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ARTICLE

Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)

ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 5(2): 171192 DOI: 10.1177/1469605305053366

Anthropological suspicion, public interest

and NAGPRA
KATHLEEN S. FINE-DARE
Department of Anthropology, Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado, USA

ABSTRACT
This article asks why suspicion regarding the aims of anthropology has
been heightened in an era when anthropologists are perhaps engaged
in more advocacy work than ever. While it may seem contradictory or
even unfair that anthropology continues to get a bad rap, this
perception (of and about all parties involved) is itself an important
focus for anthropological reflection. In this article, I examine an event
that has contributed to this issue in important ways the passage of
the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
(NAGPRA) in 1990 to illustrate why suspicions about anthropologists have taken on new dimensions, and to suggest what kind of
approach anthropologists might take in responding to these issues.
KEY WORDS
American anthropology anthropological suspicion justice
museums NAGPRA Native American advocacy repatriation

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ROUNDING UP THE USUAL SUSPECT

In 2001, an anthropology graduate wrote a letter to one of our school newspapers regarding what she as a Native American1 perceived as unethical
and disrespectful conduct of her alma mater towards Native American
objects in the campus museum collection and Native American students
concerned about the presence of human remains and sacred objects. She
felt the students concerns were ignored and disrespected, despite the
rhetoric of the collection managers. This is what anthropologists do, she
said, giving the target of her complaint a specific name; this is evidence that
they have never changed their ways.
Those of us in the anthropology program felt confused and blind-sided
by this attack as we all knew the specific person who had, in her view,
behaved inappropriately, and this person was not an anthropology faculty
member (nor had he received any prior training in anthropology, as far as
any of us knew). Why then did she write what she did, leading her readers
to believe that the transgressor was in the anthropology department? Why
did she not identify herself as a former student of anthropology, one who
was actively looking for employment in the field of government archaeology? And why did we, her professors, react so defensively?
One of my colleagues said he was tired of all the anthropology bashing,
and hinted that the only way to remedy this would be to dig our heels more
firmly into the sciences.2 Look what Indian advocacy gets us, another
colleague moaned, a kick in the pants from one of our own. I myself did
a little fuming, wondering paternalistically where we had gone wrong in
educating this promising young woman. So I decided to write and ask her
about it, continuing a conversation we had begun years ago through class
assignments and office talks.
After an interesting, if emotional, email exchange regarding matters that
continued to trouble her about anthropology and the double bind which
she, as an American Indian, felt had actually tightened since she had graduated and gone to live and work with Lakota people (Medicine and Jacobs,
2001: 326, for insights into what she calls the triple bind into which Native
anthropologists have been put), I began to think more deeply about the
deployment of negative spin regarding anthropology, however defined. I
wondered why similar rhetorical vehemence was rarely launched against
history, philosophy, psychology (and thus against historians, philosophers, psychologists), or other fields that are an intimate part of the
colonialist history from which anthropology arguably emerged.
One quick response could focus on semantics. It is far easier, it could be
argued, to single out the domain of anthropology to make a rhetorical point,
as the word has no corresponding meaning in regular parlance. In other
words, while the lay public constantly uses the terms history, psychology,

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and even philosophy to refer to matters everyday and not necessarily

academic or institutional, anthropology has no such bleed into everyday
discourse that might reduce the rhetorical impact when invoked as Creator
of Ills.
The answer, of course, is far more complex, yet not unrelated to that
proposed above. Anthropology may not occupy the same type of semantic
domain as history and philosophy, but it may well relate to the amateur,
lay public in much closer ways. We need to look at anthropology more
closely as a figure in the public realm, not only as a discipline that engages
with the public, but which is deployed and engaged by the public. Anthropology is dealt with in anthropomorphic, ad hominen terms, precisely
because it has taken on that mien in the public sphere. It is a mistake to
protest anthropologys innocence by engaging solely in a discussion regarding what anthropology is science or humanity without looking equally
closely at what anthropology seems to be to the public. Although I have
not conducted extensive interviews with anthropologists to ascertain just
how much this continued criticism bothers them, my feeling is that few take
it personally, most of it running down their backs either unnoticed or
digging an irritating groove. What remains to be examined more closely are
not the personal feelings, but the specter itself. Whether fabricated of straw,
herring, typeface, or flesh and blood, anthropology as suspect provides a
rhetorical device that cannot be ignored if we are to continue to maintain
our credibility as a humanistic discipline.
To better understand this dynamic,3 I examine some aspects of the
continued rhetorical invocation of a tropic, reified and arguably very
public, anthropology in the USA by examining two meanings of the concept
of anthropological suspicion that exist in dialectical relation with one
another. One meaning the suspicion held by anthropology emanates
from the skeptical approach that is a sine qua non of anthropological
methodology (one that arguably links the plurality of anthropologies). This
has perhaps been heightened in recent years as anthropologists have taken
more deliberate stands on civil and human rights matters, and as feminist
and other forms of critical theory have focused the gaze on taken-forgranted assumptions about humanity. It could easily be said that this rather
academic, methodological and often inward-looking approach, one that
refuses to take for granted monistic assumptions about the universal human
being or, more to the point, refuses to accept the continued Eurocentric,
androcentric and colonialist guy wires of its own history, is the norm rather
than the exception. In the words of the late William Roseberry, anthropology has never provided a congenial home for conservatives or those who
serve power (1996: 5).
A more familiar kind of suspicion is found, most famously, in the writings
of Native intellectuals such as Vine Deloria, Jr (1969, 1997a),4 Suzan Shown
Harjo (2004a,b) and Haunani Kay Trask (1993). These critiques are not

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meant to be neutral. They take place in an antagonistic political field where

principles of democracy have been invoked along with religiously-fueled
racist assumptions. The contradictions and hypocrisies in this uneven
playing field have long been rolled by oppositional public intellectuals into
an adversary variously labeled Western culture, white people, scientists,
dominant society, anthropologists, archaeologists, dancing white folks,
or Caucasians (the last two descriptors provided by Harjo, 2004b). Protest
of this vague, sweeping denunciation of anthropology has been made by
a variety of anthropologists (Micaela di Leonardo, 1998, 1999), one of the
most eloquent penned 20 years ago by the British social anthropologist
Raymond Firth:
[A]nthropology is not the bastard of colonialism but the legitimate offspring
of the Enlightenment . . . Some anthropologists have explicitly rejected the
idea that they should be expected to serve administration policy or
proselytizing campaign, or refused to accept a claim of the absolute validity
of Western moral standards invoked to enlist anthropological assistance.
Many have recorded the disruptive effects of a colonial situation upon the
societies they studied, and some have specifically examined the significance
of colonialism as a social type. Indeed, I would argue that one role of social
anthropology has been to supply ammunition for the forces of contradiction
within the system. Governments have supported anthropology, but
anthropology is dedicated to exposure of the structures and values of the
societies studied. This includes making clear the aims and interests of the
people as stated by themselves and revealed in their own behavior, in terms
of their own conflicts as well as integrative ties. In the history of the subject
this has been recognized by some members of the societies concerned who
have come to anthropology for analytical tools to aid them in their search
and struggle, or who have appreciated the record anthropologists have made
of their institutions at a given point of time. (Firth, 1984: 44)

Although Firth was writing largely about critiques leveled at the colonialist basis of British social anthropology, many of his observations about the
positive aspects of anthropology have been acknowledged by Native
American critics, including Deloria himself (1997b; Medicine and Jacobs,
2001: 328). Many anthropologists have taken these critiques, however
polemical, seriously, recognijing them as a key starting point for initiating
real change (Biolsi and Zimmerman, 1997; Dongoske et al., 2000; McGuire,
1997; Swidler et al., 1997).5
Nonetheless, while it is undeniable that much negative rhetoric is
produced by Native American readings of anthropological/archaeological
past practices within the current context of a struggle over material objects,
human remains, human rights, and territorial recuperation, the tendency in
the USA to read anthropological suspicion solely as a function of Native
American thought, Native American political interests, Native American
religious principles, postmodern sloppiness, or misplaced liberal mea culpas
is a mistake.

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For example, as di Leonardo6 cogently pointed out in a 1996 article in

The Nation, negative ideas about cultural relativism, arguably the key
methodological principle of anthropology, can be found in the rhetoric of
conservative US politicians fearful of the anti-foundational plague eroding
American values. This narrow and rather rigid understanding not only of
cultural relativism but the nature of culture itself is found in academic as
well as political fields. After battling a bad rap from Native Americans in
the 1970s, and suffering internal post-Cold War squabbles in the 1980s,
many US anthropologists were caught off guard in the early 1990s when
they learned that the multicultural movement (characterized rather
crudely by its critics as an unfortunate mixture of identity politics and New
Age religious beliefs) more often than not painfully ignored anthropology.
How, anthropologists asked, could a movement centered on cultural pluralism blithely wave away the years of research and theorizing on the subject
carried out by ethnologists and archaeologists all over the globe? A huge
number of publications were produced on the topic (Greenbaum, 1992;
Perry, 1992; Turner, 1992; Weiner, 1992 note the Columbian quincentennial nature of the date of all of these publications, a not insignificant convergence), but few conclusions were reached. While the controversy regarding
multiculturalism died down, the focus on anthropological texts intensified
within the field of cultural studies, many authors drawing inspiration from
writers such as Edward Said, Jean Baudrillard and Trinh T. Minh-ha.
Although I regularly read in the field of cultural studies, the jacket of Scott
Michaelsens 1999 book, The Limits of Multiculturalism: Interrogating the
Origins of American Anthropology, caught my eye, as I was interested in what
it said the book was about, the role that American Indians had played in the
construction of anthropology in its early years. While a few anthropologists
had studied this topic (Lurie, 1988), I was intrigued to see what new insights
a cultural studies scholar known for his border research could bring to an
understudied realm.7 Michaelsens book, however, was disappointing to me.
His focus on Indian anthropologists is not designed to illustrate the roles they
played in building the discipline of anthropology. Instead, Michaelsen downplays their contributions by contending that the application of a multicultural
approach to contemporary anthropology, i.e. opening the doors to voices of
Other-typed scholars, never has and will not now do much of anything to
change a field whose essence is so deeply defined by the colonial project that
it will forever suck the potential contestations of Otherness into its vortex.
Using a similar strategy to that employed by Walter Benn Michaels (1995)
in his pessimistic study of cultural identity in America,8 Michaelsen suggests
that whatever it is we think we anthropologists are doing to fix what ails
America, we are just fooling ourselves.
Michaelsens version of the anti-anthropology theme (accompanied as it
is by the suggestion that Indians did not have the intellectual power to
shape or resist anthropological hegemony) is all the more confounding
because of its emergence at a time when accusations of the self-serving,

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unresponsive, dehumanizing, uselessly academic anthropological gaze are

perhaps less true than ever. Michaelsen thus produces one more arguably
tired version of what di Leonardo (1998) calls the morality play of the evil
anthropologist versus the good subaltern, one that has been on stage in
the USA since the turn of the century (Brown, 2003, and Starn, 2004, show
examples of the dynamics that emerged from this tension and the results
on Native peoples objects and bodies).
Di Leonardo is blunt in her discussion of why this narrative emerges time
and again, saying that anthropology as trope has long been an element of
American cultural baggage (1998: 29). As a dense, multivocal symbol
instead of historical object, anthropology embodies the Us versus Themness so central to everything from movie plots to US foreign policy. It has
been particularly useful in the USA, by providing an excuse for making
culture and biology determinants of difference so powerful that political
economy only remains as a buzzword of tenured radicals. Anthropology, as
understood in such ahistorical, popular-culture-constructed terms simplifies
the world for many Americans, including and perhaps especially those most
frustrated by the broken promises of participatory democracy and the
failures of social engineering. Di Leonardo reminds us of the ways Johannes
Fabians masterwork, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its
Object (1983), characterized anthropologists as time-space travelers who
regularly enter what Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991) called the savage slot;
where prehistory, primitives, primates and the US primeval past all come
together (the proverbial heart of darkness).
In other words, anthropology is to most Americans less of a discipline
than a weird, exotic realm whose practitioners possess expertise inquiring
puritanical minds (perhaps the most important in the above string of ps)
want to know on talk shows and college campuses like mine, where I am
regularly asked what I think about Anasazi cannibalism, tongue-piercing, the
power of crystals, bear lore, Stephen Pinker and the Type O diet, as if I were
on the staff of Ripleys Believe It or Not.9 Fortunately, questions regarding
what I think about the US Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) have given me greater opportunity to see
where the internal and external debates converge about the discipline, and
where the discipline is in many ways created by the interaction between
public and academic realms. The salience of the repatriation context cannot
be underestimated and arguably has a lot to do with anthropology being
placed on the national stage in intensified ways. Speaking of anthropologys
presence in Indian Country, Lakota anthropologist Bea Medicine stated
presciently:
The disenchantment with anthropology as a discipline and the anthropologist
as officious meddler is still a part of the fabric of research in reservation and
urban communities. This disdain may increase as issues of repatriation and
intellectual property rights escalate. (Medicine and Jacobs, 2001: 325)

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As recently as the repatriation meetings held in September 2004 in Washington, DC, participant testimonials mentioned the harm that anthropologists and archaeologists (referred to by Suzan Shown Harjo, 2004b, as
federally-subsidized scientists) have done and continue to do in their
perceived role as an interest group that seeks to block the primary intentions of NAGPRA as a type of Indian law concerned with human rights.
Likewise, the language surrounding the opening of the National Museum
of the American Indian used anthropology as a key element in illustrating
what the museum now is not, in comparison to what it was. For example,
this quote from the Director of the National Museum of the American
Indian (NMAI), W. Richard West:
We are an international institution of living cultures, were not an
ethnographic museum Theres a distinction. We are not retrospective. We
live in the present and we look toward the future. (Burnham, 2004)

HOW MUCH SHOULD WE CONTINUE TO SUFFER?

PROBLEMS WITH NAGPRA
Because of the money it costs, the resources it drains and the frustrations
it constantly engenders, NAGPRA not only receives Native American
suspicions, but attracts what Ramos (1998: 282) has termed an anthropological suspicion, concerning the extent to which it can really achieve the
ends of justice to which it lays claim. In this regard, many anthropologists
and many Indians (and Native Hawaiians) are on the same side of the
fence. These suspicions are grounded on not only the history of federal
Indian policy and US history, but on linked aspects regarding the contexts
of anthropological practice that point to the reasons we should stay productively suspicious. NAGPRA provides an excellent case study of the ways
that anthropological, public, legal and human rights concerns can be stirred
into a confusing, emotionally charged, mess with seemingly no resolution.
One of the public sites where this confusion has emerged in the past few
years is the college classroom.
In September of 2004 I gave a talk about changes in US museum practices and Native American repatriation, to an undergraduate class at Johns
Hopkins University. Students were assigned to read my book on the history
of the American Indian repatriation movement (Fine-Dare, 2002), particularly the chapter that discusses eleven elemental problems with
NAGPRA.10 I was anxious to address students questions, as I had just
attended two days of meetings of the NAGPRA Review Committee in
Washington (the body that by law addresses disputes and serves as interlocutor between the public and the government). I was also still imbued
with the positive vibe I had experienced attending the opening ceremonies

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for the National Museum of the American Indian. On the Mall, I met
several American Indian colleagues and former students from Colorado, all
of whom expressed enthusiasm not only about the museum itself, but at
being in a place where so many Native people from all over the hemisphere
were amassed.
As I prepared myself for the Baltimore class I had to remind myself (as
did a Reason Online reporter who had called me for an interview last year)
that just because I may think the repatriation movement and the NMAI
may have significantly changed attitudes about and awareness of Native
American religious and political concerns around the USA, this does not
mean that most of the US public knows (or cares) about Indians, Indian
rights, Indian claims, or Indian sovereignty, much less Indian concerns about
repatriation and reburial (Vincent, 2004). And what the public knows about
Alaskan or Hawaiian Natives is arguably even less.
Before we began our class discussion I showed a brief film produced in
1998 that recorded some Southwestern Natives views about NAGPRA.
Spokesmen (there were no women in this film, something rightly noted by
one student) from the Hopi tribe, the Navajo Nation, Acoma, Taos and
other Pueblos, expressed some of their feelings about what had been going
well and not so well as the law had been enacted in the Southwest. An
important theme of the film, NAGPRA and Southwestern Tribes (funded
by a National Park Service NAGPRA grant), was to suggest to museum
workers that NAGPRA, a one-size-fits-all law, had to be applied in ways
that recognized the diversity within and between tribes.
As seeing this film a few years ago got me thinking about the content of
the chapter these students read for class, I was particularly interested in
hearing their comments. One student believed that far too much important
information would be forever lost by returning human remains to Indian
tribes. Another student expressed a concern that Indians were worrying too
much about what is in museums and not enough about the health and
poverty issues on their own reservations. And one additional student questioned what she saw as Indian commentators criticizing the law without
offering any solutions. The fact that the law is forever, with no set time
limit to museum compliance, put an unfair burden on museums that have
already suffered enough.
The contrast between the concerns publicly expressed by these
students and those by the Native Hawaiians and American Indians at the
NAGPRA Review Committee meetings of the preceding week were fascinating in their reflection of views of very different constituencies of the
American public.11 As a result of hearing their expressed concerns, I revisited the eleven elemental problems I had written about earlier to see if,
as a result of my listening to public voices regarding the law, I saw any
obsolete or new concerns. I was particularly interested to revisit these
concerns in light of what they reflect about what the public knows, expects,

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or suspects about anthropologists motives and practices vis--vis Native

Americans.
I have found that none of the original 11 issues have been resolved, with
some remaining particularly problematic and salient. Some of them are so
obvious as to warrant brief mention only. There is still not nearly enough
funding to deliver the demands of the law thoroughly and fairly; there is a
continual backlog of notices to repatriate; the number of grant requests
have diminished; the National Park Service may well be compromised in
managing NAGPRA compliance, as the National Congress of American
Indians and others claim (Harjo, 2004b), because of an inherent conflict of
interest (e.g. several institutions that have not yet submitted inventories are
under the aegis of the National Park Service); the legal power of the Review
Committee to resolve and enforce disputes is unclear; the concerns about
the logistics of reburial and preservation have only intensified; and the law
makes no provision for the claims of American Indians not recognized as
members of federally recognized tribes. Barbara Alice Manns recent
polemic against anthropological practice, Native Americans, Archaeologists,
and the Mounds (2003),12 bitterly states the case:
For all the tooth-gnashing going on in archaeological circles over the sea
changes heralded by NAGPRA, the price of NAGPRA constant vigilance
is paid by the Native American Community. Especially in the east, where the
Federal failure to recognize Natives allows many sly ways around NAGPRA,
archaeologists, historical societies, and developers still operate pretty much at
will, successfully pushing aside Native concerns. (Mann, 2003: 301)

At the 27th NAGPRA Review Committee meetings held in Washington,

DC (1718 September 2004) the following problems were highlighted in the
testimonies, comments and dispute discussions held before the committee
(for all Review Committee agendas and minutes, consult http://www.
cr.nps.gov/nagpra/review/index.htm).

Interpreting legal language

In many ways this remains the key concern.13 For instance, public disputes
over what the intent of Congress was in defining Native Hawaiian Organizations dominated the 27th meeting of the Review Committee because the
Bernice P. Bishop Museum of Honolulu had, in a draft statement issued in
July 2004, declared itself to be a Native Hawaiian Organization. The
uproar over this revealed to an otherwise unaware public not only the many
chinks in the law, but of the diversity of opinion among Native Hawaiians
regarding just who or what could be a legitimate Native Hawaiian Organization14 and thus who had the right to make claims to human remains and
the various other kinds of objects delineated under NAGPRA (Ayau, 2004;
Bishop Museum, 2004;Viotti, 2004).While at this time, newspapers reported

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that the Bishop Museums board of directors had bowed to political

pressure on its stance (Apgar, 2004) and voted unanimously against being
designated a Native Hawaiian organization, a variety of other Hawaiian
disputes remained serious enough that a Hawaiian venue has been
discussed for hearings by the Senate and the NAGPRA Review Committee
in 2005.
A second very important legal language matter emerged shortly after
the September meetings concluded. Responses to the setback on the
Kennewick dispute (a ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which
covers several Western US States, stating that the 9000+-year-old remains
of a person found on the Columbia River were affiliated to no living tribe
and thus could be subjected to scientific curation and analysis (Harjo,
2004a,b; Reynolds, 2004, for editorial comments on the ruling) resulted in
the Committee on Indian Affairs submitting Senate Bill 2843 entitled To
make technical corrections to laws relating to Native Americans, and for
other purposes (http://thomas.loc.gov). The final sentence of the bill
(Section 14) amends Section 2(9) of Public Law 101601 (NAGPRA.) The
proposed change inserts or was after is in the following sentence:
Native American means of, or relating to, a tribe, people, or culture that
is or was indigenous to the United States.
This proposed amendment presumably intends to clarify the original
intent of Congress that living Native Americans should be able to trace
their ancestry not only to remains and objects which the preponderance of
evidence links to an existing tribe, but to one that may no longer have any
living legacy. The uproar, both from the public and the scientists, was
immediate (Daly, 2004) and a statement was made from a group called
Friends of Americas Past (2004). The negative impact of the bill was
summarized by an editorial in the Albany Democrat-Herald:
[This] seemingly minor amendment to NAGPRA . . . would mean that any
human remains, no matter how old, even older than Kennewick Man, would
likely be defined as part of a group that was indigenous to the United
States, no matter how long ago, and thus covered by the law.
This sort of thinking if applied generally around the world, would have
prevented us from learning anything about the ancient cultures of mankind.
What little we know about the earliest inhabitants of the British Isles and the
European continent, for instance, all comes from studying their graves.
In North America, it would foreclose any attempt to learn from
Kennewick Man and other ancient bones where these people came from
and who they were. That would leave a big gap in our knowledge. Let us
hope [retired Senator Ben Nighthorse] Campbells bill dies without
becoming law. (Bill May Stall Bones Study, 2004)

Here the suspicion travels from the public to the US Senate to American
Indians (Campbell is identified in dhe piece not as a Republican, but as a

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member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe) and back to other anthropologists and the National Park Service who have supported the claims of the
Northwest tribes to the remains of Kennewick Man.

Unidentified or unidentifiable?
The matter of affiliation to a tribe that is or was in the USA at any time
is linked to a third legal language concern regarding whether unidentified human remains (a term that admits possibility of identification) means
the same thing as unidentifiable (a term that does not). As the nuances of
this discussion go beyond the scope of this article, I will only treat the matter
by including a quote from Harjo (2004a):
Certain scientists who opposed national repatriation policy have worked to
frustrate the repatriation processes and delay repatriations until they can
conduct further studies on human remains in their collections. Many are
trying to hide the identity of human remains which are the subjects of their
studies and to classify them as unidentifiable, in order to avoid repatriating
them. Some federal scientists are abetting this effort by attempting to create
new regulations to make the unidentified Native human remains the
property of the repositories where they now reside.
If these wrong-headed notions are not overturned in Court, Congress must
step in and spell out its intent at a most rudimentary level. Most Native
people say it is putting the dead and the living at peace. Some scientists say,
Its still WAR. (Harjo, 2004a)

This call for clarification apparently was asked for in the proposed
Senate amendment discussed above and results from a suspicion that rather
than ruling in favor of Indian interests within Indian law (i.e. NAGPRA)
in the case of ambiguity, scientists would (with the backing of Justice Scalia
and other conservative members of the Supreme Court) hang their hats on
absolute proof rather than preponderance of evidence regarding the is
such that fewer and fewer sets of human remains would ever see reburial.

Dispute resolution issues

Partly as a result of the confusion surrounding legal definitions and standards of proof, disputes regarding cultural affiliation are presented with
greatest frequency to the NAGPRA Review Committee. These concerns
arguably affect anthropologists most directly when their expertise is called
into question when they find themselves unable to vouch for the truth-value
of oral histories, ethnographies, and other documents of affiliation that our
colleagues themselves collected over the years. For instance, are we really
being objective by putting Din accounts of the sacred nature of Mesa
Verde National Park into an affiliation report the vast majority of which

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deals with pre-Din (by archaeological reckoning) sites? This issue has been
presented repeatedly before the NAGPRA Review Committee by the Hopi
tribe, who does not agree with the decisions made by the Mesa Verde, Chaco
and Aztec federally-managed cultural parks to affiliate such a large number
of tribes with its museum holdings. At the time of writing, the dispute has
not been resolved and may end up in the courts.
Another dispute brought before the Review Committee has to do with
the alleged possession of Geronimos skull by the secret Yale Skull and
Bones Society (to which both George W. Bush and John F. Kerry belonged).
It is claimed that one reason that George H.W. Bush signed the NAGPRA
law into effect was that the public had information that his father had
obtained the skull for the Yale society in 1918 (Harjo, 2004b; Robbins, 2003).
The Ft. Sill tribe would like to have the truth of the rumor investigated
more thoroughly by the US government without having Geronimos grave
in Oklahoma disturbed.

Out of heaviness, enlightenment?

The public face of NAGPRA compliance over the past decade reveals a
great deal about the changes in federal Indian policy; about the growing
power of Native activism not only in the USA, but around the globe; and
about the ongoing work of social scientist advocates of justice for Native
Americans. Despite the ongoing disputes, accusations and deep suspicions,
some rather significant changes have occurred, a few of which are listed
below:
1 Certain sectors of anthropology have been more inclined to draw
from critical cultural studies that stress interdisciplinarity, the
broadening of research topics, and a greater tendency to talk openly
about the colonialist underpinnings of the discipline, both present
and past (Jenks, 1993: 1578).
2 The practice of NAGPRA consultation has drawn the academic,
federal, state and indigenous nation representatives together in
unprecedented ways to articulate and work through repatriation
concerns. This coming together has revealed in practical rather than
merely theoretical fashion the impossibility of maintaining
Us/Them polarities based around academic, tribal, and federal
camps, except for strategic purposes.
3 NAGPRA in the university setting has provided new ways of
teaching anthropology that have countered the youll never change
charges brought before it, not only by undergraduates, but more
often by academics who still have no idea what anthropology might
be. It is still something to be tested, but my conversations with
colleagues who teach at institutions like mine where NAGPRA is

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front and center have revealed enormous, largely positive, changes in

the classroom. Science, rather than discarded, is deepened
historically, more self-conscious of ethics, and more dialogic in
practice (see publications located on the Public Anthropology
website for examples in Hawaii and elsewhere, e.g. Field, 2001;
Tengan, 2001).
NAGPRA discussions seem to have opened up a deeper
consideration of what justice might mean. Although perhaps not
expressed explicitly, repatriation claims blur the distinction between
material or distributive and cultural or recognition justice. In
other words, it is becoming clearer that returning cultural objects and
human remains is not merely about returning property or about
capitulating to a wronged race.
In a related vein, Native Americans have had a way to open doors
formerly closed to them as NAGPRA consultations have been used
to discuss issues and make demands that have gone far beyond the
purview of the law. Some of these issues include cultural
representation in museum exhibits and university courses, and
expanded opportunities to attend scholarly conferences as Native
intellectuals.
Participating in NAGPRA discussions all over the USA has
enhanced opportunities for participation in indigenous rights issues
at an international level. This internationalism, in turn, has
strengthened activism at the local level, for instance among
American Indian students at my college, and has provided good
examples for classroom discussions of global/local links.
Most importantly, many Native American objects and human
remains have been returned to their owners without either museums
or scientific research establishments going under (see Preucel et al.,
2003, regarding ways that NAGPRA compliance at the University of
Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has
opened opportunities for represent[ing] the character and vitality of
Indian cultures to the public in new ways).

AGONISTIC PLURALISM AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL

SUSPICION
I began this piece with a story about a young anthropologist who not only
criticized anthropology, but took as her example of the excesses and transgressions of the field the acts of a person who is not an anthropologist. As
she was unclear regarding this persons academic background, and as she

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wanted to make a point, she rhetorically labeled the wrongs committed by

this administrator as evidence that anthropology never changes. This is
fascinating as it does, in many ways, reflect the historical lag experienced
within the field as nineteenth-century aspects are indeed alive and well,
even if they have been absorbed by non-anthropologists who work in
museums.
Both senses of the term comprise a dialectic wherein various terms and
practices of the field at once create and respond to the publics evolving
ideas about human existence, human problems, and human justice, which
in turn create new problems that attract a professional anthropological eye.
While it may make anthropologists crazy that some historians, cultural
studies scholars, philosophers and other intellectuals selectively choose the
more negative effects of the field to construct their own strategies of
survival and influence vis--vis their own students and peers, we need to
look at the continued moral and conceptual messiness within anthropology
that contributes to the confusions and misrepresentations of outsiders.
William Roseberry addressed some of this confusion in his 1996 unbearable lightness piece when he suggested that anthropologists need to realize
that their discipline has for some time been deeply affected by a post-Cold
War move to not only expunge structural analysis from the academy, but to
rewrite history in such a manner as to create the sense that such analysis
has never been linked to anything that has made a difference in peoples
lives. The ways that matters ranging from social justice to education are
being thrust into the private sector are paralleled by an inability to acknowledge the linkages between redistributive and cultural justice (see Frasers
1997 discussion). Many anthropologists especially those most aggrieved
by the misunderstandings that follow them need to conduct research on
the role of the academy in post-Fordist times, to understand how our
voices are squelched and distorted by our own lack of awareness of how
what is going on outside affects our perceptions of how the politics of
funding and our own work environments (academic and not) in turn affects
our research problems and theoretical conclusions.15
This leads to a second concern, one that shamelessly borrows again
another key insight from di Leonardo. As she puts it, anthropologists are
often hoisted by their own cultural petard, whereby the disciplines insistence on championing the culture concept, particularly within cultural
studies frameworks, pushes aside the awareness that political and structural
analysis should and does take place on many fronts. Our concentration on
culture often means that we forget that public actions and perceptions
have structural qualities. Any perceived or real positive actions carried out
by anthropological advocates of indigenous rights will be understood
vis--vis other phenomena ranging from the theft of Ishis brain (Starn,
2004), to vampire-like human genome projects, to a growing obsession
with Peruvian mummies and Southwestern cannibalism. The continued

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practice of the popular media and textbooks to refer to Indians in a purely

cultural sense as ethnic minorities and the related refusal of American
society as a whole to learn about and recognize the limited nature of Indian
sovereignty provides other pieces of the context in which anthropological
activism is (mis)understood (Vicenti, 2004).
Finally, if anthropologists are to heed the message of the 1971 Declaration of Barbados, that social scientists have a moral duty to inform native
peoples of their rights and of the institutional means to regain their rights
(Wright, 1988: 374), they must find ways to keep from falling into the Scylla
of identity politics or the Charybdis of what Sahlins (1999) calls, echoing
Sartres Search for a Method, a reduction of all cultural phenomena to mere
knee-jerk resistance to power. They would also do well to heed Nancy
Frasers warning regarding giving abstract nods to coalition building as a
sole solution to the problem of justice. Just as, in Frasers words, forming
additive combinations among already formed constituencies . . . surrenders
the possibility of an integrative perspective that seeks to grasp, and transform, the social whole, an anthropology that merely seeks alliances with
tribal organizations or an infusion of Indian majors cannot necessarily fix
what ails any of us. This means taking a more structural than perhaps
cultural position, and being wary of the dangers of what Ramos (1998: 282)
calls professional indigenism. Anthropologists working with Native
American groups on repatriation consultation matters need to be able to
formulate strategies that are at once based on notions of human rights, intellectual property, redistribution and the contexts in which these
legal/cultural intersections occur.
In the end, it may matter very little whether a mood is pro- or antianthropology. In an interview conducted for Public Anthropology, Philippe
Bourgois had this to say in the context of discussing public intellectuals:
what I notice in the debates that happen, is there is sort of a bemoaning that
anthropology isnt recognized by the general public and Im not really
worried about that. I dont really care that much about anthropology I love
anthropology and I think that specifically its participant observation
methods force people to be political and have a preferential option for the
socially vulnerable and also a strategic access to the nitty gritty of how power
relations translate into everyday social suffering. (Haanstad, 2001)

Ironically, our best hope as a discipline may be to concentrate less on our

disciplinary boundaries and more on our position as interlocutors between
systems and individuals. As Grimshaw and Hart note:
It is entirely conceivable that the next century will have no place for a class of
specialist intellectuals, called anthropologists, with a mission to tell people
what is going on in their world. But, if the line between expertise and
common sense is increasingly being called into question, anthropologists, who
have never been comfortable on either side of that divide, might be able to

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devise creative ways of acquiring and disseminating knowledge out of their

combination. For academic anthropology has never succeeded completely in
eliminating the early ethos of the amateur from its professional practices.
Moreover, it might be said that, compared with the other sciences and
humanities, anthropology has remained in important ways an anti-discipline,
taking its ideas from anywhere, striving for the whole, constantly reinventing
procedures on the move. (Grimshaw and Hart, 1994: 259)

As a final comment, I would suggest that remaining suspicious not only can
be enormously productive to anthropological research, but can also contribute to grasping the antagonism inherent in all objectivity (Mouffe, 2000:
12). Following suggestions made by Derrida and others, Chantal Mouffe
suggests that the more we view one another across perceived divides as
adversaries rather than enemies, the more chance we have to realize our
respective projects. Enemies, in Mouffes definition, are persons who have
no common symbolic space. Adversaries, however, engage in the kind of
agonistic pluralism that can keep us free from the delusion that one side
of a political field can be eliminated. The dialectics of anthropological
suspicion are one of the reasons that anthropology as a discursive field may
indeed offer no false hope for resolution of human disagreements, but
creates stronger common ground for building realistic praxis.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Byron Dare, Greg Johnson, Linda Seligmann, Jane Guyer,
Lynn Meskell, Frederick F. York, David Nugent, John Isaacson and four anonymous
reviewers for helping me think through some issues that are addressed in this article
(whether they were aware of their assistance or not). All errors, of course, are my
own.

Notes
1 I admit to being less than consistent in my usage of the term Native American
in this article, although I try to make it include all peoples of Native Alaskan,
Hawaiian and Indian self-appellation. When I use American Indian or Native
Hawaiian, I am, I hope, being clear in my reference to a subset of the broader
category.
2 See Lett (1997) for a rather tongue-in-cheek hysterical account of the
dangers towards which we hurtle if we do not climb up the slippery slope of
postmodern anthropology, and soon.
3 An earlier version of this article was presented at the invited session, Fourth
World Rising: A New Native Studies for a New Public Politics, American
Anthropological Association annual meeting, 1519 November 2001, San
Francisco, CA. I wish to thank Gerry Sider and Kirk Dombrowski for inviting
me to participate in this panel and for providing cogent discussant comments
on the original article.

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4 Delorias critiques are not limited to anthropologists; see Deloria (1998) for a
discussion of fictions in the writings of historians and religious studies
scholars.
5 Also see documents posted on the Museum of London website
(www.museumoflondon.org.uk) related to an international symposium held at
the Museum in Docklands on The Politics of Human Remains and Museum
Practice: Ethics, Research, Policy and Display.
6 I owe a great deal in this article to insights drawn from di Leonardos work,
particularly 1998.
7 Michaelsen is a prolific scholar who teaches at Michigan State University. His
website states that he writes about the problem of formulating concepts of
culture and identity politics across a number of eras and a wide range of
disciplines such as cultural studies, ethnic studies (including border and
borderlands studies), anthropology, sociology, postcolonial studies, and the
like. Two works in progress mentioned on this site, accessed in October of
2004, are Ending Culture: Reading American Anthropological Literature
Across the Color Line and Anthropologys Wake: Corpses, Obituaries,
Tears. http://ww.msu.edu/~smichael/.
8 In an interesting review of Adam Kupers book, Culture: The Anthropologists
Account (Harvard University Press, 1999), Camille OReilly states the
following: In his inimitable style, Kuper makes a rather sarcastic jab at cultural
studies and its links to multiculturalist politics in the university. Perhaps more
seriously, he criticizes multiculturalism in the United States for its potentially
conservative, anti-ideals of the Enlightenment stance on ethnicity and identity.
In fact, he argues, the term culture in the hands of multiculturalism has become
little more than a politically correct euphemism for race, especially in the US.
He cites Walter Benn Michaels to back up his argument that the concept of
culture is in fact a form of racism, replacing biology as the assumed basis of
distinct human groups, but no less essentialist for it (OReilly, 2000).
9 Anthropologist Roger Lancasters appearance on HBOs Da Ali G Show to
speak about incest satirized within the brief span of seconds the role of
anthropologist as expert.
10 These eleven elemental problems are: (1) administrative and procedure
matters; (2) compliance and good-faith issues; (3) legal language problems; (4)
scientific challenges; (5) dispute resolution issues; (6) cultural affiliation
problems; (7) cultural interpretation issues; (8) reburial and preservationist
concerns; (9) balancing human rights; (10) international law and sovereignty
issues and (11) the National Park Service, conflict of interest, and structural
contradiction (Fine-Dare, 2002: 14365).
11 I did talk with one American Indian student who was auditing rather than
taking the class for credit. Although she said she disagreed with the other
young woman who spoke about the rights of scientists and museums, she
nevertheless disagreed more with the attempts of some other students in the
class to silence her.
12 While most of the facts in Manns 2003 study of the history of the desecration
and study of the mounds is accurate, the work suffers from a polemical
framework that distorts some of the picture in unnecessary ways. Her
argument rests squarely on the evils of the past in order to provide a

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foundational or root context without which the primary focus of the book
cannot proceed The past evils are not only labeled anthropology, particularly
of the archaeological variety, but are averred to continue into the present. Her
demonstration of this is not only unfortunately very selective, but occludes
the facts that much of the historical and anthropological criticism from which
she draws is itself penned by anthropologists. And these are not the fringe,
shouted down variety (as she calls them) like Larry Zimmerman (himself
hardly either, for that matter), but luminaries like Bruce Trigger, David Hurst
Thomas, and Alan Goodman. Further, although the physician Samuel George
Morton is labeled an anthropologist in Manns work because of his work on
human crania, the critique of his work is drawn from paleontologist Stephen
Jay Gould, no less an anthropologist according to the criteria of having
something to say about the human species. In the end, Manns use of a faulty
structure, one based squarely not in Native American discursive styles as she
claims, but in Western polemical rhetoric, unnecessarily frames and ultimately
overshadows the meat of this study, the native histories of the Eastern
mounds.
13 A fascinating set of reviews that deals with disagreements among federal
cultural resource managers about, among other things, the deployment and use
of legal, cultural, and academic definitions pertaining to cultural resources
(itself quite a loaded term) is found in the Fall 2004 issue of High Plains
Applied Anthropologist. These joint reviews concern Four Books Written by
Thomas F. King. Many thanks go to Fred York, one of the reviewers, for
sending me a copy of the publication (York, 2004).
14 I am indebted to Greg Johnson for any insights I might have into the workings
of Native Hawaiian Organizations and the variety of discourses and grievances
emanating from Hawaiian peoples regarding repatriation matters (Johnson,
2002, 2003).
15 Thanks to David Nugent for this insight.

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KATHLEEN S. FINE-DARE is Professor of Anthropology and Womens

Studies at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. She has conducted
field research since 1980 in the Ecuadorian Andes, and is working on a
book called Social Insecurity: An Ethnographic History of Poverty and
Inequality in Quito, Ecuador, 19802005. She has also written articles in the
areas of critical museum studies, critical archaeology and NAGPRA. Her
recent book, published in 2002 by the University of Nebraska Press as
part of its Fourth World Rising series, is entitled Grave Injustice: The
American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA. She is currently
editing a volume of essays centered on the rethinking of Americanist
Studies written by anthropologists who have worked on both sides of
the Rio Grande.
[email: fine_k@fortlewis.edu]