own self-doubts. But they had access to phones, motorboats, and arranged accommodations. The French officials sometimes helped them, sometimes acted very officiously even though the Prices had come to do them a favor, acting as “experts” (which they were). The couple took great pride in speaking the Saramaka language and continually surprising the scattered members of that group that they met. They did not fail to mention it.
The ethics of ethnological museums and collecting art from poorer ex-colonial peoples (or colonial ones in this case) has been written of in many excellent books previously. The authors here do not engage with such books more than a tiny bit. If you don’t know much about Guyane, you will get a good existential look, but come away without much of anything solid. There was a civil war going on in Suriname next door, making refugees out of a considerable portion of the country’s Maroon population, but you will not learn much about that disaster either.
In short, though the cover and the GR review called EQUATORIA “an experiment in postmodern narration” and their diaries do seem honest about their activity and what they thought at the time, I did not see anything very postmodern about it. It seemed more to me to be a chance to knock off another publication. I don’t think that in their case it was necessary, so the point of the book is vague. “Rich and Sally Go Guyane” or “The Hesitancy of the Carving Hunter” might have been better titles. C’est moi! Je suis ici! So what?
In “Translated Woman” an anthropology book about Mexico by Ruth Behar, she castigates herself for various acts (like bringing a car to her Mexican site) that revealed her to be more of “a gringa” than she would have liked to be. She felt guilty. This astonished me. Why did she still do it? If you thought it was wrong, why did you continue? It wasn’t a matter of allowing yourself to eat too many candy bars! It was serious for your work. I’m referring to that book, which I otherwise thought was very good, because the Prices also had misgivings about roaming about French Guiana (Guyane Française) in 1990 collecting objects to put in a new museum being developed in Cayenne, the capital. They had to put a monetary value on them and remove them from the culture that created them. But they still did it, then wrote their unease into the book. They were undoubted experts on the Maroon peoples of Suriname and Guyane, the descendants of African slaves who escaped into the jungles starting in the late 1600s up to the end of slavery. These people fought off repeated attempts to capture or wipe them out, developing a unique lifestyle and artwork. Richard Price had already written several well-received books on them I think….because I had not read any….but bought this one long ago, thinking it would be one of them.
But I am quite disappointed. It is a book squeezed out with a certain style but not much depth at all. It’s basically a self-centered travel book. You will learn neither history nor culture nor get any anthropological insights into the culture of the Saramaka, Njuka, Aluku and other Maroon peoples of the region. It also has the quite annoying feature of having the text on every other page with quotes from a multiplicity of authors or sketches of the collected objects on the other. The two maps are not very professional either. The text is a day by day, blow by blow account of their expedition in modern French Guyane to acquire objects as I’ve mentioned. Problems of delays, insects, things not working, people not showing up, getting supplies, and also problems of their own self-doubts. But they had access to phones, motorboats, and arranged accommodations. The French officials sometimes helped them, sometimes acted very officiously even though the Prices had come to do them a favor, acting as “experts” (which they were). The couple took great pride in speaking the Saramaka language and continually surprising the scattered members of that group that they met. They did not fail to mention it.
The ethics of ethnological museums and collecting art from poorer ex-colonial peoples (or colonial ones in this case) has been written of in many excellent books previously. The authors here do not engage with such books more than a tiny bit. If you don’t know much about Guyane, you will get a good existential look, but come away without much of anything solid. There was a civil war going on in Suriname next door, making refugees out of a considerable portion of the country’s Maroon population, but you will not learn much about that disaster either.
In short, though the cover and the GR review called EQUATORIA “an experiment in postmodern narration” and their diaries do seem honest about their activity and what they thought at the time, I did not see anything very postmodern about it. It seemed more to me to be a chance to knock off another publication. I don’t think that in their case it was necessary, so the point of the book is vague. “Rich and Sally Go Guyane” or “The Hesitancy of the Carving Hunter” might have been better titles. C’est moi! Je suis ici! So what?
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