The Vernacular Politics of Appropriation: Archives as Prosthetic Devices in the (Re)-Constitution of Identity
The events relayed above open up a truly bewildering number of analytical perspectives that are comprehensive, complex, and well beyond my intellectual capacity and the scope of this chapter.
Having restricted my analytical focus to the archives at hand and our collaborative reenactments in this particular context of intense contestation, I turn now to a more general theoretical discussion of the notion of what I call the vernacular politics of appropriation and its import on history-making. I follow Stuart Hall’s contention:Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a” production,” which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. This view problematises the very authority and authenticity to which the term,” cultural identity,” lays claim.
(Hall, 1990, p. 222)
Just as in the case of the etymology of the term “enactment,” the notion of claiming ownership through concrete practice is intrinsic to the concept of appropriation. As I have discussed in detail elsewhere (Vium, forthcoming), the word “appropriation”6 stems from the Latin appropriare, “to make one’s own,” a practice that involves agency and understanding (Schneider, 2003, p. 217). In his discussion of the term, Arnd Schneider argues for a hermeneutic aspect of appropriation that implies both the investment of new signification through displacement and juxtaposition and the transformation of the one performing the appropriation (Schneider, 2003, p. 224; see also Gadamer, 1975; Hahn, 2008, p. 196; Ricoeur, 2004; Vium, forthcoming).
In this case, as I have demonstrated, the Caixana appeared to be neither profoundly affected emotionally nor transformed heuristically at an individual level.
In hindsight, their engagement and performance seemed to have a more instrumental anchoring in their political struggle for recognition that was nearing its climax. Their predicament did not afford a more playful and underdetermined engagement with the images. This reminded me of prior experiences among indigenous Arrernte and Warlpiri in Central Australia, who were also explicitly political in their reenactment performances (Vium, 2018). They too were engaged in fierce struggles for recognition and legal claims. In Hahn’s rendition of the term “appropriation,” which favors the dynamic over the absolutist, the agency is shifted away from that of the powerful performing a (negative) form of “cultural appropriation” and toward the indigenous peoples, who, as de Certeau (1984) also argued, may use appropriation as a tactic to undermine the power of the ruling people (Hahn 2008, p. 196). Hahn further argues that “Appropriation orients the look at local contexts and protagonists, who decide whether a certain cultural element is picked up, transformed, and will become a feature of the local society—or not. The concept of appropriation constitutes a way of understanding processes... [such] as adoption, modification, and rejection” (Hahn, 2008, p. 197).Just as I had intentions and ambitions for our encounter, so did the Caixana. Just as I was appropriating Frisch’s work through collaboration,Indigenous, I Presume? 69 so were the Caixana. That day in Sao Sebastiao, we were all engaged in appropriation through various iterations of collaborative reenactment. This occurred within an overall scientific and legal discursive frame burdened by imperial duress (Azoulay, 2019; Clifford, 2001; Foucault, 1969; Povinelli, 2011; Stoler, 2016; TallBear, 2013).
In LArcheologie du savoir (1969), Foucault reformulates the archive as archaeology and shifts its meaning away from a unifying structure to a system in which a multiplicity of discourses are created from a given set of data (Featherstone, 2009, p.
596). In this perspective, notions of discontinuity, dispersed events, accidents, etc., attain importance. In her discussion of the social biography of photographs, Elizabeth Edwards writes: “Integral to social biography is the way in which the meaning of photographs, generated by viewers, depends on the context of their viewing, and their dependence on written or spoken ‘text’ to control semiotic energy and anchor meaning in relation to embodied subjectivities of the viewer. These are acts upon photographs, and result in shifts in its meaning and performance, over time and space, producing ‘a culturally constructed entity endowed with culturally specific meanings and classified and reclassified into culturally constituted categories’ (Kopytoff 1986:67)” (Edwards, 2001, p. 14). By actively refraining from contextualizing Frisch’s photographs and by actively exploring the enunciative potential of experimental reenactment, a novel space for articulation arose—a space in which Caixana analyses of the photographs and their performative self-presentations were pivotal. However, as I have demonstrated, the Caixana appropriations of Frisch’s photographs did not fundamentally destabilize or dismantle the imperial frame but rather operated within it, because it represents the legal system in which the Caixana are confined. Although the master’s tools will (probably) never dismantle the master’s house, as Audre Lorde (2017) famously stated, we may see here the contours of a method for the reconstruction of our shared present and future, as the prosthetic memory device (cf. Featherstone, 2009, p. 594) of the photographic archive embodies excess and layers activated when enacted anew with other elements added to the assemblage.