ABSTRACT
This chapter explores relationships between texts and objects as configured in certain fields of academic research and in museum practices. The main focus of this discussion addresses possibilities and limitations in critical or reflexive approaches to cross-cultural encounters, particularly in anthropological writing and display. Both written and visual forms of representation have been analysed in terms of their authority and effects in the communication of ‘otherness’ (Clifford 1988; Karp and Levine 1991). Central to these debates are analyses of the cultural politics of ethnographic texts, the ways in which objects (both material and conceptual) are constituted and the relations of power that are conventionalised or institutionalised through textual and visual representations. As Cruikshank observes:
Museums and anthropology are undeniably part of a western philosophical tradition, embedded in a dualism which becomes problematic as a conceptual framework for addressing issues of representation. Entrenched oppositions between ’self/other’, subject/object’, ‘us/them’ inevitably leave power in the hands of the defining institution.
(Cruikshank 1992: 6)