ABSTRACT
Curiously objectivity is both unobtainable and a requirement for admission to dominant societies’ principal intellectual domains – including those governing attempts to repatriate Indigenous human remains and cultural objects. It is also a derived ethos with a traceable cultural history. Given its status as a foundational ideal of the dominant global cultures, objectivity must be ritually performed. The chapter is a limited (the cultural history of the objectivity amalgam is vast) genealogy of the objectivity story. I argue that it is not a panhuman assumption or a requirement for ‘proper’ understanding. I then discuss empirical examples of rhetorical, ritualised, and power invoking performances governing Indigenous attempts to repatriate ancestral remains and cultural objects through the US Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA). These reports rely on my own experiences as a representative of my tribal community in interactions with the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley, as well as my observations of cross-cultural interactions spanning 15 years of National (NAGPRA) Review Committee Meetings. I show how ‘objectivity’s’ unacknowledged cultural history and status as a presumed extra-cultural constant facilitate its deployment as powerful colonialist weaponry.
